Ad agencies must be more result-driven, study says

The Fournaise Marketing Group has completed its 2010 Global Marketing Pulse Report, which suggests that 69 per cent of marketers believe ad agencies are still not result-driven enough.

According to the report, marketers are of the opinion that ad agencies are still not doing enough to push the all-media marketing campaigns they develop to deliver better results for their clients' bottom line.

The Global Marketing Pulse Report compiled insights from close to 1,000 marketers on several aspects of their marketing return on investment - from the increased pressure for results they get from top management to the effectiveness of marketing strategies they implement, and their expectations of ad agencies.

Fournaise found this marketer perception of agencies not being result-driven enough is a global trend.

It is around the 70 per cent mark in developed economies such as the US, western Europe and Australia, and has now exceeded the 50 per cent mark in developing regions such as north Asia, southeast Asia and India, where the ever-increasing sophistication of customers makes each sale even more difficult.

The company also found that marketers classify ad agencies into three groups.

The result-drivers truly believe that the primary purpose of a campaign is to deliver the bottom-line results of their clients and do whatever they can for that (35 per cent).

The result-pretenders claim they believe in making campaigns that deliver results, but are internally not prepared to put in place the relevant systems and processes to do so (43 per cent).

The third group - the dreamers - still leave in old 'Adland' (22 per cent), according to Fournaise.

The company further identified three of the major weaknesses marketers believe the majority of non-result-driven ad agencies have.

First, their customer insights expertise and knowledge is not deep enough (74 per cent).

They do not know enough about and do not spend enough time or money investing in better knowing their clients' target audience.

They still relay too much on gut feeling and 'hearsay' and often end up developing strategies and campaigns that have little impact.

Second, they are too award-driven and see campaigns as a way to boost their creative portfolio instead of boosting the PandL of their clients (71 per cent).

This in turn often leads them to be creatively inflexible.

Third, because they usually do not have systematic tracking mechanisms in place to measure the effectiveness of the all-media campaigns deployed, they do not know enough about what worked (and why) and what did not, and have difficulties fine-tuning their strategies and campaigns accordingly to boost their return on investment (70 per cent).

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