Building a Reliable Digital Agency Scorecard

Wed, Jan 25, 2012

Companies aren’t happy with the level of digital proficiency they’re seeing from agencies, but at the same time those companies have haphazard systems for appraising work agencies are doing in the online realm. It’s not surprising. After all, “you don’t know what you don’t know” right?

How can brands expect to hire the right agency when they have no way of identifying and evaluating the right skill sets? We believe the way that agencies represent themselves in the digital world says a lot about the work they do for their clients.

Clients aren’t happy…

Results highlighted in a new Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Council report dubbed “More Gain, Less Strain” show that clients are disappointed by agency performance, most notably because they feel agencies are not keeping up with developments in social media, mobile marketing and other digital whizbangery.

In fact only 9% of senior marketers believe traditional ad agencies are doing a good job of evolving and extending their service capabilities in the digital age.

51% see their agencies as playing catch-up with regards to new technology, or acquiring but not integrating digital marketing capabilities.

Long story short, agencies aren’t cutting it when it comes to digital.

But no one is keeping score

Unhappy as they may be, most marketers don’t have a documented process for evaluating the work that agencies do on their behalf. Only 44% of marketers say they have a formal scorecard for rating agency performance on an annual basis while 52% have no such mechanism.

As the CMO Council’s executive Director Donovan Neale-May notes, “there’s an underlying level of frustration among senior corporate marketers worldwide when it comes to agency contributions to business value creation, strategic thinking and digital marketing development.”