83% OF AGENCY LABOR HOURS ARE A WASTE OF TIME

Not too long ago I was talking with a marketer. Her CPG company works with a highly respected agency. She said their TV commercials are taking about 6 months or more to produce. It’s insane.

The typical agency delivery model is ridiculously slow, incredibly inefficient, and outrageously expensive.

Most agencies are replete with people that check on other people to ensure that under-qualified people – who do the real work – do better work. This says nothing about all the costs and salaries that clients often pay to agencies which are totally unrelated to getting their work done.

We recently did an analysis that examined the number of hours that a few good agencies take to produce work for video, online, and print production. The analysis indicated that 83.6% of agency hours are wasted. This includes having too many people engaged in processes that spend far too much time briefing, discussing, presenting, checking, and producing work that is rarely very good at first.

There is a different approach that works better for clients. Agencies should work with fewer clients and understand their needs with greater depth. Agencies should hire multi-talented people who can work across channels and do many tasks, e.g., talk to clients, understand their strategic needs, write copy, do art direction, edit videos, etc. That doesn’t mean that every agency person needs to be equally adept at every task, but today’s agency professionals should have reasonable competency across disciplines and channels. This is our agency’s business model – and it enables us to eliminate approximately 83% of unnecessary hours on our side — and a huge amount of time for our clients as well. For example, the video work we produce typically takes hours or days to produce. These are not TV commercials but could be if needed.

To conclude: time is money. And neither one should be squandered.

So, if you’re a client and would like to understand how you can operate more efficiently with your agency, please reach out by emailing Hi@Rung-UP.com and I’ll explain it to you. It will take about 5 minutes.

Lawrence M. Kimmel is CEO of Rung-UP, the first agency custom built for C-Level executives at mid-sized organizations.