Behind the Curtain of the Traditional Agency Model

Maybe you’ve been there – in a meeting with a brand, or marketing, or creative agency, excited about a lively conversation, a convincing point of view, expressed by charismatic and experienced founding members of the firm.

You may have left a great pitch and felt confident – because of the confident delivery – that the hefty fees would surely be followed by exceeding goals.

That exhilaration of a good show, put on by expert players, is all to convince us to commit our time and (lots of money) to this partnership for many months ahead.

My friend, I’m sorry to say, most of us also soon realize that that meeting – the one where they closed you – is likely the last you’ll see of those experts.

I don’t mean to vilify, though it does make for good dramatic effect. But more often than not, this scenario is what business owners find in choosing an agency partner.

The simple fact is that, if you’re a small or medium sized business, the senior members of the Big Agency probably handed you off the moment you signed on the dotted line.

Unless you are an enterprise level client (cash cow) you will always be lower on the priority list.

Everyone and anyone who isn’t Spectrum, Coca-Cola, or Suntrust? We’re assigned a mix of mid and entry level staff.

The principals of the company who pitched to you are not available to be involved on a daily basis– they are out pitching to more clients, attempting to secure new business to keep the machine churning. And who can blame them? They have a ton of overhead to keep everything running in the traditional agency model. 

If you ask about involvement or oversight they’ll likely have a statement prepared about how they stay in tight communication, have frequent check-ins – maybe the teams are “overseen” by senior personnel, etc.

The fact of the matter is that it’s impossible to achieve a premium level of work with a team that’s essentially training on your dime.

If the agency is small, you might think you have a better chance of getting focused, quality work. But think again. It’s expensive to hire employees with highly specified skills and knowledge. Small agencies don’t have the budget to staff up at an expert level for account management, strategy, copywriting, design, development. Instead they will hire fresh guards and fill in with contract people.

That means that every time another person is brought into the project, they mush be briefed. Anyone who wasn’t in the initial client meetings is working off someone’s interpretation. Ever play a game of telephone? There is no substitute to being in the room.

Here’s why it is the way it is.

Each person at a traditional agency has a billable rate. If an entry level member’s rate is $125/hr and a senior members rate is $375/hr you can guess whose time the agency is going to reserve for the big clients. Unless you’re an enterprise level client with an unlimited monthly budget, your project is going to see very little of that high-level time.

If you’re tired of the traditional agency model with all it’s dog and pony showmanship, where can you turn?

In contract to where we’ve worked and the Big Agencies we have worked with, we established SIDE ROLE to have virtually no overhead. Therefore, we are able to be super efficient with the two of us doing the work on your project.

You get a pair of experienced, highly skilled individuals who are ourselves the experts you hired, actually executing the work. 

In our intensive model, you have the experts and the executers (two and the same) in the room with you hearing firsthand about your business, challenges, and goals. 

This two-person team is comprised of marketing professionals with decades in branding and the digital space. We set out to break that model that caters only to the high dollar enterprise level clients who can afford to pay tens of thousands month after month for an inefficiently run process.

Instead, we decided to deliver what we did at those agencies but in a compressed, super-focused model that wastes no time and delivers the same solutions faster and at a price that almost everyone can afford.

If this idea resonates with you we invite you to book a call. Learn more about how our model breaks the mold and let;s plan your path forward together.

– Jenny & CR