In the ‘2010 Global Marketing Pulse Report’, the Fournaise Marketing Group found that 67% of Australian marketers believe advertising agencies are not results-driven enough.

The report says the figures are relatively stable globally, hitting 70% in developed economies (US, Western Europe) and cresting 50% in developing regions such as North Asia, Southeast Asia and India, allegedly as “the ever-increasing sophistication of customers makes each sale even more difficult.”

Globally, marketers believe 35% of agencies are ‘result-drivers’ who believe the purpose of a campaign is to deliver bottom line results and follow through with this, 43% are ‘result-pretenders’ who claim this as a campaign’s purpose but fail to follow through by putting in place relevant systems and processes, and 22% are “dreamers who still live in old adland”.

The report identifies three of the major weaknesses marketers see in the majority of non-result driven agencies:

1. 74% believe their customer insights expertise and knowledge is not deep enough and still rely heavily on gut-feeling or hearsay,
2. 71% believe they are too award-driven and see campaigns as a way to boost their creative portfolio, and
3. 70% believe because they don’t have tracking meaures to quantify the effectiveness campaigns deployed, which leads to difficulty fine-tuning strategies.