Death of an Advertising Agency:Part 9 of 12 - Rumblings at the Newspaper

Posted on August 9, 2007
Filed Under Death of An Advertising Agency |

Please note: This is part nine 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.

The success of Diversified Recruitment Advertising (previously Classified USA of Nevada) created some rumblings at the Las Vegas Review Journal. Each time we informed the newspaper that the agency would be representing another client, we could sense their displeasure.

For years, clients relied on the RJ classified advertising reps to advise them of what to do when their help-wanted ad was not working. The advice was always the same - make your ad larger to demand more attention, place it in multiple areas of the newspaper for additional exposure, or run it on more days than just Sunday. The end result was usually the same. The client would spend more money. The Review Journal would make more money. And the additional response could not be measured because there typically was none.

Now employers were calling upon Diversified Recruitment Advertising account managers for advice. A thorough analysis would be conducted looking at the client’s current and future needs, as well as the demographics for critical need areas. A report would be provided to the client that detailed out the market landscape of talent and suggestions were made as to where that specific talent could be found. The suggestions, more times than not, did not include spending as much Review Journal.

Diversified Recruitment Advertising looked at talent shortages from a supply-demand perspective, as they should be. If a client needed nurses and Nevada had the lowest nurse to population ratio in the country, it was senseless trying to draw blood from a stone. (This also led us to the model that Recruiting Nevada operates today)

With that being said, we began encouraging our clients to place their ad copy in national niche publications and association journals, which would garner them better results. Unfortunately, that had an impact on the budgets clients had always allocated to the Review Journal.

Needless to say, we would reduce the client’s budget in the daily newspaper to allocate the amount needed to get the results from other mediums. The Review Journal would remind us of the contractual obligations the client once had. As an agency, we never signed contracts for guaranteed expenditures with any advertising outlet, the RJ included. If an advertising outlet wanted to retain our business, all they had to do was provide good results. That was what we measured.

Obviously that mentality did not go over well with the Review Journal. Periodically I would receive calls from mid and upper level management insinuating that we needed to change our position and spend more money with the newspaper. Reading between the lines, I could see that they were upset that we were educating employers as to what actually works and, more importantly, what works best. The RJ’s position was that Diversified Recruitment Advertising’s educating clients that the daily newspaper was no longer working for them, was the wrong thing to do.

Being a man of principle I would always respond with comments such as “Our client is our boss. They pay our salaries. We are obligated to look out for our client’s best interests, not yours. If you would like to retain more of their recruitment advertising budget, then simply, find a better advertising solution for them.”

Those statements did not go over well. I could sense the Review Journal’s frustration with Diversified Recruitment Advertising.

Knowing the RJ’s disposition, we knew something bad was about to happen.