Opinion: Full Service Agencies v Specialists – Is the ‘one stop shop’ lazy decision-making?

by Charles Ryder, CEO, White Chalk Road.

“Today’s digital and non-digital ecosystem is a good deal more complex than agencies and clients have ever had to face before,” says Martin Thomas, MD at FRANk Media, a respected full service marketing agency in Melbourne.

The amount of knowledge and the diversity of skills that a marketing department or agency has to be across these days are enormous. This begs the question as to whether some of these skills in specific service areas such as social media and search engine optimisation (SEO) should be outsourced to specialist providers and whether the modern full-service agency (FSA) has the best structure or resources to handle all in a ‘one-stop-shop’ arrangement. Indeed, regarding the FSA choice, is the ‘one point of contact’ for all marketing needs over-rated or still relevant these days?

Regarding the structure of modern agencies, particularly the web design oriented ones; we have to question whether their priorities or processes are fully appropriate these days.  In the words of Thomas: “I always felt that starting with the creative concept was putting the cart before the horse. I understood that the words and pictures were the instant gratification bit of advertising that clients liked to focus on, but to my mind, if 90% of marketing budgets were spent on media, why was it only receiving 10% of the client’s interest?”

Thomas goes on to suggest a more appropriate structure with the Client Partner in the middle with the Social/Business Strategy & Consumer-Concentric thinking and the service components or specialties as the spokes of the wheel:

Specialist Search Marketer vs Multi Service Agency

A full service marketing agency consisting of a large team of professionals can offer an array of skills with a host of experts all pulling their expertise together under one roof. On the other hand, a selection of specialist agencies can provide specific, niche knowledge, offering demonstrable passion and creativity within their area or discipline.

In the words of Danielle Stegg of FindGood: “Yet both integrated marketing agencies and specialist marketing agencies are highly capable of acting as an extension of your in-house team and can equally add value to your brand.”

Well, maybe in theory. Leaving aside diplomatic even-handedness in the debate for a moment, I am going to ask what is actually going on in practice in the market today? What can we learn from this experience so that we can provide practical tips that can be applied to the client’s modern dilemma of making choices in a complex multi-channel and multi-service world where  sometimes they ‘don’t know what they don’t know’?

“Matt Henkes from Marketing Tech News argues that, according to recent research by the Chartered Institute of Marketing (CIM), 85% of companies consider campaign cohesion across multiple channels as a priority. What this essentially means is having a project managed under one roof by the same team was a highly preferable option for marketing agencies. However, only a fifth of respondents believed this integration was regularly achieved.”

Henkes makes an interesting point when he says that “…many find with integrated marketing agencies, projects can be passed around from pillar to post, with different (and in many cases more junior) members of staff handling the project.”

I myself find this to be true, particularly with the discipline areas of SEO/SEM and social media.

While some, like Chris Moriarty Head of Corporate Affairs at CIM, warn that managing several specialist agencies can take time and requires specific skills, he and others also say that “…some still prefer the far more personal, personalised and niche service that specialist marketing agencies can undoubtedly offer.”

Moriarty goes on to say “…at the end of the day, what really matters is finding the marketing agency that will listen to you, inspire you, offer great, relevant ideas, meets your needs, work with your budget and will provide that all important chemistry!”

While I agree with the above, chemistry alone will not be enough if the agency does not have strong enough skills in a particular highly competitive service area or ‘silo’ that requires it to deliver a positive ROI.

For example, SEO/SEM is arguably the fastest changing, most complex service of all in the marketing and web services industries – with yet another Google update expected later this month that will yet again bring big changes. So, all the goodwill and chemistry in the world will not cut it when only the best will do.  If a full service agency sees SEO as a relatively small part of its service offering and it is staffed accordingly, in terms of skill competencies, then generally ‘page two’ results will accrue resulting in no return on investment in that particular spend.  While it is true that some FSAs who lack dedicated in-house SEO specialists outsource or ‘white label’ this service to the best they can find, it is my experience that specialists who are willing to ‘white label’ their services are either very short of industry experience themselves or are one-man-bands – either way a risk to both agency and client alike.

Not that this SEO dilemma tail should ‘wag the dog’ as far as the FSA versus the specialist decision. If there are good reasons to engage a FSA, then engage it. However, there is nothing wrong in solving an SEO shortfall with a specialist if the chosen SEO and full-service agencies can work well together and with the same terrific chemistry referred to above. Moreover, really good SEO people are very rare, while good people in other disciplines such as Paid Search (e.g. Google AdWords), media planning and creative are not so rare and can be found in quite a few FSAs.

The Problem with the ‘One Point of Contact’ Argument

This brings me to the issue that frustrates me and many others to no end. Some might call it decision fatigue.  I call it lazy decision making. This is the question I asked earlier. Is the ‘one point of contact’ for all marketing needs over-rated?  Far too often, CEOs or marketing managers do a lot of good work evaluating various tenders or service provider offerings only to, at the short-list stage get lazy and fall back on the ‘one-stop-shop’ simplification. Do they really take the time to figure out whether the ‘one contact’ doesn’t end up being ‘one voice’ – a highly filtered and managed voice to the detriment of the diversity of specialist perspective needed to challenge the status quo?

If what is in the decision maker’s mind in choosing a FSA ONLY is ‘I just don’t want to deal with (read conflict resolution) multiple providers’ then I fear that this could be a case of ‘lazy decision making’ rather than prudent management.

It may be a radical idea, but a little bit of ‘conflict’ (read differently informed viewpoints) can be good for getting the right decision on an important matter.  After all, isn’t the viewpoint/debate between architect and builder or GP and medical specialist a necessary challenge that is needed to get a better and more balanced/informed result for the client? God forbid in the medical world we adopted the FSA mode exclusively because patients were afraid of conflict between GP and specialist views of their health treatment options!

To illustrate this in the marketing world, let me just give you one small example amongst many. If a designer’s creative mind comes up with a product web page that has cool looking multiple tabs and the analytical mind developer/programmer implements that vision in code and cost efficient fashion that involves just one unique page (URL) that the search engine (like Google) sees, the SEO guy may point out a serious problem with that implementation, preferring multiple URLs. Yet, if the latter SEO voice is drowned out or filtered by the often stronger designer/developer voices in the agency – whe
ther it be ego, cost or one-voice internal politics – then the client never gets to hear about the compromise to SEO, never mind the ability to express his/her opinion on the relative priorities of cost versus design versus search visibility.

Some might counter here with that all important need for ‘campaign cohesion’ but I know from many years of experience that this cohesion can still be delivered, provided certain things are set and clear.  These include:

• Appoint an in-house marketing manager and/or lead agency to champion cohesion;

• Have an integrated overall marketing plan with clear objectives;

• Avoid conflict of interests within and between providers where possible;

• Have one primary point of contact within each provider;

• Set up appropriate inter-agency communication protocols up-front.

In Summary

If you follow the above guide and carefully chose the right mix of general and specialist providers without the one-shop-stop mentality, such that this choice fits your particular marketing objectives and relevant marketing channels then there is no reason why everyone can’t be totally focused on the best overall result for the client – which hopefully should be customer-centric and lead to bottom line results.

Charles Ryder is CEO of White Chalk Road, a leading search engine optimisation (SEO) and online marketing firm in Perth, Western Australia. White Chalk Road provides SEO, SEM, PPC and Conversion Optimisation services to clients based in Perth and wider Australia. Connect with Charles on Twitter or LinkedIn.