Dear Agencies: Thank Sellers for Those Holiday Gifts

It’s a difficult issue for agencies to navigate. As a few sellers noted, agencies during the holidays are up to their eyeballs in gift baskets. It does, however, bring up the issue of whether agency buyers overplay their upper hand with sellers. One agency executive told me he spends much time making sure his troops don’t “abuse the media community.”

“In my opinion, it goes back to how you were raised, to be honest,” one seller wrote. “Many of these people expect or do not appreciate the effort you go to and the amount of T&E it takes to organize something genuinely special. It has always pissed me off.”

The less charitable conclusion is the need to shower agencies with gifts is exposing a weakness in the digital media system. In this view, the gift economy is needed for agencies to pass off compensation costs for armies of relatively low-paid ad buyers to execute plans — and not all that well.

“The problem is that agencies just aren’t relevant in the digital space,” a seller wrote. “They hire cheap, under-qualified labor and depend on the vendor market to supplement their income so the agency can save money and use perks to justify hiring less than they’re scoped. This leads these people to believe that they deserve these gifts, when in most cases, they don’t know 20 percent of what they should know about how to do their job.”

Big issues aside, it’s never too late to thank ad sellers for their thoughtfulness.