Choosing an agency in the capabilities arms race
When choosing an agency, MORE isn’t always BETTER.
I recently watched the webcast of Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Global Digital Marketing Agencies.
For those of you who are unfamiliar with the Magic Quadrant, it’s a qualitative research study where Gartner, Inc. rates technology companies against each other in particular industries. These industries have included everything from Ecommerce vendors, to Life Insurance Policy Administration Systems in Europe, to Trading Platforms.
In each category Gartner acts as an objective source of truth to inform buyers and investors of who’s the best of the best. Gartner rates vendors with two simple criteria: 1) completeness of vision, and 2) ability to execute. Essentially each vendor is plotted on an XY graph and assigned to one of four categories:
Niche Player,
Challenger,
Visionary,
or a Leader.
Gartner says that just making the Magic Quadrant is an honour. So announcing the annual list is like finding out whether you made the cut for the highschool football team. Or that you didn’t make the cut, after you put all your faith into becoming the next American Idol.
Actually, that’s not an entirely accurate comparison, because as a vendor you can drop off the Magic Quadrant. This shouldn’t be the end of the world, but I suppose it’s akin to the devastation felt by a chef who has just lost their Michelin star.
And while it’s nice to be on the Quadrant, your immediate reaction — if you work for one of those companies — is usually to look for your dot and, if it’s not in the top right, bitch loudly that, “there’s no fucking way!”
Source: https://twitter.com/adweak
The Usual Suspects
In an age where it seems like everyone has jumped into the warm waters of the digital agency pool, Gartner selects 20 or so companies to plot on the Quadrant.
Until last year, when we started Modern Craft, I had only worked at big (or at least big to me at the time) 400+, multi-office digital agencies who –through their parent companies — made the Quadrant. But even at that size, I always felt like an underdog who would constantly be looking up and to the right at the titans of the industry such as Razorfish, Sapient, AKQA, Digitas/LBi, and R/GA.
And so the most recent, December 2014 Magic Quadrant featured all the big boys with a few new entrants from traditional consultancies (Accenture and Deloitte) who had years ago invested heavily into digital services.
It’s hard to argue with the results.
I can tell you — having personally competed with most of these agencies at some point in my career — that they’re all pretty capable. Whenever I knew I was pitching against one of these guys, I would try to put myself in their shoes and think about what office they were going to lead with, which case studies they would use, which senior managers would anchor the pitch team, and what work they might done with that client. And typically it was hard to find a weakness, or a lack of capability in their “full service” agency armour.
This is probably why they’re all fairly clustered together in the Quadrant.
Full(er) Service than Ever
When I started in the industry in the year 2000, our agency had earned their stripes creating amazing flash microsites. And then these became CMS-enabled websites, then we added intranets/extranets, portals, then ecommence platforms, digital in-store/out of home, customer-experience design, usability, digital strategy, myspace widgets, facebook apps, social playbooks, community management, search, mobile, integrated campaigns, interactive video, touch-screen experiences, mobile apps, augmented reality, digital innovation and so on and so on.
Technology changed often, and the importance of digital to marketers (and the increasing size of digital budgets) drove our pursuit of offering the next thing.
And although it was hard to be good at everything, that never stopped us from trying.
But as Gartner pointed out in the webcast, everyone on their Quadrant is a truly full-service agency, who is vying to be a one-stop-shop for all of an organizations’ digital needs. All 20 of these companies feature a set of global offices, roughly 1000+ employees, and earn a minimum of 150M in billings.
Flaunting an impressive logo parade, a sizzling sizzle reel, and a few case studies used to be enough to compete. But today, if you want to stand out in a sea of capability sameness, your “completeness of vision” needs to go the extra mile:
- R&D labs
- exclusive technology relationships
- more offices in developing countries
- perfectly engineered outsource operations
- tenured global practice leaders
- event sponsorships
- books published
- frameworks pioneered
- fellowship programs
- studies commissioned
- number of data-scientists employed
- a healthy portfolio of start-ups incubated
- And a mountain of awards, oh so many awards
Like Ringside Seats to the Giant Robot Rumble
Image: Pacific Rim Movie Poster
Watching the webcast, hearing all the new capabilities, and seeing the slides on all the best work from all the best agencies, felt like I was watching Pacific Rim. This movie features skilled warriors, in exosuits, sitting in giant robots, created to fight giant aliens, in cities with lots of stuff to blow up. Watching it was all very impressive, yet exhausting at the same time.
It made me think that, in this capabilities arms race, it’s kinda liberating to be a spectator.
When Choosing an Agency, MORE isn’t necessarily BETTER
During the webcast, twice people asked about the price and affordability of hiring an agency in the Quadrant. In credit to Gartner, they did acknowledge that it is a very competitive space and that there were pros and cons to hiring a big full-service agency versus a smaller one.
In my experience, if you work for a sizable brand, and need the no hassle of a one-stop-shop who can handle the majority of your digital needs, globally, then the Magic Quadrant is for you.
Global full-service agencies
These are huge agencies that at least have the bodies to make their full-service claims somewhat believable. However, it’s not uncommon for a big network agency to pull case studies and capabilities from all their agencies, and people, anywhere in the world, as proof of capability. So when evaluating an agency, it’s always good to ask if the actual office and team leading the engagement has the capabilities and experience you’re looking for.
But as expected, be prepared to pay big-agency rates, for large teams, and the cost of overhead.
National/Local agencies
If you’re looking for help on a specific project, or a particular type of challenge, then there are an abundance of local/national agencies in every major city. Being small means they’re hungrier of course, much more nimble, and you’ll likely be dealing with senior people in the firm, more often. Many folks, like us have left the big agency world in pursuit of building the place, they want to work in.
But as you evaluate a smaller agency, find out what they’re really experts at. Many agencies have a tendency to emulate their positioning from the leaders in the industry, straining the bounds of what’s plausible.
And beware if their the capabilities list is longer than their number of employees!
Where we stand
When my co-founders and I left the big agency world to start Modern Craft, one path we could have taken was to try and recreate the experience which had made our previous employer successful, while hoping to avoid the mistakes. But we firmly believe that in this an age of specialization, you cannot be an expert at everything.
So while it has been tempting to bid on all the RFP’s that haved landed on our door – especially since we’re a start-up – we have chosen to be selective. We have embraced the practice of referring opportunities that aren’t our core competency to other agencies so we can focus on being experts at doing the thing we love, and are best at — digital strategy for the modern marketer.
In practice this means keeping our value proposition simple and our capabilities list short, while ensuring the knowledge of our craft, runs deep. We’re not for everyone, and that’s ok by us.
If you stand for something, you will always find some people for you and some people against you. If you stand for nothing, you will find nobody against you, and nobody for you.
William Bernbach
