On Saturday night I was out with a friend who works in accounts at OMD Worldwide on a fast food client.  She asked me how Matchnode was doing and what we were doing for our clients.  I listed out some of our different services when she cut me off asking, “No, I meant do you take them out for drinks and dinners?”

The comment perfectly matched a plot line from last night’s season premier of Mad Men.  A young hotshot just out of business school tells Joan that he wanted to move the Butler Footwear from SC&P to an in-house team.  He makes a joke about being tired of paying for the dinners and middle men purchasing ads from the networks.  After some research Joan calls the young exec to inform him that if he wants to move things in house, good luck.  It will be pretty difficult to replace the expertise, creativity, and network buying power of SC&P.  If he pulls the account, he won’t be competing with other shoe companies but other media agencies.

AdAge framed her comeback well:

Joan holds him off by throwing the old we’ll-get-you-better-media-rates-than-you-could-get-on-your-own case at him, the scale argument that many in our business would say has been responsible for a loss of creativity. 

Flash back to the present and the creation of new digital platforms, most notably Google and Facebook.  Buying ads on these networks doesn’t require an agency to buy at scale.  The compete against other agencies for media placement argument is dead.  Businesses go directly head to head to secure placement through bidding and targeting. Suddenly, the question of why companies are paying outrageous fees to an agency who takes them out to dinner is even more relevant.

All you really need to compete in the current digital era is platform expertise.  It’s why an agency like Matchnode isn’t wasting our clients money by taking them out to dinner.