CMOs Not So Thrilled With Their Agencies

http://www.adweek.com/aw/content_display/news/agency/e3i6229a90fa9a407c3d402bd85fdd5a22b

Chief marketing officers are less than enthralled with their ad agencies, to judge from a survey conducted for Epsilon by GfK Roper Public Affairs & Media.

Released today (based on polling fielded in October),the poll found relatively few CMOs saying their agency of record exceeds their expectations in such areas as price (9 percent), return on investment (12 percent), client service (23 percent) and "knowledge of my business" (24 percent).

Much higher numbers of CMOs said their agency "meets" expectations in these areas, though the approval was well short of unanimous even by that middling standard. For instance, 62 percent said the agency meets their expectations for knowledge of the client's business and 64 percent said it does so when it comes to client service.

The same poll asked the CMOS to say which marketing efforts they would never outsource. Atop the list (cited by 34 percent) was strategy and planning services, followed by customer relationship management (31 percent), customer database warehouse (29 percent), e-mail delivery system (22 percent) and data mining (18 percent).