Mercer Island Group

10/13/2025

https://migroup.com/blog/secrets-to-more-agency-opportunities/

Does your agency have as many at-bats as you’d like? Do you get enough opportunities to grow at the rate you’d like? Large, well-known agencies see a constant stream of opportunities. They have more current and past clients, touch more marketers, get more attention from the trade journals and en...

08/18/2025

Your agency has been invited to pitch. Now what? Your hard work has finally paid off – your positioning work is done, your website is prospect perfect, you’re marketing the agency and you’ve built your network. And today an opportunity surfaced! It may be a warm lead, and inbound inquiry…

06/16/2025

A client needs a new agency and after a diligent process has narrowed the field to a couple agencies.The prospect is excited! They’ve done their homework. They think they’ve found a couple promising agencies! The agencies are excited – they know they are one of only a couple left standing…

06/11/2025

What are the top 54 pitch mistakes agencies make?Robin and I were delighted to present 54 Mistake Agencies Make in New Business Development during the annual Build A Better Agency Summit presented by Agency Management Institute. Forbes calls it the #1 conference for agency executives. This is the id...

06/09/2025

The 4As hosted a fascinating effort last week in Austin as part of MPF 2025: they programmed an afternoon of speed dating for agencies and search consultants. Thirty-six fine agencies met individually with several of the country’s top agency search consultants. MPF stands for the 4A’s “Managem...

05/27/2025

Many agencies forget about a critical element of brand positioning when it comes to their own brand. Just what kind of agency are they positioning? This important gap results in agencies missing out on business opportunities daily. In classic brand positioning work, the two core elements are capture...

05/21/2025

It is so hard to keep up with seemingly daily changes in technology, marketing, media and consumers. Marketing strategy, creative and media effectiveness, transparency, AI and attention are just a sampling of the areas that are challenging for anyone to master. Luckily, there are a handful of people...

05/19/2025

The world of large agency holding companies has lost its collective mind in the past 6 to 12 months. Publicis led the way with an ever-increasing emphasis on principal buying and centralized teams working across differing agency brands. Omnicom then ate IPG in an attempt to seemingly enjoy even more...

05/07/2025

Is your advertising driving your business ahead, enhancing brand equity and building market share?Most advertising does not do those things. Most is readily forgettable and is wasting much of the media investment supporting it.But there is hope! Hot off the presses: The Extraordinary Cost of Dull is...

05/05/2025

Every year there are hundreds of agency selection processes in our industry. While we run a sizeable number of reviews and are a major “player” in reviews, many more reviews are run by clients themselves or by other consultants. The problem is that few people have ever been trained in…

04/21/2025

Last week we wrote about the vital and often misunderstood role that corporate Strategic Sourcing teams play vis-à-vis their firms’ marketing services firm relationships, and how agencies and marketers can work better with their procurement counterparts. Upon reading that blog, an agency friend (...

04/14/2025

Strategic Sourcing teams (aka “procurement”) play a vital and often misunderstood role in many companies vis-à-vis the relationships with marketing services firms. Let’s fix that!I was honored to recently moderate a panel of Strategic Sourcing pros on behalf of a group of senior agency execut...