Published in ADWEEK, January 21, 2009

One of our new employees came to us from a large, national manufacturer with several consumer brands. In her role she worked with a well-respected national agency that had been hired to do both the digital and traditional advertising. (The shop, better known for its traditional work, had created some cutting-edge digital solutions for clients.) The manufacturer reasoned that by consolidating its communications with a single, well-known agency, it would gain better control of its brands across the increasing number of communication channels, as well as some efficiency.

The reality turned out to be quite different. Says our new employee: "There I was, 10 hours before our site was supposed to launch, talking to someone in India where the work was outsourced. It was someone who had no relationship to the agency whatsoever, someone I did not hire. There was not an agency person anywhere. It quickly became clear that it was going to be up to me to fix what needed fixing."

Clearly, that agency promised something it was not prepared to deliver.

Today, virtually every agency talks about its ability to do "integrated communications." But determining who really can do what is difficult. Here are five questions clients should ask before hiring an agency to manage digital and traditional communications:

1. Is the agency team that leads brand strategy as adept and knowledgeable about the digital space as it is the traditional space? (And vice versa.)

Your strategy, to be effective, must live in the digital as well as the traditional world. In many cases, the agency's senior talent responsible for strategy may not understand the digital environment well enough to be able to articulate or advocate one that will play well online. If a one-dimensional individual is leading your strategic planning, some really amazing potential digital ideas may be missed. Conversely, your strategy could be hopelessly skewed to the digital side of the ledger.

2. Where will the work be done?

Sounds simple, but it's probably the most obvious question that almost never gets asked. If the agency is not doing the work in-house, then where is it getting done? If it's being outsourced to another country, how much control does the agency really have? And how much will that affect your brand consistency and efficiency?

3. What percentage of the agency's business is online versus offline?

This is another very simple question that almost never gets asked directly. If an "integrated" agency's digital work is only 10 percent of its total, how good is it really going to be at it? What happens if the shop loses that 10 percent of its business? How much full-time staff does it have to do the digital work? Conversely, if 10 percent of an agency's work is traditional, does it have the strategic chops to really discern what your brand is about and to manage things like point-of-purchase, collateral and anything beyond the largest TV jobs? The appropriate agency should have a balanced revenue stream and therefore balanced resources.

4. What is the agency's process?

What you're asking your potential agency for is a single contact: one person, or small group of people, to create and manage the communication of your brands through a wide variety of channels, essentially managing the production of a promotional mini-site one day, TV the next and in-store point of sale the day after. Clearly, that's not an easy task, and the only way it happens is with a well-defined process, one simple to manage, but flexible enough to handle the various elements. When do the experts and specialists plug in? How are they involved and when? How are the handoffs managed?

5. How highly respected is technology within the agency organization?

By their very nature, Web developers tend to be quiet and unassuming. And yet, for any digital process, these folks are absolutely critical and are often the most knowledgeable about user behavior (and experience) of any group in the agency. One quick way to determine whether the agency believes that developers are an integral part of the team as opposed to just a "production function" is to find out what role the top developer has in the agency. If they/he/she reports to anyone other than the president or CEO, don't walk, run, because you're looking at a group for whom the folks charged with making everything work -- including your databases and digital communication -- are not a part of the strategic discussion.

If the answers to these questions are satisfactory, then you should be congratulated: You've found an agency uniquely prepared to help you develop sound, 21st-century strategies for your business and execute against them flawlessly in the digital and traditional realm. You've found the agency of the future.

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It’s a perfect way to spur marketer types like us to excellence, recognize talented individual and team efforts in outstanding Website development and to generate internet marketing exposure for the award-winning site.

And so recently, a select panel of judges named the best sites in 96 industry categories. And during that process, our name was mentioned over and over again.

Because, out of competition from interactive agencies and web site marketing departments in more than 33 countries, Slingshot walked away with honors for our work with Finlandia, Dave & Buster’s, Tucker Hill, Mission Foods, Liquid State, and STA Body Shots.

It was good day.

And, of course, if you’d like your site to get the same treatment, you know where we live.

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At agencies founded from the mid-'90s on, it evoked headshaking—as in disbelief. It's all a matter of timing. Agencies that came into being in the last 10 years have digital DNA, others do not.

Granted, it's hard for shops that built their chops on the Big Creative Idea and the award-winning TV spot to turn themselves around 180 degrees in a decade, which is about as long as it has taken the Internet to go mainstream. So what I am going to posit might produce even more extreme head gyrations. Success isn't about having "digital capabilities" to enhance one's traditional offline advertising skills. Digital is where everything should begin.

Why is that? One of the fundamental differences between online and traditional is the measurability of the online stuff. But what are we measuring? If we use the results of what we do online just to improve our online advertising, we're missing a major opportunity. What we should measure is real action: what people do online after they are exposed to online messaging, even if they don't interact directly with your creative (as opposed to theoretical results testing in a focus group). This is what makes the Internet a perfect testing ground for a messaging platform across the entire communications portfolio.

With mass broadband penetration and rich media and video matching levels of impact previously claimed only by TV, you can put almost any kind of message in front of consumers, in their homes or offices, usually when they are by themselves. Humor, heartstrings, logic, whatever. There is a reason why the Web is being used as a research environment more and more frequently, but many marketers are still not using the media they run every day online to inform their messaging across the media mix, including traditional. That is the link we need to make.

Think about it this way. If you could find out what happens after each person looks at your magazine ad—whether they went into a store and bought your product or not—it would sure beat doing a focus group to find out what people say they would do. You would use that data, right? What if you could also find out what the folks who saw your ad said to each other about your product when they were talking to their friends. You would use that too, no question. The information that blogs, forums, search-engine behavior and chat arenas can provide, if mined appropriately, as well as data that can be gleaned from creating messaging online and testing the action or inaction it generates, can go a long way toward improving overall advertising effectiveness.

Let's say your client is a regional homebuilder. By scraping the blogosphere, it is possible to find out the good and bad of what people are saying about that builder's brand and, to some extent, how consumers are deciding which brand to use. If you get really lucky, you can even identify a blogger who has agreed to build with your client and which development he has chosen. That is a consumer to pay close attention to, because he is either going to trumpet your success or create the dreaded "brandxsucks.com" domain to defame your client. Use that data, in addition to traditional research information, competitive information, planning goals, etc., to develop a messaging platform (or even two or three). Develop creative against that messaging, and then run that creative online. Study the results. What did people do? How many clicked and sought more information about your client? How many came back later looking for more? And in which environments did they do so? How did one message perform relative to another in a real environment, not a theoretical one like a survey or focus group?

The challenge this approach presents is that it means the agency must be involved in every aspect of the client's planning process—which in turn means the agency must be adept at all forms of communication, digital as well as "traditional." So, two things have to happen. First, marketers should expect and enable their agencies to leverage the vast knowledge that can be gleaned from the digital world and apply that knowledge across the communications mix. Second, agencies must be able to effectively plan, develop and execute digital as well as traditional solutions, with an integrated team that understands all of it and how it works together—not the traditional "silo" approach.

The agencies that can't do this will continue to lose blue-chip clients. Those that can will continue to pick off the Nikes of the world until that traditional big-brand agency model is gone.

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