Five ¢ents

Agencies don’t spend nearly enough time strategizing for ourselves. We purport to be the strategists for our customers, but there is enough of a gray area in all the things we touch that even in online, there isn’t a huge amount of accountability. We suggest a strategy, we decide how it will be measured, and we get buyoff from the customer. If it doesn’t seem to be working as the campaign rolls out, we shift strategies and attack from another direction.

We try to keep our fingers on the pulse of advertising innovation on behalf of our customers — but we don’t hold our finger to the wind on our own behalf. We don’t invest in research or strategies that let us evolve or be particularly proactive. Mostly this is because everyone at an agency is focused on winning, keeping and improving business for the next quarter’s revenue. We have no idea how we’ll differentiate from competitors in five years — because we don’t have the time to think about our own business.