Follow the Leaders

According to the 2013 Best Practices Study conducted by the Big “I” and Reagan Consulting, top agency priorities for software and IT investments in the coming year include internet marketing/social media and agency management systems.

Agencies with revenues under $10 million overwhelmingly identified internet marketing and social media as their top technology investment priority for 2014, while those with revenues over $10 million honed in on agency management systems and business intelligence, dashboards and reporting as top of mind.

Over the past year, small- to mid-size agencies reported an average of only one employee working on social media, devoting approximately 8.4% of their time to related activities—a number that Shirley Lukens, principal of Reagan Consulting, expects to change as social media becomes more “integral” to agency jobs.

“The social media issue continues to be at the top of the list,” she says. “As the customer bases become younger, the social media connection becomes much more important.”

By contrast, larger agencies averaged two agency staff members devoting 13.9% of their time to social media.

“For the larger agencies, their client base is larger and more sophisticated, so they’ve had to make these investments all along,” Lukens says. “A lot of them are in the process of changing systems as they’ve gotten bigger. So they’re trying to figure out which agency management system is really going to meet their needs going forward.”

With the exception of agencies with revenue over $25 million, the majority of agencies across all revenue categories identified TAM or AMS as the agency management system utilized (TAM and Sagitta were most popular with agencies with revenue over $25 million).

Technology priorities have shifted drastically since the Best Practices study began more than two decades ago—a trend expected to continue as long as the digital world continues to expand exponentially.

“Technology is always one of those challenges,” Lukens says. “It’s a different world, so we need to make people understand: here are the issues and the challenges and the limitations, and here’s our stance on it for now. And we’ll evolve as things change.”

Jacquelyn Connelly is IA assistant editor.

SIDEBAR: Get Over It

Lukens compares the industry’s social media lag to its reluctance to accept agency management systems 25 years ago. “When you started keeping data online, people were just hysterical,” she says.

As technology transforms more significantly and rapidly than ever, many agencies must face deep-seeded fears when it comes to embracing change.

“Every time we introduce something new, people resist it,” Lukens says. “You hear all the horror stories and the what-ifs, and we learn and we struggle a little bit. But then it just becomes: what was the big deal?” —J.C.