Your Company Needs a Marketing Partner, Should You Trust Scraped and Curated Data?
I suggest not. When you’re looking for meaningful agency data, you don’t want to be dealing with that which has been scraped and curated. Typically that is a shallow, surface peek at an agency that has yet to contribute to or confirm the data you are trying to use. How do you recognize scrapped data or a scrapped data site? Be wary of sites that claim coverage of all, the greatest, the top, the best, etc. Poke around at agency profiles – when you find those unfinished that read anything like “Oops, looks like they are busy taking care of clients.” Or look for postings in alpha-sort order or dissimilar adjacencies where what the agency paid for placement rather than their suitability determines their order. Scraping and curation is best left to the hotel, lodging and airline industry.
Interested in further proof? In your search you’ll need to study significant and verifiable data contributed by each agency, and you’ll spend precious time and money doing so. Then I ask – have you spent any time looking at agency websites? It’s understood they are always interested in new clients, but you wouldn’t know that looking at many of their websites. The most common egregious sin is their Contact Us page. Rather than identify themselves, as to physical address, contact person, email and phone, you are asked to fill in the blanks and “be advised” where clients get the feeling they have to beg to be connected. Along that same line, you’re lucky if you discover the identity of their important people, how to reach them and how many there are. What value would you expect to find from that scraped data?
Beyond that, agencies are proud to post their “Work” product but I remind clients during an agency review that work “ain’t all it’s cracked up to be!” Some clients are receptive to their agency’s suggestions, yet others insist and almost direct their agency to execute their preferences. As a result, work you see is not always a product of the agency, but of the client’s direction. You’ll discover agency selection is much more than point and click! Finally, if you’d enjoy the best of both worlds, let us introduce you to “best-fit” agency candidates, give you a chance to evaluate them by providing more access to their data than is available on their websites and then we’ll introduce you. We step away at that point, but with encouragement to invite open discussion. There are variables in getting to the end-point and we can help you there as well. Your second pleasure – our service to you is free!
###
