Hucksters No More

A lot of things have happened in the 15 years since we laid out the first 20-page issue of PROMO on the Smith dining room table in November 1987.

The biggest change, in my estimation, has come about at promotion marketing agencies worldwide. It’s unfair to generalize, of course, so that’s exactly what I’m going to do:

Promotion agencies, it seems to me, are not only a lot better today at what they do, they’re a damn site better off for what they’ve become.

There were so few promotion agencies around when we set out to publish our first PROMO 100 directory in 1993 that we came up an embarrassing 22 short. Many of those we ranked were quite small — three guys and a briefcase described more than a few.

Today there are nearly three times as many such enterprises worldwide, and most of them are larger — substantially larger in some cases, particularly where agencies have gone global on their own or been drafted to serve as cash cows for big ad factories.

But even to this jaundiced eye, promotion shops everywhere — large, medium, and small — come across today as being smarter, smoother, and more professional in how they look, in what they do, and in how they go about getting it done.

It’s not just the way the New Agency presents itself to the outside observer — hell, the Enron guys were good at that — or even the way 21st-century promotion shops plan, create, and execute the campaigns they put together. (That may be excellent, but that’s what they get paid to do.)

The agency that I perceive is one that is both better and better off in 2002 because it has finally become the business model it should have been all along. This model is one of an enterprise with the good sense plus the business smarts, the will-power, and the discipline to shed the hucksterism and discipline-bias that cast such a shadow across the industry for the better part of the last half-century.

By hucksterism I mean the “Whatever you want, baby, that’s exactly what we do” approach to pitching new business. By discipline-bias I mean the old “What we do, baby, is exactly what you need” way of relating to what the client needs. It’s taken a long, long time, but the corner has been turned.

Developing Class

One reason why is that the one-trick business model is a ticket to a very limited future. The others are that client companies can’t be bothered anymore orchestrating supplier activities, and few are so gullible as to dare gamble on a single-solution pitch.

How cynical it was in the beginning for printing companies, display makers, premium suppliers, fulfillment houses, merchandisers and sweepstakes shops — plus retail jobbers, detailers, product samplers, and various purveyors of trinkets and trash — to dress their salespeople up as account execs and purport to offer “strategic counsel” as if they were promotion marketing agencies. But that’s what they did, and that’s what they became. And that’s how the promotion industry was born, at least in the U.S.

That goes to explain why it’s taken so long for the agency side of the promotion industry to live down its supplier-side reputation. Unlike their ad-world counterparts, promotion agencies have to know an awful lot about an awful lot of, well, things.

By and large, the New Agency gets the business today because it’s smart enough to come to the table with open minds and creative attitudes, a variety of resources, a wealth of expertise, a known track record, and an ample amount of knowledge, experience, and manpower to make it all work.

How this came about I can’t say for sure, but much, much credit is due to the remarkable amount of cross-pollination of creative ideas and successful techniques that takes place within agency recognition programs in the U.S. and abroad each year.

Add to this the communications value of no less than five international conferences and expos in the U.S., plus a continuous flow of news and information from PROMO in the U.S. and a dozen or so marketing magazines overseas, and you have a forum, if not the formula, for the development of a continuous worldwide “best practices” symposium.

Perhaps it is, as Sam Levinson once said, that “too soon we get old; too late we get smart.”

Only in this case — the professionalism of promotion marketing agencies — it’s about time.