The Minimart founders:
Tim Clyde, left, and Ed Chilcott
As the internet dawned and the number of media outlets through which marketing can be carried out have proliferated, the marketing agency has become a more sophisticated beast.
It’s also become a more varied entity, coming nowadays in a plethora of different forms.
Creative agencies come up with the Big Idea. They devise a communications plan in three stages: identifying who the customer is, what to say to them and how to say it. Media agencies coordinate the final stage — the ‘how’ — identifying the most effective, and indeed cost-effective, media for conveying the message to the customer, whether through printed advertorial, TV or radio advertisements, sponsorship, events, the internet, email or SMS text messaging.
Characterised by an emphasis on digital technologies, digital marketing agencies use internet marketing, interactive TV and mobile and email marketing, among other media.
Direct marketing agencies can measure the effectiveness of their campaigns because the customer is asked to respond directly to marketing by ringing a freephone number, emailing, visiting a website, returning an order form, complete a survey, and so on.
One-time M&C Saatchi employee Tim Clyde decided he wanted his company to be a jack of all marketing trades.
“We provide a one-stop shop, which is why it’s called the Minimart,” explains Clyde. “We do anything from the web through to the production of TV commercials.
”If the client wants web design we have in-house programmers. We don’t even outsource directors and photographers and so on — we actually make all the ads in-house.”
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