Banks and other financial services clients sit on a significant content marketing opportunity that most of them are not using well. Current research on financial literacy makes the case clearly ...
Do Your Bank Industry Clients Understand Consumers?
Resigning a Bad-News Client
Every agency has had them. The client who seems to exist solely to make life miserable for everyone assigned to the account. The one whose feedback is never constructive, whose ...
Rule No. 1: Never Work for Free
There was a stretch in the last century when advertising creativity was not only celebrated, it was paid like it mattered. Big agencies built reputations on their print and television ...
How to Propose Agency of Collaboration to Clients
For most of the advertising industry's history, the agency of record agreement was the standard framework for client relationships. Both sides had contractual obligations, defined responsibilities, and a clear ...
Three Things You Need to Live Long and Prosper in Advertising
There has been a lot of talk about the sweeping changes moving through the advertising and marketing space. It is all true. Few industries have been reshaped as fundamentally or ...
A Short History of the Advertising World
Advertising is still big business in America. Total U.S. advertising revenues have surpassed $300 billion annually in recent years, placing the industry alongside transportation and health care, and ahead ...
Do Programs, Not Projects
We speak constantly of the need for agencies to become strategic marketing partners with their clients and not just suppliers of projects. Fine, you say, couldn't agree with you ...
To the Moon… Agency Principals Are the Rocket Fuel of Account Service
Escaping Earth's gravity requires more than a spacecraft. It requires rocket fuel powerful enough to break free of the pull holding everything else in place. Client relationships work the ...
Get Thee Out of House
Agencies today continue to face competition from other agencies and related firms. Agency owners and managers also continue to find themselves in the uncomfortable position of competing with their own ...
The Attuned Agency Ear
To be fully successful in the agency business, you must have an attuned ear. It sounds simple. It isn't. There are several distinct modes of listening that agency people ...
Start Making Sense: How to Talk to Your Clients
Every agency has felt it. The prospect who stops listening mid-presentation. The energy draining out of the room. The polite but unmistakable signal that the meeting is over before it ...
Getting a New Account to Profitable: How Long Does It Really Take?
The opening months of a new account are a dangerous time. All sorts of things can happen that end the honeymoon period most agencies and clients enter into after the ...
Get Down and Upsell!
Upselling is probably the most logical, easy way to grow agency profits. Account people know it is quicker and simpler to develop more business within existing accounts than to win ...
Can’t We All Just Get Along? In-house and External Agency Collaboration
The in-house agency is no longer a cost-cutting measure of last resort. It has become a permanent fixture of how mid-size and large companies manage their marketing. Over the past ...
Not Every Client Is Worth Having. Here Is How to Tell the Difference.
Before the new business conversation starts, the most important question an agency can ask is not whether the prospect has budget or fits the agency's sweet spot. It is ...
Is That Account On the Rocks?
The business world is stressful, and clients are not immune to the impact of market changes, internal politics, and competitive pressure. Agency client service teams are not immune either. Things ...
Are Account Executives Productive?
As agency workload levels rise and fall, making sure every account executive is handling an appropriate share of AGI is one of the most underused levers in agency management. Making ...
Delivering “Wow” as an Account Service Strategy
The traditional notion of an account executive was that of someone ordered around by the client and disdained by the agency creative. Or, they were the ones living large on ...
How to Get Customer Experience Right
Too many companies think better customer service is all about adding tiers of features and service options, but new research questions that approach.
More Isn’t Better
Researchers working at ...
read moreToo Many Clients from the Dark Side? Try Aligning Agency-Client Values
An agency principal lamented to me about her clients, saying, “It seems as if we’ve been in a great client drought for the past few years. Each of our ...
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