Well, it’s nearly over, this mixed bag of a year. Sitting where we do, in the middle of agencies and clients, we get to see and hear a lot of different views of this economic climate.

We know personally of several agencies who have had to shut their doors this year, never good news, particularly when staff have been laid off.

Interestingly, most of the agencies we know who’ve gone under have blamed themselves rather than ‘the market’. They attribute their demise to leaving it too late to respond to the changing needs of clients and their marketing budgets. Examples include:

• not developing a serious digital offer whether through acquisition or partnership
• not having a clear offer and/or targeting strategy for business development
• a lack of investment in proactively looking for new clients and/or markets

On the other side of the coin, we’ve added over 600 new agencies to our already extensive agency database and more of our clients have won business this year than for the last 5 years.

Out of interest, here is a breakdown of client wins by discipline:

• Research: 19%
• Digital: 17%
• Full service/integrated: 17%
• Design/branding/packaging/corporate com: 17%
• BTL, PR and media planning &buying: 30%

As a glass half full kind of person, I always look forward to the forthcoming year with the hope of more and better! I wish this to all my readers!

Further to my last post and specifically the part that addressed the situation advertisers find themselves in at the mercy of the Sky Plus remote control, I thought I’d follow up with a blog concerning product placement in TV programmes.

Just in case you’ve been living in a cave and hadn’t heard, Ofcom are allowing product placement within TV shows from the end of February. Technically, product placement has been going on for years on TV, but unless a brand specifically pays the programme to include its products then it doesn’t count as product placement.

However, this got me thinking about all shows that have been broadcast here but made overseas. I remember going on a Sopranos Tour about 6 years ago through New York and New Jersey and the tour guide spent several minutes telling us how brands such as Tropicana made damn sure that when Tony Soprano opened his fridge and poured himself a nice refreshing glass of orange juice there was no way it was going to say Del Monte on the carton. It wasn’t really the sort of information that most of the tourists were expecting to be told on a locations visit – they were itching to see the car park of the diner where Chris Moltisanti was shot by Matthew Bevilaqua – but I found it pretty interesting given my line of work in business development.

When these US shows are subsequently aired in the UK I presume (though somebody correct me if I’m wrong) that this means that any international brands have effectively been getting free product placement to a British audience. And with some of these shows that become massively successful (let’s not forget the DVD box sets that will be bought and lent to everyone in the office who hadn’t seen the show) that is a truly staggering amount of coverage. Nobody is going to skip past the storyline with the remote, so you have a truly captive audience and an opportunity to raise brand awareness and win ever increasing amounts of new business from what might be a fairly reasonable price.

Of course, the first trick for brands is to identify the shows that are going to take off. Again, I’m no expert in this but I presume that some programme makers must have a deal with brands who want product placement that will take into account future repeat screenings of the programmes, DVD sales, etc, etc. After all, you can’t delete those scenes featuring product placement if they contain essential dialogue or if they are central to the story, so once the brand is in, it’s in for good.

Product placement is not confined just to television. It’s being increasingly used in areas such as computer gaming too. This is another ever-increasing market that has worldwide reach and seemingly limitless possibilities for brand marketing.

So what does the future hold for brands hoping to win more new business from product placement?

My prediction is that psychology will become increasingly involved. Suitable shows and games will be scouted out as viable marketing vehicles when they are just a glint in the writer’s eye. Within these media, brands will want to subliminally target consumers by associating certain characters or events with certain emotive decisions that the viewer makes. There will be a lot of complex research involved and even a sub-industry that develops with specialist agencies that are retained by brands to influence scriptwriters and directors to work certain situations into a show in order to increase the association we feel towards a product in relation to these situations.

And the Sky Plus remote control won’t be able to save us now.

And finally, to my response to number 5 in my list of the 5 most frequently asked business development questions (in my experience):

How will you get to know not only my agency’s offer but the personality of my agency?

A crucial concern for a lot of agency owners, as we are representing their brand on the telephone; a brand which they have often built up over years with a lot of blood, sweat and tears and therefore the last thing they want to happen is for Alchemis to misrepresent them.

I often draw parallels between outsourcing new business and sending your precious child to school. You’ve done a great job in bringing them into this world and giving them the basic skills, but now it’s time to send them to the professionals for the next stage of their development.

All 3 of the working owners of Alchemis are parents (and I’m a recent grandparent too!) so we understand this and take great care to ensure we understand what your agency and your people are all about, as well as obviously getting to grips with your work and your case studies.

We do this through a structured and an intuitive approach to briefing. This involves an initial set up where we discuss your case studies and agree your offer to market and your target prospects – to demonstrate our understanding of your offer, we then write a campaign plan which summaries your key selling points. This is then often followed by an immersion programme which varies from client to client and can involve standing on Waterloo station handing out samples, attendance at relevant exhibitions or simply spending a day at a client’s office. This immersion tends to follow some calling activity, as by then our New Business Managers will have feedback from the market and therefore some informed questions to pose.

Rest assured, we will look after your brand as though it was our own…..