Zappos pitch underscores what’s wrong with the review process.

The business development consultants are right: formal agency reviews are an expensive way to grow your business. As the experts are quick to point out, the average review includes 15 competitors and lasts more than two months—with a trip to the final round guaranteeing only that your investment will increase significantly. Yet agencies continue to pony up the big bucks for a chance to play, deluding themselves into believing they’re simply too good to lose. Even stranger is the fact that, throughout the review process, agencies talk about their expertise in delivering ROI, all the while giving away their services for free.

But we’ll leave it to the consultants to remind agencies why we’re our own worst enemies. Instead, we’d like to address the unprofessional manner in which the vast majority of advertisers conduct their reviews.

Like more than 80 other shops around the country, we were lured by the Zappos cattle call. The red flags were hard to miss: the RFP was posted on Adweek.com (so much for carefully screening the participants) and the brief asked for “storyboards and mock-ups” to be included in the first-round response (premature to say the least). But the temptation of winning the Zappos account was even harder to resist.

We submitted our response online in the form of a blog. It gave us the opportunity to have lots of contributors posting text, pictures and videos, and the ability to use meta tags and navigation that made our response easy to explore. But just as importantly, it allowed us to see how much time Zappos spent reviewing our proposal.

All agency responses were due on June 30; by July 1, the review had become a circus (or, perhaps more accurately, a supermarket). At least that's what dozens of Twitter posts from Zappos employees indicated:

"Thx to all the agencies that submitted. Zappos enjoyed the pizza, ice cream (both times), smoothies, Red Bull, shots, etc. Fun times."

"It's ad agency pitch day at Zappos. We're being showered with pizza, ice cream, Red Bulls, a bowl of airline booze ..."

We opted to let the content of our proposal speak for itself and left other shops to duke it out for the title of best junk-food provider. (Note to agencies: if we continue trying to one-up each other with irrelevant bullshit like ice-cream and pizza, we all lose.)

There was but one significant problem with our approach: Zappos wasn’t willing to spend the time required to examine the content of our proposal.

According to Google Analytics, Zappos viewed only 5 of the 25 pages on our blog, with an average page-view time of 14 seconds. Considering that each page corresponded to a question they asked in their RFP, one would hope the content would prove valuable in their evaluation process.

But they never clicked on the page that introduced them, as they requested, to the members of the team that would service their account. They never clicked on the page that described how we stay at the forefront of marketing and technology. They never clicked on the video testimonial from the founder of another e-commerce company that we helped increase sales by more than 200 percent. And they never clicked on the page that outlined our approach to measurement. Which may explain why they didn’t know we’d be monitoring how much time they spent looking at our proposal.

At this point you may be saying, “Hey, Ignited, maybe your blog sucked.” We’re pretty sure it didn’t, but you know what? Maybe it did. That’s not really the point. The point is this:

Clients have always had the upper hand in the review process and they always will. But the playing field is about to get a bit more level.

If we reply to any RFPs in the future, we’ll be letting the prospective clients know that our submission will be online and that we’ll be measuring how much time is spent reviewing it. And we encourage other shops to do the same. If agencies are going to spend weeks preparing their response, the least any client can do is commit 30 minutes to look at it.

If Zappos wasn’t prepared to evaluate 80+ responses they shouldn’t have opened the review beyond the initial 16 agencies they contacted. Moving forward, we hope those who are leading reviews will determine how much time they want to spend perusing responses, divide that number by 30 minutes, and set the number of agencies invited to participate accordingly.

We admit it: Ignited was part of the problem. We have only ourselves to blame for being suckered into the Zappos extravaganza. But to be clear, we’re not bitter about the outcome (better to be eliminated in the first round than the last); we’re disappointed by the process that led to it.

There’s no doubt agencies will continue to take the bait laid out by advertisers in search of the next big idea. We wish we could say otherwise, but we’ll likely respond to another RFP or two this year. But if as an industry, we can’t agree to stop giving away our services for free, the least we can do is demand some respect from those who benefit from our generosity.

AT THE REQUEST OF AARON MAGNESS FROM ZAPPOS, I'M UPDATING THIS POST WITH THE RESPONSE HE OFFERED AT ADCONTRARIAN.COM:

Hi all - First, I'd like to thank Mike for posting his blog/Tweet and all those that have taken interest in it. I just felt I should give a little of the back story about this RFP process. We originally invited 16 agencies to participate in our agency review. A couple weeks later, AdWeek posted the story along with our RFP http://bit.ly/14W8sS. The response to that was wild. We had over 170 agencies contact us requesting to participate. We were very up front on the fact that we had already invited 16, the total number that had requested to participate, the shortened time frame that the late agencies were working on as well as any other info we could to paint a clear picture of the landscape. From those 170 that requested to participate, 104 ended up submitting.

I know that a lot of attention has been given to Ignited's blog (great agency that has done great work), but there hasn't been much attention given to our request in the RFP to have two hard copies delivered in addition to the soft copy or the conversation that our Brand Marketing Manager had with Ignited (and just about every other agency).

There may be some speculation that we should not have allowed anyone else to participate that was not on the original invite list. However, it's pretty obvious that no one was forced to participate. I’m actually very happy we did allow more to be involved because we went on to invite an additional six agencies to come in for in-person presentations. Please note that we had the same time to read their submissions as we did those we passed on, so those really stood out. I'd also like to note that while the food/gifts are nice, they really aren't necessary in the attempt to win the business (at least it didn't impact us).

Mike's post really highlights the strange situation we all call "the agency review". It's crazy for the agencies for sure, but it's also crazy for the client. I'm grateful we were able to meet so many agencies that do such great work and wish it was possible to meet with every single one of them for extended amounts of time to truly see what their capabilities are. But, as we all know, this isn't possible. So, again, I'd like to thank all those that expressed interest, those that submitted and those that were invited in to present. Cheers to your continued success!

Aaron Magness
Zappos.com
Business Development & Marketing
amagness@zappos.com
http://twitter.com/macknuttie
Aaron Magness | Homepage | 07.14.09 - 12:02 pm | #

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