Carolyn Hill, founder of Carolyn Reps and Ross MacRae, founder of Agency Source, on data collection, shifts in the advertising business and career progress
After his industry start as a graphic designer art director, Ross MacRae launched and led multiple successful ventures, including the creative web design consultancy MacRae Osdin and creative marketing list resource BikiniLists. Having previously worked in advertising agencies, design companies, and commercial TV and after establishing his web development consultancy in the ‘90s, Ross has a deep understanding of the creative industry and sales and marketing.
As part of Agency Source‘s new series, ‘Selling Stories’, Ross caught up with Carolyn Hill, founder of Carolyn Reps.
Q> Describe the shifts you’re seeing in the advertising business from when you started in your respective businesses to now. This could be related to: the structure of agencies/production companies/vendors, to how they work with each other, to how many there are, etc.
Carolyn> It’s so drastically different. When I was a staff rep in New York, we would fax requests to agencies for lists. Sometimes they gave them to you, and sometimes not.
This conversation is so important because I’ve been doing a lot more consulting, and clients have been asking me way more “industry 101” questions. The first thing I ask is, do they subscribe to a service like Agency Source, that is, do you know how to find the audience you’re looking for? Many don’t realise how professionally reps and data distributors analyse the business. We listen for the trends and gather the information.
Some say, “Oh, I use LinkedIn”, which is fine, but what does that mean? Do you reach out on LinkedIn? What’s your reply success rate? What they really need is a contact email address, which Agency Source can provide in places where normally you can’t get that information.
Ross> Due to my dissatisfaction with how creative data collection was done back in 1997, I started Bikini Lists out of London, with a list of 2000 contacts. Before that, you would find trade magazines, like Campaign and Ad Age, and try to connect the dots to find out who worked where. We launched our online offering in 2004 and gave people printed contact information collected via phone. I was developing first-generation websites in the 90s, and I soon realised we could more efficiently collect info beyond just calling agencies directly. Ultimately, we came up with clever bits of programming to help us find email addresses and other data you just can’t find online, even now with platforms like LinkedIn. Now, we’re 110,000 contacts strong, with 60,000 in the U.S. alone…re-verified on a three-month rolling cycle.
Carolyn> That’s definitely ahead of where things used to be.
Ross> It took a while for us to get fully up to speed back then because there was not enough processing power in web browsers to run the code we wanted to run. What always held us back was the speed of the Internet. When we first hosted reels, they couldn’t be larger than 5MB, because dial-up Internet was too slow. We had to wait for it to catch up.
On the sales front, what we’re finding now is that you have to ‘touch your prospects’ via outreach, email, advertising, LinkedIn, etc., as much as 14 times, up from the common knowledge of seven times. LinkedIn is especially great for this. Harnessing all of that and keeping up with technology has kept us ahead of the curve.
Carolyn> We started looking into CRMs recently as an added resource. I talk to so many people during the day that if we recorded our own CRM, it would take hours. Amanda (Rosenberg) and I were recently talking, however, about how we don’t need to use the larger CRM platforms because of how we use Agency Source. Anything I’m looking for, I can find in my email history (which is a little antiquated), but it does work. I have a large volume of people reaching out to me and asking questions all day long. Quite literally, all day.
Ross> What I identified early on, having worked in TV, design, advertising, illustration, etc., is that creatives are an idiosyncratic bunch of people. They live on their wits. So, if you try and build a CRM like Salesforce or HubSpot, for someone working in a fast-paced environment like reps, you have to know that reps don’t adhere to ‘normal’ business processes. We knew when building our CRM offering that there was no point in emulating the same kind of format. Our mini-CRM is designed to make it easy to do what you want to do, when you want to do it. The majority of our subscribers don’t use 75% of the platform. Some have been with us for years and are still discovering things as they go. We build a platform that lets people discover features that make sense to them as they use the service.
Q> Let’s talk data. How had companies previously collected data before resources like Agency Source and similar came along?
Ross> We used to fax creative secretaries. In the UK in the 90s, there was an existing “list” company that would compile agency and production contacts through the second half of the year and print and sell its list as a 200-page book back to the agencies and production companies. They would deliver them on the first working day of January, so that industry professionals could find each other’s respective agencies and producers.
As soon as they printed it, however, it immediately became out of date, people may have left or been laid off in the interim. They wouldn’t even include emails back then, because they felt it was too much of an imposition for the creatives.
