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Do they take responsibility for your results? Or just for deliverables?

No wonder so many marketers try to build their agencies in house, or go directly to production companies, or try to patch together a mesh of agencies.

How lonely so many marketers tell me they are with the sole responsibility for generating results. How difficult it is to be the only one in the room who knows what an allowable is – for my agency readers, an “allowable” is the amount of money a marketer can spend to acquire a customer profitably; it’s the limit of spending per customer acquired – how challenging to bring to the table so many competing agendas, to deal with competition and beg for cooperation, to seek clarity, cohesion and synergy and find it ever elusive.

Big agencies suffer even greater confusion. With purchasing departments dictating the internal management of agencies, agency leaders are left wondering what they can possibly take responsibility for. Growth stage clients wait in line behind the lumbering behemoths, and get the scraps. The holding companies get their profits. And the game starts again next quarter.

Alignment. Integration. Shared KPIs. These are not new things, nor are they trendy things. But there’s nothing about content, social, mobile, local, programmatic or any fact of the contemporary marketing mix that has made them any less essential to winning the game of growth with something like certainty.

Your power number is the cost of acquiring incremental revenue, whether through new customers or existing. This is your ticket to the big table. Any agency that can’t take responsibility for helping you get there isn’t an agency at all but a production house.

If we agree to take your business, we agree to get you there. That’s what we mean by Inspiring Action.