Linking back to my blog posted on 30th September about the most frequent questions I get asked whilst speaking to agency owners about business development, let’s have a look at number 4:

Can I pass over lead and contacts for you to follow up on my behalf?

 The simple answer is yes, and the slightly longer one expands like so….

The most effective new business campaigns consist of a well researched and considered targeting strategy plus several tactical strands. These strands include Alchemis checking out all the trade press (both paper based and online) including NMA, Campaign, PR Week, The Drum, Event, Design Week and Marketing Week as well as the nationals (the FT, for example), the relevant vertical press (eg. The Grocer, Retail Week and Pharma Times) looking for current leads that are right for your service offer.

Our experience shows that once a lead is in the trade press, then it’s often too late; so our best sources for leads tend to be the financial and vertical press. As these leads are not necessarily part of the overall targeting strategy, we will then check with our clients to make sure that they’re not already talking to that lead and that they are happy for us to do so.

 Equally, if our clients see a lead and don’t have the time to follow it up, then we are more than happy to do so on their behalf. Similarly, if they’ve attended an event and come back with a load of business cards, send them our way – it’s why we’re there and it’s our day job!

The news that Lean Mean Fighting Machine has lost the Coca Cola account after it’s Dr Pepper social media marketing campaign put a reference to “2 girls one cup” (I won’t put a link to that here!) on the Facebook page of a 14 year-old girl shows the pitfalls of a medium where the brand owner loses a certain amount of control in the direction that a campaign can take.

Before the days of interactive marketing, a brand would commission its agency to produce work that was carefully monitored and signed off at every stage and then released to the world. There would be the occasional blunder – anyone remember the Hoover Airmiles sales promotion offer during the recession of the early nineties? – but on the whole, it was the brand rather than the agency that was holding the reins.

Whilst the development of technology has allowed brands to communicate with consumers in exciting new ways and at relatively low cost, the sheer speed and scale at which these campaigns can gather pace (and notoriety) shows how the brand can go from hero to villain in an instant.

Agencies know that they sometimes need to push the boundaries to give the brands they represent the edge over competitors but, as LMFM found out to their cost, it can be a very fine line between what the intended target audience, people outside this (as was the case here) and the brand owners themselves find humours or horrific.

How ironic the old Dr Pepper slogan of “so misunderstood” must seem now – but maybe not so much as “What’s the worst that could happen?”… Well, you could lose a multi-million pound account.