Q> While it may be an obvious question, why is accurate data reporting so important, especially in today’s fractured industry ecosystem?
Ross> This question of brands quickly moving agencies, sometimes on a project-by-project basis, is a big difference. Also, more and more ex-agency people are going brand side. In the last five years, our brand database has grown larger than our agency database, and the difference is only expanding. The problem is, brands don’t expect the inbound inquiries for contacts as agencies and other advertising companies do. You have to go about collecting data from brands differently.
Carolyn> You’re watching the consolidation of the agency holding companies and the proliferation of smaller agencies. Some creatives are breaking apart and making their own agencies, resulting in more small agencies. Highdive recently recruited Steven Fogel and Doug Fallon and opened a New York office led by the duo. I recommended Mischief’s work to someone else, and their CCO, Greg Hahn, came from BBDO. You have to keep track of those imperative shifts in talent, which Agency Source can do.
Ross> Those moves have only gotten noisier and faster. If we were servicing insurance or pharma clients, say, over production and advertising, the perceived value of our product would be greater. These industries understand that keeping up with people moves is critical, we could increase our cost tenfold. In the creative sector, it’s undervalued.
Carolyn> Here’s the thing, it IS undervalued, and the information that we have in the business is very valuable to other people. I used Agency Source to write the HOP of a hot agency, who wrote back thanking me for the valuable intel. To your point about this being the creative industry, I was talking with a bidder recently about how Japan has become very valuable for creative production, because I’m a fan of the work that they do, and she was interested! If I can get through to those people, they’re interested in having these conversations, because we’re imparting detailed, intrinsically creative information to very smart people working at the tops of their industries.
Ross> What you did was your homework. You already identified your dream client and weren’t going to burn your opportunity on a generic email. You may have spent a minimum of an hour on the whole process before pressing the button. But that hour will be given back to you tenfold, because now you have the accolade. Our problem is that creatives may not understand our business, the sales business. They think it’s about numbers, rapid calling, and quantity.
Carolyn> You have to be a fan in the business and of the information you’re sharing. You have to know who you’re talking to and what they’re working on. It’s like business Jenga.
Q> Do companies seem to think they can just “collect it themselves”, or are they also struggling to find resources for data collection?
Ross> Well, they think they can. We experimented once. I got my sales team to do the job of the research team and asked them to find email addresses for 10 creative directors in London, and gave them the whole day. They gave up; it was an impossible task for them. They don’t have the tricks of our research team. I told them to try it so that they could relay the value of the Agency Source research team to their customers. We constantly hear about other email verification platforms online, which tell you the format of an email address and whether it’s correct, but they don’t check and see if the talent is still there, whether that specific person has that specific email format (in cases of duplicate names), or more importantly, what they work on!
We experimented with AI as well. We asked ChatGPT to give us 50 CDs in NY from the top agencies, and it was correct only half the time. But to find out how correct it was, we needed to re-verify the whole list…which meant doing the work twice. What’s the point in that?
Q> When you bring up data collection offerings to prospective clients, what seems to be their general reaction? What is their feedback?
Ross> It varies. Early on, we got the negative (and untrue) critique, “All you do is re-sell someone else’s lists”, and I banned that person from ever having a Bikini Lists or Agency Source account! We have a ‘window’ within Bikini Lists and Agency Source, where we post the names of banned people who don’t attempt to understand what we do and overly criticise us and the platform.
The other extreme feedback we get is, “I get everything from word-of-mouth”, which may be true in some cases… but how do they get to know of you in the first place? Most get some work that way, but it’s usually not enough. These excuses come down to not wanting to spend the money on an annual database.
Carolyn> I always say, you’re sitting in the UK, with a population of 70M. I’m in the US, which has 342M people. It’s unmanageable to think you can get so many accurate contacts alone. The thing is, I have an MFA in writing, and we say there’s no unclear writing; there’s unclear thinking. How do I apply clear thinking to sales? What I like about Agency Source is how you can sort the information you have by vertical, or location, etc. The point is, a database can help you think through what the value is and speeds up your workflow. It helps you think.
Ross> If 80% of decent budget advertising is done by 20% of the companies, you really want to work with those 20%. Plus, you can’t possibly work with all 100% anyway. We always say, ”Your future clients are in our platform…you just don’t know who they are yet.”
You won’t find out who you can work with until you start.
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