The Pros & Cons of Pinterest For Brands – Including Platform Demographics
We’re always on the hunt for effective new social media tools and platforms for our clients, so we thought we would share our thoughts on the web’s latest obsession: Pinterest.
Brandware’s 10 Predictions for PR & Digital Media in 2012
Happy New Year, colleagues, clients and friends! It’s going to be an action-packed 2012, and what better way to kick off January than with a little speculation and prognostication about the trends that will fuel our business this year:
Five Questions That You Should Add to Your Agency RFP
If you’ve finally wrangled the 2012 budget and you’re spending the end of December cranking out a request for proposal (RFP) for an agency, you have my condolences.
A couple decades on the client side handling agency searches taught me one thing: finding a great partner is like everything I find despicable about dating: beneath the pretty packaging, there’s always the risk of a rotten core or outright psychosis. In addition to whatever your company’s purchasing tsars demand, what questions should you be asking potential partners to mitigate the risk of a disappointing match?
Here are five questions we find helpful to help start you down the right path:
1. Who will do the work?Ask for an account team org chart. You’ll want to know how many hours the high-profile agency exec or the star digital guru spends on your business. If staff is presented in the RFP, you’ll want to require that they attend the account presentation. To avoid bait-and-switch, require rights of approval/refusal for any account team changes.
2. What are the key performance indicators (KPIs)? Yes, Virginia, all work results, traditional and digital, can – and should – be measured. Ask which monthly metrics the agency will provide as proof that output is moving the needle in the right direction. Be sure you understand costs – third-party vendor fees from companies like BurrellesLuce, Radian6 and others can add thousands a month. Ask about lower cost options – for example, we use in-house solutions.
3. What’s not included in the fees? The biggest complaint I hear from client-side colleagues is that agencies nickel-and-dime them to death. Read the fine print – is the agency charging you for every color copy and phone call? Is the minimum monthly fee a loss leader with hefty rates in effect once you exceed a certain set of hours? What’s their mark-up for third-party services?
4. What happens after hours? Everyone loves to pontificate about work-life balance, but let’s get real: just last week we had a client insist on a Sunday morning conference call. If you need support after 5:30 pm on weekdays, on holidays or on weekends, ask the agency to explain how, how fast – and for how much – they’ll handle work after hours. Most agencies charge higher rates for same-day, evening or weekend work.
5. What won’t they do? RFP responses will be chock-full of wonderful things your prospective agency has done and will do. Ask what they won’t do in-house. If the agency outsources certain types of work (and ALL agencies do), you ought to know about it. Who’ll provide research and analytics, write that executive speech or byline articles or design a last-minute media invitation?
In addition to our five questions, we also ask for a favor:
One thing that we don’t want to see on an RFP is a proverbial fishing expedition. You’ll be tempted to ask competing agencies to provide campaign concepts for existing issues, like an upcoming product launch. Agencies call that spec work.
Giving away intellectual property and essentially a free plan during an RFP process has always been anathema for ad types and creative shops – see www.no-spec.org. It’s equally annoying for PR firms.
To really understand an agency’s strategic, creative and tactical juice, create a hypothetical challenge. You’ll get apples-to-apples insight of an agency’s approach – and that’s what counts.
If you are in the market for a new agency, happy shopping!
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