ting things

Advertising and marketing agencies come in all shapes and sizes – corporate behemoths with labyrinthine hallways to cozy boutique agencies with big dreams and bigger hearts, and they all have their pros and cons. But one fundamental way in which agencies differ has to do with the range of services they offer. On the one hand you have the one-trick-ponies – the guys who claim they have been doing a single thing for so long that they have mastered it, and in many cases, they have! Kudos to that. And then you have what is known as an integrated marketing agency, a beautiful chaotic joint-familyesque set-up of diverse talents and teams coming together with one common goal – helping your soaps/creams/restaurants/proteins/underwear/masks/buildings/softwares/(insert your product here) find the right buyer.

So, what’s an integrated agency really like? In many ways, it’s exactly what you think it would be – different teams working on their own challenges and coming together to provide a unified experience. But take a peek under the hood and that’s when things get really fun. All of these teams come with their own skillsets, temperaments and coffee preferences (some even love tea- heathens). While the digital marketing team is busy playing tetris with their excel sheets (oh so many excel sheets), the copy writers are staring into space trying to come up with seven ways of saying “Happy Diwali” in a quirky way. Somewhere you’ll find a designer confused between two shades of red that look exactly alike while a video editor bravely edits the same video for the 42^nd time. And let’s not forget the drama that ensues when a bunch of these volatile peeps are locked into a room with a wild brief.  Opinions fly, egos are bruised, and arguments break out over who deserves the most time to tackle the brief. If you thought ‘Rasode Mein Kaun Tha?’ was a loaded question, you haven’t heard an account manager ask – “When will we be ready?”

And this chaos is exactly the reason you should pick an integrated marketing agency. Because it’s only when a variety of passionate and talented people are thrown together that magic happens. The digital team isn’t only concerned with just crunching data, they want to know why the creative team isn’t giving them exactly what they need. The copywriter’s job doesn’t end at writing an ad, they pester the campaign managers to constantly give them updates on what’s working and what should be trashed. Conversations happen, arguments happen, learning happens. When you are talking to a good integrated marketing agency, you aren’t just talking to the creative team or the digital team or the website team. You are talking to an entire ecosystem that is collectively working towards every aspect of your marketing mix.

Sure, you can pick an integrated agency for just one service, but that’s like choosing Ravindra Jadeja for just his bowling performance. So come, bring us your marketing challenges, your nascent brands, your creative roadblocks, your kuch mazza nahin aa raha hai situations. We won’t give you just any old solution. We’ll give you one that involves all these crazy folks coming together to ensure your brand gets the love it deserves. After all, at Ting we are all about that love and #LoveOnly.

Tinging off, till next time.