Decideware has enjoyed a long and productive relationship with the ANA.
Richard Benyon, CEO of Decideware presented "Advancing the Agency Evaluation Process" at a April ANA Procurement Series webinar, along with client-side input from Jim Zambito of Johnson & Johnson and Joyce Costello of IBM.
Richard, Jim and Joyce covered some key fundamentals of agency evaluation, and included real-life examples from their cutting-edge relationship management programs.
The webinar was broken down into the following main topics:
1) Agency Evaluation, Why? - Richard facilitated discussion around the results of a recent study with the WFA indicating that the top three reasons that advertisers perform agency evaluations are to:
a. Identify and improve underperforming agency relationships
b. Identify and recognize high-performing agency relationships
c. Formulate a basis for incentive or value-based compensation.
2) Agency Evaluation Basics - In this section, Richard discussed the question set structure, frequency of the evaluations as well as the rating scale. Results from the above mentioned survey showed that majority of those polled conduct an annual survey with a mid-year "pulse check" (a smaller, lighter evaluation).
3) Engagement - In this section, the team discussed techniques that they employed to grow levels of engagement among their marketing stakeholders and agency staff. They also discussed tactics to refresh and renew the program to ensure that it generates the results which are relevant, actionable and celebrated. Some of the items they mentioned include:
• Agency engagement - Giving a voice to the agency by holding agency self-assessment evaluations or agency on client 360 evaluations. Ensuring that agency has access to the evaluations results by including them in the evaluation debrief and compiling the action plan.
• Marketing engagement - Engage your team by relaying useful stories and not only uncovering issues but suggestions on how to solve these issues. Celebrate the success and disseminate it across the entire team. Renew your evaluation every so often and ensure that the content is relevant.
4) Advanced Techniques - Lastly, the team provided some guidance on more advanced techniques to improve program and focusing resources to identify savings, leverage efficiencies and increase client-agency productivity. Those techniques included:
• Sentiment Intelligence - application of contemporary textual analytics to a set (or a sub-set) of comments to fully uncover the richness in those qualitative data sets.
• Data Analytics- Understanding complex data through highly visual dashboards- which help motivate action and change.
Agency Evaluations remain a fundamental tool to build and maintain healthy client-agency relationships. Over the last few years we have seen certain clients pushing the boundaries of their evaluation programs. These agency management professionals are using data in more advanced ways than ever before - collaborating more directly with agencies, engaging in deeper and more robust "comment analytics" to help build meaningful action plans and providing their marketing stakeholders with very actionable insights on their relationships.
For a copy of the webinar, please visit: http://www.ana.net/miccontent/show/id/er-pro-0421-decideware
If you would like to discuss your agency evaluation program in greater detail, please contact us at sales@decideware.com
