Interesting commentary from Sir Martin Sorrell on WPP’s 2009 performance, calling it a ‘game of 2 halves’ with a ‘much less worse’ performance from November 2009.

This almost mirrors our experiences at Alchemis, whilst calling marketing decision makers across a wide range of market sectors on behalf of our clients, who represent the full range of creative marketing agencies – except our second half recovery (a bit like Aston Villa at the weekend) began in August 2009.

When I say our recovery, I really mean our clients’ recovery, which actually manifested itself in a 70% increase in the amount of new business we helped our clients win between August – December 2009 compared to the first half of the year.

2010 has seen an even more significant increase with Alchemis helping to generate almost £2.5m worth of new business for our clients already.

These wins can only come from us ensuring that we manage to get our clients in front of the right marketing decision makers at the right time – we do this by combining fresh calls into new prospects and managing the ongoing development of those new relationships on behalf of our clients.

What are your experiences of 2009? Do they reflect WPP’s?

Last month I attended a Marketing Industry Network event in Birmingham, which focussed on the topic of “Agency Collaboration”. The panel used the example of the Birmingham 2018 World Cup bid, which was a fantastic example of how a group of completely different disciplined agencies came together to produce an amazing argument for the City of Birmingham.

The essence of the discussion focused on how we could get marketing agencies to work together to better serve the needs of the consumer. Lets face it, the consumer calls the shots nowadays and they are totally aware of how demanding they can be. This puts greater pressure on marketing agencies to provide a 360-degree approach.

In the past, agencies have been suspicious about sharing their ideas with other agencies and they have felt exposed to the fact that their ideas could be stolen or worse still, misused.

Today, we see more of the “ Best Creatives” coming together and sharing their knowledge across all disciplines, which makes the need for getting it right first time key, especially as more emphasis is placed on delivery.

Direct clients will inevitably get the most for their money when they present a problem to a group of vendors and they are no longer concerned with how many people are involved in the campaign as long as they get the results they require.

The challenges tend to be experienced at agency level as colleagues try to build experience around skills, which may overlap. Therefore, the best agency collaboration can be seen between agencies that respect each other’s boundaries and learn to work together towards a common goal.

Are there any agencies out there that would like to comment on their personal experiences of collaboration?

Now I have always been a great believer in harnessing new platforms like mobile marketing and social media sites to promote your brand or company. Hence setting Alchemis up on Twitter.

In my view it’s more than a wise step to get out there, even if a Twitter account doesn’t result in immediate new business, your brand and company name is out there in the “Twittersphere” for all to see, which can only be a good thing.

The common perception with social media sites is that people go there to socialise and not to buy. True, but brand visibility is the key, and with Twitter having over 18 million users, and Facebook a staggering 400 million active users, it’s hard to see why some companies still stick to their guns and use more traditional methods of marketing.

On the same note, with the introduction of more and more mobile devices, surely the place to be is in the mobile web? Well you would be shocked at the lack of brands I speak to on a daily basis that are yet to fully appreciate the benefit of mobile marketing.

That’s why when one of my clients that I call on invited me to a seminar based on their predictions for paid search in 2010, it was refreshing to listen to someone promoting the idea of harnessing the mammoth power of social media, and the importance of the growing number of consumers available to be targeted through mobile devices today.

Now I am not about to give away my client’s top tips for mobile or social media search (sorry), but what I will say is that the seminar really drove home the constant developments in social media and mobile technologies that companies just aren’t making full use of.

I read an obvious but probably not widely registered fact in an article some time ago that text messages are usually read by a user within 20 seconds, which means brands can start seeing results almost instantaneously, versus hours or days for a similar email marketing campaign. Now if brands can harness this to generate new business and get results that fast, then they should be getting onto it before these spaces are flooded, and their brand becomes a needle in a haystack.

The moral of the story is if you’re not using the power of social media, do it. And if you’re not mobile marketing, do it.

I can’t recall the last time I had a clever, well-targeted marketing text message sent to me, in fact I’m not even sure I’ve even had one! Aside from my mate John texting “Dan, get down to the Royal George, they are giving out free Tequilas!” Now that was well targeted.