The days of a company being held hostage to its ad agency media buyers and webmasters are over. We live in a user-generated, client-empowered era—one which has caused marketing firms like ours to adapt. I’m proud to say we have been leading the charge for some time.
We were client-empowering before client empowerment was cool.
Four ways that we are equipping our clients to be as self-sufficient as they want to be are:
1. Easy-to-Use Content Management Systems. Every new website we create enables our clients to edit the content using best-of breed content management tools. Sure we handle the heavy lifting of major design or structural changes, but we’re saving clients thousands of dollars by enabling them to make multiple content adjustments to their sites.
2. Graphics Standards. When we deisgn a new logo, we do so knowing that the new logo must work in a wide variety of situations—from business cards to billboards; television commercials to crop circles. We create a set of guidelines, templates and usage recommendations that allow our clients to produce much of their own marketing communications while keeping the visual brand consistent—a key to brand identity.
3. MarCom Libraries. There is still a role for print. We’ve spoken to that here in this blog a few times. But printing thousands of brochures that become obsolete before the last box of them is opened is untenable. While we continue to produce award-winning print pieces to this day, we also create marketing tool libraries with high-resolution PDF files that a company’s sales and marketing team can download and print on demand. Good for the planet. Good for the bottom line. Edits and updates mean new PDFs, not new print runs.
4. No Media Commissions. While we’re huge fans of AMC-TV’s Mad Men, we don’t have booze carts, don’t chain-smoke in the office, and we don’t charge media commissions. We’re tough media negotiators here at TCA, and our clients pay us for the time it takes to put the best media value together. But they keep the commissions. It enables them to save money or make their ad dollars go farther. If we recommend TV, radio, web or print media, it’s not because we have a finacial interest in it.
While other agencies and advertising trade magazines lament the new client empowerment, we welcome it. It puts the focus squarely on the two parts of our business we like best: Partnering with clients strategically, and then developing and implementing big creative ideas.