About the Author: Jason Small is a digital marketer with 10+ years of digital experience working with 20+ brands via various agency roles. Small's expertise includes broad digital strategy, social media strategy, SEO, website design and development and he has led teams to produce results for brands online such as Peoples Choice Awards, ChapStick, Centrum, Dial, Honeywell, Renuzit, Castrol, Sears, Hertz, CoverGirl, John Deere, Advil, ThermaCare and more. As Director of Strategic Partnerships and Business Development for a fifty-person startup, Small led initiatives uniting value propositions and technology across 10+ companies while generating press in trades like TechCrunch and the Wall Street Journal.
Agencies vs Startups
Jason Small | Aug 09, 2012 | Comments 2
Does your startup love proposing to agencies?
Having been on both sides of the table (agency and startup) I know what it’s like to pitch agencies, and to be pitched by startups. There is a mutual feeling of making sure there is absolute and timely relevance to the discussion. If the startups proposed solution is lucky enough to be timely and can potentially plug in to the right client and/or campaign they also have to overcome the challenges of being reliable (stable) and cost-effective. When this perfect storm happens, it can be a beautiful thing – creating a win/win/win across the board for the agency, the startup and the brand. When it’s not a perfect storm, the entire process can be inefficient.
Thus, I’ve even heard some agencies with internal models that function like a startup within an agency. One such example coming from Eric Johnson (Ignited) at the Ad Age Digital Conference this year. A lot of his presentation addressed the ROI challenge of pitching new clients, but he also discussed how he does champion internal entrepreneurship in a startup-like mentality, here is a marginally useful Storify from Eric Johnson’s talk.
All of this to say that the current model of startups and agency relationships is extraordinarily inefficient when not managed accordingly, and perhaps there is opportunity for disruption or just an adjusted model that would help agencies vet startup vendors faster by pre-qualifying them based on existing opportunities already in motion and the stability of the startup.
Which side of these relationships are you sitting on? What have you done to make things more effective and painless for all parties involved? What can your counterpart do to help improve things for you?
By the way, before you ask – you can get the hat in the image here.
Jason Small
Social Media and the Big W
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www.SocialMediaandtheBigW.com
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Great article. Coming from the agency side, and being responsible for bringing in many third parties and startups to meet specific client needs, I’ve learned that the bringing in everyone from the beginning can make a huge difference. This could mean everyone from our account team, strategy, UX, tech (who are usually responsible for making the decision on whether to outsource or not), and our social team. Having everyone there from the first discussion can help to speed up what is usually a slow moving process in agencies, and really make a difference.
Agencies don’t have very much money to spend on tools or databases to help their clients. The real money that they may influence is the marketing budgets of their clients. Clients have objectives and timelines to hit. They need to know that if they spend money it will reach the audience they need to reach. Start ups want brands to come on board without proving audience size or audience willingness to purchase. This is a hard sell for agencies to make to clients. First get the audience, prove it’s worth then think about approaching agencies or clients.