Full-Service Agencies Can Slow a Growing Consumer Brand. These 4 Problems Explain Why
The same agency structure that delivers polished campaigns can also create delays, extra layers, and creative compromises.
EXPERT OPINION BY JAMES F. RICHARDSON, PHD, FOUNDER, PREMIUM GROWTH SOLUTIONS
After CPG brands clear roughly $50M in annual sales, many generate enough gross profit each year to fund some form of consumer marketing, even in a pure retail business.
This is also when you, the founder, get easily sucked into the world of full-service promotional agencies. Why? Well, an agency offering everything from social media campaign management to linear TV ad placement to 30-second TV-grade video production in one place, under one contract, seems like a money-saving solution for a small marketing team you haven’t staffed up like your sales team.
But here are the problems that high-growth brands discover when they sign up full-service agencies—and don’t discuss publicly:
Big agencies don’t move at the speed of the internet
Brands that have mastered organic internet marketing are now posting multiple times a day across multiple platforms. This frequency allows you to generate lightning strikes and then boost them with an ad hoc, agile marketing budget.
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Layers of management and ‘systems’ in a large agency slow everything down to days when you need to move in minutes. You simply won’t get the kind of re Even an Inc. 5000 early-stage growth brand is not going to be the top-priority customer of any full-service agency
The slower execution speed of full-service agencies stems from their design: bureaucratic systems built around the BIG TV campaign of the late 20th century. This is a well-researched, meticulously produced annual event. You can execute these campaigns too, but only your internal marketing team can move as fast as the internet in the 2020s.
Big agencies can’t affordably produce the asset quantity required today
They’ll never admit it publicly, but large, full-service agencies reserve massive asset production for their top clients, not an insurgent consumer brand. And the markup on this volume of work results in very high fees. I also question how much agencies really want to scale up internet-destined production—even with AI—without being prodded to do so continuously by a billion-dollar power brand. Any agency’s profit motive is about minimizing this kind of scope-threatening labor commitment.
Source: www.inc.com
