To be an effective team player, you have to know how the game is played. That means understanding game strategies and how they work. Most important of all, is knowing what the goal is. The goal is keeping the client happy. The game strategies include:
- How an agency is structured
- How an agency makes money
- How an agency gets clients and keeps clients
- How an agency builds its reputation
Agency priorities
Advertising agencies are concerned about only one thing: staying in business. To stay in business, an agency must have clients, service those clients, bill the clients for those services, make enough money from the clients to pay the agency's bills (rent, utilities, salaries, and other operating expenses), and then hopefully earn a profit when all the bills have been paid.
Agency owners discover that in order to succeed in business, they must develop a set of priorities that determines what is important to the agency. Those priorities, which tend to be the same for almost every agency owner, are as follows:
- Putting the client always, without exception first
- Making a profit
- Producing quality work
- Developing creative, fresh, and innovative approaches to projects and campaigns
- Having a reputation for fair and ethical business practices
- Satisfying management with jobs, salaries, and benefits
- Satisfying employees with jobs, salaries, and benefits always a last priority
How an agency gets clients
To have clients an agency has to get them. That becomes the responsibility of the account executive or A.E. An A.E. is the agency's salesperson first and account manager second. The A.E. brings new business (clients) into the agency in several ways:
- Cold Calls
- Networking
- Referrals
Once an account executive finds a potential lead for a new account, the next step is to try to set up an appointment with the business owner or company representative. During the first meeting, the A.E. will assess whether or not this account is worth pursuing. That decision is based on the amount of money that the company is willing to spend on its advertising for the year and if the owner or company representative appears sincerely interested in working with the agency.
If a company's budget for advertising is very low, it may not be possible for the agency to make any money on that account. Some agencies will only accept an account if the yearly budget meets a minimum amount. That is usually determined by the size of the agency and the prices it charges. For some smaller agencies, that minimum might be as low as ten or twenty thousand dollars a year, and for larger agencies it might have to be at least one hundred thousand dollars or more a year. There are some agencies who will take work from a business or company on a project by project basis and will not be concerned with how much revenue will be generated for the year.
Presentations
With lower budget accounts or projects, the A.E. can often convince the owner or company representative to give the agency a try just after one or two meetings. For an account that represents not only more money but also the possibility of other competitive agencies knocking on this company's door, the A.E. may have to offer the company a presentation. A presentation is a formal meeting between the A.E. and several other agency people called the account team and several key people from the company usually upper management and company officers.
During this meeting the agency will present a proposal that will outline exactly what the agency intends to do to promote the company's product or service. (From here on I will refer to the company's product or service as the "product" for the sake of simplicity.) That proposal will also include how much the company will have to spend to pay the agency to do this and how much the advertising itself will cost, such as radio, TV, newspapers, brochures, etc. The agency account team will then show samples of the creative ideas the agency has come up with, such as ad designs, copy for the ads, and if television commercials are involved, samples of commercial storyboards, and so on. The company may also be reviewing presentations from other agencies as well and then comparing each agency for price, services capabilities, whether or not the agency's ideas will work, and if they believe that the agency can accomplish what it promises.
The agency account team prepares for a presentation by going through three steps.
Research The account team researches the company's history, the competition, and the current and future trends of the company's product in the marketplace.
Positioning By looking at the information gathered during the research phase, the account team can then decide how to position the client's product, first in relation to the competition the product has in the marketplace, and second in terms of how to get the target audience interested in purchasing it.
Strategy Based on how the agency intends to position the product, the account team then develops a strategy plan that details exactly how the product will be presented (the advertising concept) to the target audience, the media mix that will be used (radio, television, newspapers, billboards, etc.), and the frequency in which the ads will appear (i.e., how many times a day an ad will run on a particular TV station and for how many weeks).
