A new survey from the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Council finds that most marketers are satisfied with their agencies, with a majority ranking them as “pretty good” or ”extremely valuable.” Less than one in 10 of the respondents said they plan to switch ad agencies.
Only 14% of the respondents said they are looking for other PR representation.
According to a CMO Council news release, participants were drawn from every major region of the world and were representative of most vertical industry sectors and company sizes. Nearly 63 percent of respondents said they reported directly to the CEO, president or COO, while another 21 percent said they were accountable to a regional vice president, general manager or division/business group head.
Other key findings from The State Of Marketing: Outlook, Intentions and Investments for 2010 include:
• Clients are building new internal skills, and if you’re a traditional ad agency with a limited suite of standardized creative and media services, you’re likely to have less budget, control and influence with your client.
• Investing in digital demand generation and online relationship building rank among the top initiatives being taken to maximize the impact and value of marketing in 2010 by 46 percent of those surveyed.
• When marketers were asked to rate their online marketing performance capability, only 6 percent responded “excellent.” The majority (44 percent) reported they are either growing their capabilities or struggling to quantify the value of online marketing spending.
• Attesting to the growing shift to digital modes of engagement, 59 percent of marketers are looking to train and develop existing staff, 40 percent are adding or expanding digital marketing agency support and 36 percent expect to bring in new talent resources to their organizations.
Don Beehler provides public relations consulting services to small- and medium-sized advertising agencies and businesses.
The Art of Telling Your Story 
On a recent job interview I went on, they are trying to combine traditional with new media. They are new to the space and see this as an opportunity to reach a new audience but they would also like to measure what is being done. They are also trying to do this to reach everyone as opposed to their traditional business to business model. I wonder how happy they are going to be after this has begun.
Jamie, I had a meeting yesterday with a large ad agency for some project work. In the course of our meeting, we had an interesting discussion about how the future ad agency will look and operate in the digital age. There was consensus that while the traditional agency model is changing, many ad agencies still don’t understand new media very well.