Rick Stanton’s column (link below) on KOMO’s current campaign to go direct to the client (http://www.komomarketing.com), rather than have the creative work done by an agency, sparked some feedback from local ad-agency execs. Here are the comments we’ve received so far:
Floyd Kolmer, Ad Mark Services: “All stations have been doing this. They make more money cutting out the agency. We already have had a small taste of that in a California market we buy in. That said, you would hope that this effort would be directed to clients they have identified as having no agency of record. If I find out they are aggressively going after our clients, we will figure a work-around, for sure.”
P.S. Stanton, Copacino and the guys at Wexley—you picked a good time to pull the plug!”
Jim Copacino, Copacino+Fujikado: “I have to disagree with my friend, Rick Stanton—which almost certainly will require me to buy him a drink when the bars reopen. But the fact is, ad agencies aren’t entitled to anything except for the opportunity to compete for business. I’ve always felt—perhaps naively—that if you offer high value and service, you will earn your clients’ loyalty. In a client-agency relationship, we have to prove our worth every day, every quarter, every year. Entitlement breeds complacency—and complacency is a greater threat to agencies than a media outlet’s attempt to diversify its offerings. Competition from broadcasters might even provide the opportunity for an agency to demonstrate why it’s the better partner.”
John Brown, John Brown & Partners, Retired: “Looks Like Sinclair is about to shoot its local partner, KOMO, in the foot. The decades-old bond between agencies and the media is being challenged by Sinclair, KOMO’s owner. KOMO’s online promotional “brochure” promises prospective clients with everything from marketing, copywriting and design to social to websites, and anything from digital and Internet to promotion and all the other services clients usually call upon their agencies to provide. It simply snips the agency out of the picture. Snip snip, bye bye. Maybe it’s time for agencies to do a new brochure that turns down the dial on broadcast to off.”
We requested comments from KOMO but have not yet received a reply.
—LC
We fought this for years, especially when we started up and were sometimes competing
with television stations for clients. Ken Hatch at KIRO and I had an on-going ‘dialogue’ on this
subject. TV stations would offer their direct clients a “convenience taping” for production of commercials
and we fought for the same. And, ultimately, we unsuccessfully kept them out of our sandbox. Big Broadcasters
have plenty of muscle and sharp elbows.
The real losers are not advertisers but the public at the loss of free radio and television public service announcements.
In the days before stations ran four (or more) commercials at every seven and one-half minute break, they would accept, and sometimes even help us produce PSA’s. KIRO, for one, had a staff person responsible for PSA’s. Our Graf-Hoke agency produced several multi-media sustained campaigns using PSA’s, “Don’t Let A Drunk Drive’,’Phone Home’, ‘We Have A Talent for Work’
and our collaborations with stations were good and healthy. Win-win.
Today, we see PSA’s from St. Jude’s and the ASPCA and the remainder of commercial time seems spread
among annoying (or worse) automobile (and motorcycle) insurance commercials. I encourage Rick Stanton
to thoroughly investigate this. Rate cards from television stations today list a veritable menu of what were formerly advertising agency services.The horse is out of the barn and heading for Centralia. Note to advertising agencies: adapt or perish… and good. luck with that.
An additional point to be raised when an advertiser gets “free’ creative is in the ownership. Creative that is provided by a media company like KOMO might not be so ‘free’ when the client decides to try and run it across the street at a competing station. One key advantage an agency provides is that our focus is on doing the things that get results for the client, not beholden to getting billing for a particular station group or media company. And the cost of the creative is in there somewhere, a competent agency will add transparency to the transaction as well.
Comments are closed.