Why You Don’t Need An Advertising Agency – And Why You Do

There’s good news for you businesses out there who shutter at the thought of turning over the majority of your marketing budget to an advertising agency. SpotRunner.com allows you … yes you … to create top-notch television advertising, design a targeted media plan to air your television spots in specific markets and hit specific demographics and then sit back and watch the customers roll in. You create your slick, highly produced (complete with professional voice over artist) for a mere $500.

Pause for agency clients to sigh (or curse) in astonishment.

Depending upon the market and the length of your self-design media campaign (I chose El Paso, Texas, for four weeks in February), you could air your $500 TV commercial for as little as $5,700.

I can hear clients now, “YOU MEAN I COULD HAVE SPENT LESS THAN 1O GRAND ON MY TELEVISION CAMPIAGN?”

Yep. Sure could. There you have it. You don’t really need an advertising agency.

Now, if I could reel you in a bit, I’ll tell you why you do need an advertising agency.

Sites like SpotRunner.com commoditize advertising execution. Just like Google and Amazon have been transitioning computing to a utility, as detailed in Nicholas Carr’s book “The Big Switch,” user-generated content has been transitioning media creation into common practice. If everybody can do it, why pay some agency a lot of money to?

But commoditizing the execution of the advertising only proves that the execution is the easy part. What SpotRunner.com won’t tell you is when, where and how to deliver the right message to the right consumer to arouse their curiosity about your brand. There’s no consumer insight found plugging your anecdotal target characteristics into some website’s database.

Where advertising agencies prove their worth is with the strategy, planning and conceptualization that connects the audience with the message and the community to the brand.

Image: “Cheese, Cheese, Cheese” by OctopusHat on Flickr.

[tags]advertising, advertising agencies, SpotRunner.com, cheap advertising, marketing, marketing strategy, strategic planning[/tags]