According to Forrester, 78 percent of clients don't believe their lead agency does digital well. And this for good reason: Given the state of the economy, it's been increasingly hard for agencies to turn away any opportunity to earn some revenue. And as client interest and budgets have increasingly turned towards digital, the response within traditional agencies has been to tell their clients, "Yeah, we do that," and then try to figure it out. It's no surprise that the results are often dissatisfying. Agencies discover that digital isn't just another medium like television. And clients discover that "Yeah, we do that," means their key digital tasks are being outsourced, mismanaged, or improperly staffed.
Is your agency faking it? Next time you ask about digital capabilities and your agency's response is "Yeah, we do that," here are few questions that should separate the true digirati from the poseurs.
Which panels did you vote for?
The digital world thrives on conferences, where really smart, interesting people show each other really cool things. If no one in the room has been to SXSW, OMMA, f8 (or knows what those acronyms stand for), they're certainly voting with their feet about their commitment to embracing the new world.
Who leads the charge?
Does the agency have a CTO? No, not an IT guy. A CTO. As it becomes harder to separate creativity and technology, does the agency's ECD have a peer on the technology side?
Where's the beef?
Are the agency's developers in-house, or do they outsource? Maintaining an in-house development capability is expensive and requires learning how to manage people who are completely different from typical ad folks. It's also essential to delivering high quality digital work on time and on budget.
When agencies outsource coding and development, they lose control of the process. They also lose the ability to keep refining work and making it better. It's a daunting proposition to build a new department where the average salary is in the six figures, but it needs to be done, and it needs to be done with a department. An agency that can't develop across multiple commercial and open-source environments (PHP, Java, .net, etc.) can't truly provide complete solutions for its clients.
Digital-only clients/projects
Does your agency have any digital-only clients or projects, or is all of its digital work coming from long-standing clients that simply don't know better? The RFP process for a significant web development engagement does a pretty good job of identifying agencies that have genuine digital chops. Make sure you know what kind of enterprise level digital development your agency has done, and whether other clients trust them with their online business.
Who advocates for the consumer?
We no longer think of account planning as revolutionary; it makes perfect sense that the consumer should be the primary consideration in the development of compelling, effective advertising. Account planning ensures that advertising constantly achieves maximum relevance. Well, user experience design achieves the same thing online, keeping the usability and functionality of online experiences front and center. If your agency doesn't have a user experience practice, you're unlikely to be creating optimal consumer experiences, online or off.
Analytics
Every agency will tell you they're "into analytics," in the same way that they assure you they're digital. But what does your agency measure to optimize campaigns and to determine success? Hopefully the answer is more than click-through rates and web hits. Because every client's business situation is unique, each should have its own dashboard that the agency uses to measure success. Analytics software is getting increasingly sophisticated, allowing the integration of data from multiple sources -- like online display advertising, social media, mobile and website behavior -- to paint a comprehensive picture of how your customer is behaving online, and your marketing impacts that. Once again, this requires an investment in tools and people. But it's a better investment than really expensive desk chairs.
Unfortunately, most clients have had at least one bad experience with digital marketing or web development, often at the hands of their current agency. Trust is the most valuable commodity in any client-agency relationship. And faking digital expertise is a surefire way to erode that trust. As clients become increasingly smart about digital, agencies are going to have to stop creating digital window dressing and realize that becoming truly digital requires changes and investments that are time consuming and expensive. But they are not nearly as expensive as being caught faking it.
