Marketing Is Everything

How do you choose an agency? Updates From Prior Editions

The Fantasticks
Last November in “Can Good Ads Save a Bad Product?” I mentioned that I had seen the iconic musical when it was one-act play at Barnard College starring an unkno

June 2006 By Denny Hatch

multipage

Sim Wong Hoo blew it.

In 2000 the Singapore entrepreneur came up with the idea that eventually became the iPod. He was approached several times by Apple’s Steve Jobs to do a joint venture. Jobs was turned down, and Sim went his own way—creating half-baked in-house marketing materials and doing no brand advertising.

Jobs brought out the iPod and ate Sim’s lunch; now Sim is suing for a patent infringement.

It seems inventors like to invent, but they operate on the better mousetrap theory—that buyers will beat a path to their door.

“Build it and they will come,” was the refrain in Kevin Costner’s “Field of Dreams.”

“Build it and they will come is bullshit,” said the late developer Willard Rouse, who built Boston’s Faneuil Hall complex, Baltimore’s inner harbor and changed the skyline of Philadelphia. “Build it, sell the hell out of it and they will come.”

Quite simply, if you have a product or service, it’s imperative to get a marketing professional on board early in the process.

The question: Do you sell the hell out it via direct marketing or brand advertising? Or both?

And how do you choose the agency?

General Advertising Agencies and Design Firms Can’t Do Direct Marketing

And vice versa

By Robert C. Hacker

If you outsource, one of the most important decisions you’ll make is hiring the right resources to help you. General agencies and design firms can’t do direct marketing when return on investment (ROI) is the prime criterion for success. ROI means by-the-numbers program development, measurement and control.

Truth be told, general agencies and design firms don’t want to be measured objectively—they prefer subjective judgment. And they’re almost proud of their organizational anarchy, which works OK in advertising creative development, but can kill you in direct marketing program development and management.

Unless an agency thrives on tight control and objective measurement, it shouldn’t play the direct marketing game at all. Most general agencies we run into will tell their clients, “Yeah, we do direct,” even if they don’t know a good offer from a box of rocks.

On the other hand, most of the direct marketing agency people I know admit they couldn’t do a brand campaign to save their lives. It should be the other way around. When an agency screws up a direct marketing campaign, it gets caught in a few days or weeks and there’s nowhere to hide.