Matt Hammerton

The last series of Mad Men airs on Wednesday night, and as a fan of the show who’s been waiting for over a year for the next installment of Don Draper’s adventures, I thought I’d watch the final episode of season six over the weekend.

The episode, In Care Of, featured a disastrous presentation by agency SC&P, to a potential client. At one point everything was going really well, but one story about Don’s unsavory childhood ruined everything. This got me thinking about the fine line that exists between winning and losing pitches and what clients should be looking for in an agency when deciding who will design their next brochure or website or implement a PR or social media campaign.

I’ve written before about how to put together a shortlist of agencies but when you’ve invited them into to talk to you, what should you be looking for?

Previous experience

Has the agency worked in your industry or sector before? Have they worked for a competitor before or an organisation that’s part of your supply chain? Can they bring contacts and relevant knowledge with them, which will help you? Has the agency got long and successful relationships with its clients, or does it have a high churn rate? If the agency has worked for lots of clients in a short space of time, you need to ask why. It might be they work on a project basis, but if they have a high churn rate then this can be a sign of making impressive pitch promises but failing to deliver.

Recommendation

Will any of the agency’s clients (both current and previous) provide a reference or testimonial about how they performed? If not, why not? Recommendation doesn’t just come from clients, you can get a feel for the quality of an agency by the number of awards they’ve won over the years, the case studies on the website and the work in their portfolio. In the case of PR activity, asking relevant journalists for the names of the agencies that constantly give them well written, timely and creative news is another way of sorting the wheat from the chaff.

Personalities

When an agency is pitching, remember the team want you to like them and want you to appoint them. Ask the people who come and talk to you if they will be the ones actually doing the work. Do you get the sense that they genuinely want to work with you, and do you like them? Could you have a coffee and a chin wag with them? It’s going to be a hard slog if you don’t like the people you’re going to be working with.

Ideas

Creativity counts. Have the agency done their research, understood your objectives and requirements and then come up with some great ideas? You might not able to afford to do all of their ideas and some of the ideas might not be exactly what you’re after, but would the ideas solve your problem? Could you refine the ideas they present and turn them into something that fits your organisation’s culture and approach? How do they react when you give them some candid feedback on an idea during the pitch? Do they come up with an alternative plan there and then? Remember, all relationships take time to develop.

Trust

Ultimately, you need to be able to trust who you’re working with as you’ll be entering into (hopefully) a long-term partnership. If you can’t trust the agency to deliver what they promise then the relationship will never blossom.

At Lava, we’re quite selective about which new business opportunities we go for. Putting a presentation together is time consuming. We want to be known for delivering great work and great results. This will only happen if we share the clients’ passion for their product or service, like them, and think there’s an opportunity to do something that will deliver a fantastic return on investment.

In the last two months, we’ve been particularly busy with new business enquiries and presentations. I think we’ve won all but two of the pitches we’ve took part in. And whilst we’d like to have a 100% record, we’re not too disappointed with the two presentations that didn’t go our way. Why? Because the chemistry between us and the potential clients didn’t feel right and if things don’t feel good, then the relationship will never blossom.

You will no doubt notice that I haven’t listed price in the list of factors you might want to keep in mind. Yes, it is a significant part of the selection process but there are reasons why some agencies charge more, just like there are reasons why a Mercedes is more expensive than a Kia.

If you’ve stated the budget in the brief, then the agencies that you will consider too expensive won’t take up the opportunity and this will leave you with a shortlist of agencies that really want to work with you and think the financial reward on offer is really worth going for.

Hopefully by keeping these factors in mind, you and your colleagues will be able to select the right agency partner. It will be interesting to see how SC&P change the way they present to clients in Mad Men’s final series!

The New Year is always a good time to take stock of your marketing activity and refresh your approach but what should you be considering and how will 2014 be different from last year? Here are my six predictions for the year ahead.

