Foundry-Metalcaster UGLY Marketing Newsletter 365501 | Page 7

Mark’s InBox…

anything but they have plenty of awards from
other advertising groups (but not clients).

Which is better, a consultant or an
advertising agency?

The ad agencies you are looking at have no clue
what you do. They think ‘casting’ is done in a
lake with a fishing rod. ‘Ladles’ are for soup.
And a ‘pour problem’ is something their teenage
daughter needs facial cream for…

This is an advanced question. Plus you may
consider me biased since I am a consultant. I’ll
answer and challenge you to determine if what I
am telling you is accurate.
To start, it is going to be dependent on what you
want to accomplish. As a foundry owner , CEO
or Marketing Director, there are some basic
elements you must decide before even coming
near this question. For example:
-do you want ways to measure the Return-onInvestment of any marketing campaign? Then
you probably want a consultant.
-do you want ‘branding’ where you spend money
with no way of measuring the results? You want
an advertising agency.
-Is one-on-one attention, where you are the
primary focus of effort, important? A Consultant
should be your choice
-Are you looking for generic marketing that
could be applied to almost any product? Go to
the Ad Agency
-Do you want a specialist that knows your
industry and limits himself to the
foundry/metalcasting niche? Consultant
-Do you have an unlimited budget? Agency
-Would you rather laser target who you are
selling to? consultant
These points are just a few.
If you want to stabilize the revenue in your
foundry, you need to understand the dirty
underbelly of ad agencies:
You are assigned an ‘Account Executive’. An
Account Executive has 40 or more accounts and
yours is not his primary.
An Ad agency has nice offices and slick
presentations. Do you wonder who pays for
that??

Your account executive at an ad agency doesn’t
look for what works specifically for you, he is
worried about your account only until you sign
off on something. Then he is off to another task.
Ad Agencies do not want to have you measure
the ROI of a campaign. They will talk about
‘getting your name out there’, ‘branding’, and
other non-ROI measuring phrases.
That’s bunk unless you have millions of dollars
to spend.
An Ad Agency will spend your budget- that’s
why they immediately want to know what it is.
They are not substantially different from a
magazine ad seller. They have several forms of
media that they push. Just like when a media
rep calls on the phone for everything from the
Yellow Pages online, to foundry directories. Just
think of an ad agency as a one stop shop for
sales reps. They don’t know you, your industry,
or the specific marketing a B2B operation like a
foundry needs.
Although this may all sound self-serving,
research for yourself and see where anything
here is untrue.
The choice is always yours. Some will choose an
ad agency because they are more concerned
about branding than revenue. Others will choose
the industry marketing specialist because they
want the personal attention without paying the
agency’s overhead for buildings and large staffs.
No matter which you choose, you must be able to
trace the expenditure to an actual Return on
Investment or ROI. Every marketing campaign
should be a revenue source, not an expense.

An ad agency has more creative ideas, like
cartoons and Super Bowl- like commercials that
are cute. They can’t prove they actually sell
© The UGLY Marketing Newsletter for Foundries/Metal Casters/TheFoundryMarketer 2014. All rights reserved

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