Fresh Strategic Thinking Often Missed When Taking Marketing In-House
I’ll admit it. I had over 1,000 emails in my inbox when I started work today. You know, the already opened, scanned, I’ll get back to this, probably should save it and then it gets buried deep below the viewing window kind of emails. I decided today was a good day to dig through those and get down to a respectable number.
Somewhere around the 600th deletion I found an email I’d saved because I thought it would be a good subject for a blog posting. According to an Association of National Advertisers report from earlier this year, 42% of advertisers have set up in-house advertising resources as a strategy to create efficiencies and cut costs. The report indicates these resources are doing everything from creating collateral materials to executing direct mail to buying media to building web sites.
While perhaps not as formally as setting up an in-house department, senior living communities are following this trend. We’ve seen many communities evaluating the benefit of outside resources against the cost savings generated from handling the same activity internally. But the current trend of bringing activities “in-house” is not what jumped out at me in reading about the report. It was this next line — 61% of those advertisers report that in-house agencies lack strategic thinking depth and approximately 50% said that getting fresh thinking from them is a challenge.
Now, I don’t read this as meaning an outside advertising resource is inherently smarter. What I see is the logical result of not having outside stimulus. I think we’re all smarter when we get the benefit of other perspectives, when we have sounding boards, when we see what the rest of the world is doing. I hope that’s one of the reasons you read this blog, because you are interested in what other people are thinking and saying about senior living marketing. That synergistic effect that happens from partnering with others not burdened with your “internal mindset” is often the missing variable when an organization uses an in-house agency.
I find it interesting that in a marketing environment where good strategic thinking and new ideas are needed to tackle the challenges facing all marketers, a large number of them would embrace a strategy that they admit hinders their ability to gain the very thing they need.
Okay, back to digging through the emails. Perhaps there are a few more posts buried in here somewhere.