Extending the engagement

I think we will see brands doing more to continue their relationship with customers away from the primary point of engagement or purchase. What do I mean? Take the TV show Breaking Bad. For most television programmes the audience is only engaged with the series when they are watching an episode. However, Breaking Bad maintained its relationship with its audience through innovative use of social media. Each of the central characters had their own Facebook page, which was updated throughout the series. Saul Goodman even has his own website – http://www.bettercallsaul.com/.  What does this mean? It means people talk about the developments in the programme the following day with their friends, but they also remain engaged between episodes through the updates posted by the fictional characters in the real world through social media.

Pictures will say more than a thousand words

Facebook posts with strong images, photographs and illustrations attract more engagement and interest than words alone. Pinterest and Instagram continue to grow, and with new services, such as Flipagram, allowing people to combine pictures with personal music, I think we will see even more focus on image-led communication over the next 12 months.

Social advertising

Declining newspaper sales, fast forwarding through adverts thanks to personal hard disk recorders and Sky+ and other such ad aversion means marketeers will look for other routes through which to push their messages. It’s no surprise that with Facebook and Twitter now being public companies that their advertising products are becoming more sophisticated.

As a marketing agency tasked with helping clients make the most of Facebook and Twitter, we’ve already started to use Facebook advertising and promoted posts with impressive results. We can tailor messages to reach people in specific locations, of specific ages, gender and most important of all, relevant interests.

Twitter is the latest platform to introduce paid for advertising. We’ve managed to attract applicants for our latest vacancies by using promoted Tweets with great effect. Being able to target Twitter users who are interested in specific topics, who tweet about them or even follow certain TV programmes allows you to target millions of potential users. Yes, it’s in its infancy and lacks Facebook’s ability to target specific towns and cities, but it is a platform to watch. I think we will see an increasing number of brands using promoted Tweets and promoted accounts to reach out to people over the next 12 months.

Creative content

I’m going to be brave and say that I don’t think we will see any major developments in the number of social platforms that are launched. I don’t think we will see a new Pinterest or Tumblr bursting onto the scene. Facebook will stay ahead of Google+ in terms of its user base and Twitter will plateau as people find it increasingly difficult to stay abreast of the updates issued by the several thousand accounts they follow.

What this will mean is that the content marketeers produce for distribution via social media will have to be even more creative, compelling, disruptive, engaging and most important of all, worthy of being shared. Marketing will have to work harder than ever before to create cut through. Story telling, audience participation and a subtle selling message (perhaps even a lack of selling all together) will be the social priorities of brands in 2014.

Mobile growth

In the last two years, owning a smartphone has become the norm rather than the exception. This Christmas, Britons have spent millions on tablets. The result? An increasing number of people using portable devices to browse the internet, shop and find information. A responsive website (which changes layout to provide the best user experience depending on the screen size of your device) is now essential for practically every business or organisation.

With the continued rise in internet-connected mobile devices, I think we’ll see geolocation services used more and more in marketing. Foursquare and Facebook’s check-in functionality go hand-in-hand (pardon the pun) with mobile devices.

Blogging and content marketing

My final prediction is that there will be no let up in the number of organisations that take to blogging and producing content for websites as they seek to build an authoritative reputation and enhance their chances of being found through search engines.

Just looking at the number of results Google offered for ’2014 marketing predictions’ (a staggering 109,000,000) shows that website owners, marketeers and content producers are seizing every opportunity to highlight their views and engage with people through comments.

Content will be increasingly repurposed and reused. We will see articles appearing in news media (both print and online) and then being tweaked for publication online, whether it be the writer’s own website or sites owned by third parties.

The number of people becoming ‘professional’ bloggers will also increase in 2014, meaning that companies, brands, products and services wanting to raise awareness, build their reputation and influence their audiences will have even more media outlets to target.

I’m sure there’ll be lots of other changes over the next 12 months to keep us on our toes and to offer us new ways of communicating with those important to us. If you’ve got any thoughts or predictions of your own, please do share them in the comments below.