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Whilst working on client projects we often find useful bits of information out. Where possible we blog about that information to pass on our knowledge. Below are some of our most recent entries.
Are the days of full service marketing agencies coming to an end?
Since we setup The League we have spoken to a great deal of specialised agencies, such as User Experience Agencies, Web Design Agencies, with no serious back-end developers, Web Development Agencies, PR Agencies etc, etc. What does this mean for those agencies (you know the ones) that offer everything under the sun - "Web Design, Graphic Design, Multimedia, PR, SEO, Social Media, Marketing etc" ?
When we setup The League we always planned to only handle web development and we specifically advertise ourselves as a Web Development Agency. We have no facility for design and we never will. Our skills are purely in development and we do not want to dilute ourselves to cover more and more bases. This does not mean we don't understand how design or marketing works and we always take the time to understand the concepts behind the projects we embark on, we just stick to what we know.
A number of our team have worked in full service marketing agencies in the past and have seen the problems first hand for these types of agencies. In this day and age of hugely diverse forms of marketing it seems no longer possible to offer everything to clients under one roof. There is not only the issue of keeping knowledge up to date, there are also the cost implications of running teams of highly talented individuals.
For us the point at which this strategy of offering everything falls down, is when the sales and account handling teams talking to the clients simply do not understand all aspects of marketing. They maybe exceptionally good at understanding how to use Social Media to strengthen a brand, but their knowledge of marketing a brand with different forms of print may well be minimal, and thus the client cannot be getting the best marketing strategy out of the agency.
What about those clients who simply need a new web strategy? There is simply no need for them to go to a full service agency, and it's just not cost effective as full service agencies often demand more money for their time as they will have larger overheads.
Don't brands need these one stop agencies though?
The problem with all these smaller specialised agencies is that brands will always need someone with the full marketing strategy across all the different forms of media. A solution to this maybe that companies start to follow the broadcasting model, where a producer is hired to create the marketing strategy and it is their responsibility to pull together teams of specialists to produce the various forms of marketing required.
We believe that using more specialised teams and individuals will provide brands with better solution, but we would say that wouldn't we!
We'd really love to hear your thoughts on this. Please let us know if you think we are way off the mark, or if we have struck a chord with you on our facebook page.
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