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Marketing agencies

Working with marketing, research and e-commerce agencies and partners. How to get the best from the relationship.

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Meeting the media sales team – make it awesome, not awful

Snapshot : Media agencies sometimes recommend you spend your media budget with a single media supplier to get a better deal. This leads to media sales teams from different media suppliers pitching for your budget. Learn from our experiences what happens in this meeting, and how to get the most out of it for your business. Marketing people like to talk about advertising. We’re no exception. In past articles, we’ve covered… Read More »Meeting the media sales team – make it awesome, not awful

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Creative approval – How to get creative work through your business

Snapshot : Businesses use creative approval controls to prevent legal issues, ensure brand and customer consistency and manage budgets and the company reputation. But, these controls often work against breakthrough. They provoke differences of opinion about business risk. This article covers how to turn these challenges into an opportunity to create better work.  Last week, we shared three simple creative evaluation questions that keep you focussed on external customers, their… Read More »Creative approval – How to get creative work through your business

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Creative evaluation – 3 key questions to keep you on the right track

Snapshot :  Getting creative work out the door and in front of customers can be a challenge. The creative evaluation process takes time. There can be many distractions and differences of opinion as your try to make the creative work better. To keep you on track through these challenges, we recommend you always come back to three key questions. Who’s it for? What do you want them to think and… Read More »Creative evaluation – 3 key questions to keep you on the right track

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Marketing agency evaluation – some rules of thumb

Snapshot : Formal marketing agency evaluation is important. But, there are also many informal ways to judge whether your agency is doing a good job for you. We cover the many rules of thumb that will help you decide if your agency relationship is a dream or a dud. One of the first lessons you are taught in marketing is that you can’t do everything yourself. Marketing covers a wide… Read More »Marketing agency evaluation – some rules of thumb

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The world of media buying is weird

Snapshot : Your media spend is usually the biggest part of your marketing budget, so you have to spend time with media buying. But we reckon the world of media buying is weird. You have a “product” that is intangible and transient. And the industry behind it is a weird mix of overcompensating detail and social relationships.  We recently spent a bit of time updating our guides on media planning and… Read More »The world of media buying is weird

Speaker addressing a large crowd. To demonstrate that engaging the business helps you to be a better marketer.

How to be a better marketer?

Snapshot : We outline three easy ways to be a better marketer. Firstly, avoid jargon and buzzwords. Then, have a sales mindset. And finally, learn to engage non-marketers.  One of the more challenging but fun aspects of marketing is that there’s no single best way to do things. Marketing is not like science where you follow a set of prescribed steps and get the same results every time. Even though there… Read More »How to be a better marketer?

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Is anyone looking for brand expertise?

Snapshot : Keyword research shows more searches for ‘marketing’ than for ‘brand’ terms. And while brand strategy and brand identity generate searches for reasons we cover in this post, many other brand terms have low search volumes So, is anyone actually looking for brand expertise? Yes, but there are opportunities for all brands to raise their game. In a recent article, we pointed out the irony that market researchers have… Read More »Is anyone looking for brand expertise?

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How to evaluate advertising : Client – agency experiences

Snapshot : How to evaluate advertising is one of the most challenging questions in marketing. We share models and checklists from academia and agencies to show how leading business do it. But we also recognise that it really comes down to how you understand your consumer and define what your brand stands for.  We’ve talked before about the key moment when client marketing and creative teams come together to present their… Read More »How to evaluate advertising : Client – agency experiences

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Start up experts will start stalking you

Snapshot : When you start a new business, you suddenly find a lot of start up experts reach out to you with advice and offers of help. We review some of the not so practices we’re seeing as a guide on who avoid.  It’s no secret that most start-up businesses do not last. 55,000 Australian businesses went bust in the last financial year. And depending on which source you read anywhere… Read More »Start up experts will start stalking you

Car crash

Creative review – how to avoid a car crash

They say that in life, only two things are certain – death and taxes. Well, in the marketing world, there’s a third certainty. That’s the inevitable car crash of the ‘creative review‘ meeting between marketing agency and client. You can’t really call yourself a marketer until you’ve survived a bad creative review meeting. Which most of them are. This is the meeting where the creative teams at the agency show… Read More »Creative review – how to avoid a car crash