If you’re charged with the responsibility to obtain a marketing communications firm (ad agency) you should take the trouble, if you don’t know already, to find out what shops are out there. Find out what they’re capable of–as opposed to just throwing a net over the entire local mar-com community and getting everybody goosed up to respond. If you’re of any size, you’re going to look like the golden goose to agencies trolling for new accounts.

Sending out RFPs to the twenty top shops in Buffalo? Buffalo doesn’t have twenty top shops. It doesn’t have ten. Small shops with no chance are spending countless hours answering the RFPs and believing they have a reasonable shot at getting an account they can’t legitimately handle.

And stop looking at advertising agencies like they were a box of crayons.

A good agency won’t grow your business because they can do hot creative. They will do it because they have smart account people that can connect share-of-voice with share-of-market.

Quit wasting everybody’s time.