Dear Tig,

Thank you—I came in prepared to do battle after a sleepless night stressing. I cheered up after reading some of your funny yet informative articles—some of which gave me the "proof" I need to vanquish my enemies. Well, almost. I recently joined a company as its first marketing manager. The problem is they have used the services of one agency for years. I think this agency isn't giving its best and is making way to much dough for its lackluster efforts. I have a lot of marketing experience and not so much direct advertising experience. As such, the owner of the agency successfully talks circles around me when I raise my concerns. Unfortunately, I haven't developed the same amount of trust from the CEO that the owner of this agency has (with the assistance of much boozing). Can you please give me your opinion on a few things that don't sound quite right to me?

1. Is frequency a must have in TV if your biggest competitor is on TV and your budget for TV advertising is relatively small?
2. What is a good/average/expected turnaround time for an agency to provide a company with a media plan and design concepts (given that they are very aware of the company's history and direction).
3. How important is frequency in radio advertising as compared to TV?
4. Thank you for any assistance you can give me,

-Under Their Thumbs

Dear Thumbelina,

I'll get to your specific questions, but I see two problems right off the bat. First, you describe a situation in which you've been hired as the first marketing manager, yet not given marketing manager responsibilities. The agency relationship should be your purview, not a relationship based on boozing with the CEO. Your CEO theoretically should have the trust in you to accept your call.

The other problem I see is that you do not seem particularly confident about your suspicions of poor agency performance. This lack of resolve might be from your suggested inexperience, but neither that nor the apparent self-doubt are going to foster much trust from your CEO.

These two problems might be related. Especially as the first marketing manager, you are setting the pattern by which this company will treat marketing and marketing staff in the future, so you have to choose your battles and fight them with certainty. Lacking that certainty, you should bide your time and collect the needed experience and data to come to a more confident conclusion.

You will not help your cause by taking on a generally negative attitude and taking pot shots at agency work. Your specific questions lead me to believe that the marketing situation might not be completely mishandled by the agency, but that it depends entirely on the context.

The answer to your first question—about frequency—could go either way, depending on the specific marketing conditions. For instance, a product that requires high top-of-mind awareness for purchase would warrant high frequency, even if the budget is small. Rather than spread out your message ineffectively in a wider swath, you need to reach as many people as possible with the desired frequency.

On the other hand, this might be a strategy useful only for the boozing TV sales rep friend of the your agency nemesis. But that might be overly cynical. A good expectation for turning around a media plan and design concepts should be about eight weeks. It can be done in less than that amount of time, but you would be sacrificing some of the benefits of paying an agency in the first place—namely the ability for them to apply all of their experience to it.

In order to prevent them from abusing that amount off time, producing the work only in the last couple weeks, keep them honest with some checkpoints along the way. Finally, frequency in radio advertising is just as important as it is on television. If the agency seems to have a different philosophy on this, it's both interesting and suspect.

One circumstance that might make a rational person require vastly different frequency on the different media would be pricing structures. Valuing frequency higher on TV would make sense if the TV reps practically give away additional frequency once a purchase is made, and the radio people make you pay standard rates for each impression.

If, after all this, you still harbor suspicions about the quality of the agency's work, check it yourself by talking to other agency people confidentially. Do not go to the next agency down the street and ask them if they can “beat this offer.” Instead, tell them what sorts of advertising you are doing and ask them how they might approach it, what it would cost, how long it would take and how they might think better efficiencies would result. This is the evidence for which you are looking.