Why did we stop promoting marketing as one of our services?

If you're running an agency, maybe you should too!

Marketing is essentially a process where you try to grab people’s attention and place your product in your audience’s minds. But here’s the thing: if your customer’s mind were a land, every plot in that land would already be filled up with a vast amount of information, celebrity gossip, perceptions of big brands and products, fandom, loyalty, care for people, animals, products, companies, services, and places—making it very difficult for them to provide attention to new things, unless the new thing is exceptionally flashy or important and everyone else is also showing care and attention to that new thing.

So, according to that analogy, if the audience's mind is like a land where you are positioned in a place (preferably a good one), the plots are already filled up. You could rent a few apartments, but the price would be too high because for that same rented apartment, 100 other ‘brands’ are spending money and putting in so much effort.

Bigger brands are making bigger waves

Another analogy I frequently use is the wave analogy. Imagine bigger brands are making waves with their superior in-house marketing team and extended support from agencies, accomplished brand managers, PR professionals, working full-time to care about their brands. Naturally, they’re making bigger waves consistently. Sometimes they run campaigns with budgets that are unthinkable for smaller companies. Many small companies that come to us have raised funds for the entire company’s operations that bigger companies would spend only as their media buying budget for one OVC. Big brands, with their marketing, sometimes create Tsunamis whenever they need to. Smaller brands, with their ignorable waves in the same sea, wouldn’t stand a chance.

Attention has always been a currency. It’s just that this concept is understood by many people now. So the price is much higher to grab someone’s attention now. Many clients/companies wouldn’t be able to afford that because they have this perception that the number of content and the boosting budget would measure how much value they’re getting out of a marketing effort—which is wrong. It has never been just about the number or frequency of the content. In today’s world, attention is expensive, and it’s probably one of the most competitive things to buy with money.

Since Yellow Raptor would want to run effective campaigns, unless we find clients who understand what they’re trying to accomplish and how crucial it is to focus on marketing with a unique essence of a brand, it’s a wasted effort. We’ll only work with brands that have gone through our brand building exercises; otherwise, it’s not worth it for anyone—the agency, the client, and the audience—all will lose in an ineffective setting where everyone has vague expectations.