Death of an Advertising Agency:Part 7 of 12 - Growing Up

Posted on July 19, 2007
Filed Under Online Recruiting, Death of An Advertising Agency |

Please note: This is part seven of a twelve part series. A new entry will be made each Thursday. To view the entire series, please visit the Death of an Ad Agency category.

At Classified USA of Nevada, we had a hard time accepting the Review Journal’s resistance to technology and disinterest in improving the overall process for a client to place an ad. We just could not understand why they would not want to improve efficiencies and deliver better quality of service to their (and our) clients.

Needless to say, we began to re-strategize how we would improve the process. Our solution was two fold:

Find other advertising mediums that would provide a better quality of response for our clients, educating our clients on the difference between quantity and quality. This would also extend the reach of their employment brands.
Begin to develop “Online Career Centers” for our clients, allowing them to control the ad copy, write more effective and legible job descriptions and make changes to these whenever they would like.

We leveraged our knowledge of the newspaper/publication business to become a better advertising agency. We knew the strengths of each Las Vegas publication from our previous role in the Southern Nevada Free Publication Association, an association I was president of for 3 years prior to selling the Las Vegas Employment News (Guide).

Classified USA partnered with many of those publishers to introduce them to our clients, and our clients to their readership. Many of these publications reached minority markets, regional specific areas, or niche markets furthering our client’s overall diversity initiatives. Each had a unique, and valued, audience that our clients were not reaching through the daily newspaper.

Classified USA began to buy and broker full page ads from many of these newspapers, creating employment sections that did not exist for some, and expanding classified sections for others. We designed the pages in-house, using our past newspaper experience. By delivering the newspaper camera-ready artwork, we could ensure that the copy had been proofed and approved by our clients.

Very few mistakes were made. And the savings were passed along to our clients. Simultaneously, we were strengthening the brand of our clients because they were reaching untapped markets – what we call hidden talent pools today. (Read a white paper on hidden talent pools here).

As we expanded our clients’ reach, we had to be mindful of their budgets and could not increase them. To do that, we needed to decrease the amount they were spending in the Review Journal. Ultimately, this would anger the newspaper and was a contributing factor to the death of our advertising agency.

While we decreased the size of the ads, we improved their effectiveness. Again a novel concept – spend less money, get better results.

The solution we discovered was profound:
We focused more on employment branding in the ad copy, establishing our client as an Employer of Choice, and we encouraged the reader (jobseeker) to learn more about these great opportunities (and potentially apply) online.

This was done through the Online Career Center that we were mastering.

The concept made sense. Take a client’s ad copy that once contained the job title and a job description (usually poorly communicated because it was cost prohibitive to be descriptive in the newspaper) and focus more the employment brand.

The ad copy would contain the company logo, a brief description about their company culture and what made them an “Employer of Choice.” And finally, it would contain a laundry list of open positions. The ‘call to action’ was to learn more online at the Online Career Center.

When a jobseeker visited the Online Career Center, we could reinforce the brand, expand on the company profile and provide a full job description. And because the Internet offered an infinite amount of space, we could avoid the typical description of:

Need PT or FT emp. w/ min. 2 yr. F&B exp. TAM card req. Pls. fax to.

The most important part was our ability to capture great data on the jobseeker and begin a 2-way communication, something newspaper does not do effectively.

The increase in the quantity and quality of applicants was unbelievable. This new found strategy needed to be duplicated.

Our story needed to be told.