Founder of Fahren (hellofahren.com). Digital leadership for business transformation and innovation. I love creating meaningful experiences for modern brands
Jim- this was a heavily discussed topic at the recent iMedia Agency Summit. A few things to note:
1. Clients continue to use multiple agencies, but they don’t make those agencies collectively accountable for the end goal. For example, clients hold the interactive agency that built the website accountable for traffic, yet they don’t have an impact/control over the traffic drivers: like making sure the URL is actually prominently displayed on the 30 second spot.
2. Agencies are founded on years and years of a siloed model. The silos existed to reward people with silly titles like ESVP Client Management Director. Those siloed approaches have made it near impossible to embrace disciplines that are horizontal in nature, like digital.
3. The industry as a whole still primarily relies on a time and materials approach to compensation making it challenging, and often near impossible, to staff correctly on the agency side and to actually get value from them. If agencies are billing out on an hourly basis, and a client is paying for them on an hourly basis, you’ll always be limited by time and materials.
There was a lot more discussed and I’ll be blogging about it this week (hopefully). I think the encouraging thing is that everyone wants to fix it. Well except maybe DRAFT.
Jim Cuene 
Jim- this was a heavily discussed topic at the recent iMedia Agency Summit. A few things to note:
1. Clients continue to use multiple agencies, but they don’t make those agencies collectively accountable for the end goal. For example, clients hold the interactive agency that built the website accountable for traffic, yet they don’t have an impact/control over the traffic drivers: like making sure the URL is actually prominently displayed on the 30 second spot.
2. Agencies are founded on years and years of a siloed model. The silos existed to reward people with silly titles like ESVP Client Management Director. Those siloed approaches have made it near impossible to embrace disciplines that are horizontal in nature, like digital.
3. The industry as a whole still primarily relies on a time and materials approach to compensation making it challenging, and often near impossible, to staff correctly on the agency side and to actually get value from them. If agencies are billing out on an hourly basis, and a client is paying for them on an hourly basis, you’ll always be limited by time and materials.
There was a lot more discussed and I’ll be blogging about it this week (hopefully). I think the encouraging thing is that everyone wants to fix it. Well except maybe DRAFT.