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Going Direct: Agencies

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Andy Pontin is CEO of Clemenger Proximity

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Are agencies dead?

I’ve worked in a lot of agencies. Most of them don’t exist anymore. That probably says more about me than the agencies – I have the inverse Midas touch!

I went into a DM agency straight out of university (oh, OK then it was a polytechnic – I wasn’t smart enough for uni). It was a great little place in the London red light district of Soho, right opposite the famous Raymond Revuebar (enough said).

Much like this esteemed establishment, most of the senior guys in the agency had seen better days. We’re talking 1989, so the agency was staffed with washed-up ad men milking the last few years from their fading careers, and a scattering of young muppets like me who had vaguely heard of direct marketing.

It was marvellous. Imagine this for a minute:

  • no mobile phones – clients were perfectly understanding when told that you were out of the office for the afternoon and would call them back in the morning
  • no pubs open between 3pm and 6pm – the licensing laws still in place from WWII meant that you had to be a member of a ‘drinking club’ for those busy afternoons mentioned above
  • no Apple Macs – artwork was a mysterious business involving bromides, scalpels, mounting glue and hand-drawn colour mark-ups, and
  • no email – we used to actually meet with clients and talk to them on the phone! Sacrilege.

But, best of all, agencies actually used to make a decent profit margin. Obviously this wasn’t much of a concern for me in my role as trainee shit-kicker, but in fact it made a huge difference to my life.

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