It's about the Talent, stupid!

As the velocity of change in the marketing world continues to accelerate, those of us who run interactive agencies are challenged to sort through all the noise and ensure we have created agencies that are capable of assuming our increasing position of key strategic marketing partner and change agents for our clients. I was recently in a meeting with my senior leadership team, and one of my partners was walking the team through a recent pitch in which he used our performance management system as a source of Rosetta differentiation.

This got me to thinking about something that we spend a lot of time thinking about internally, but have kind of taken for granted externally here at Rosetta, which is our intensive focus on performance management (both in terms of our team members and our own internal scorecard of our client performance) as a source of differentiation. At the end of the day, we are really just the sum of our people and the institutional knowledge we have in the form of processes and intellectual property, so why shouldn’t we use our performance management system as a differentiator or in MarCom speak an RTB (Reason to Believe) in a pitch or whenever we talk about our firms? It was one of those “could have had a V8” eureka moments and I encourage all of us in the industry to rise to the challenge and begin competing on the basis of our talent, specifically the impact that talent has on client performance, or we risk losing the market position and influence with our clients whom we have worked so hard to build.

This is not merely a boast of “we have the best marketers, or smartest, or most creative people,” but rather it is a question of how does your agency systematically recruit, train and cultivate the right talent to drive the future of marketing and be the best in the industry. While this is a constant process of improvement, we believe that at Rosetta we have a “secret sauce“ with respect to talent management and the unique capabilities of our team. We plan on speaking about this more with our current and potential clients and publically over the next few months. We will soon be publishing our Rosetta perspective on talent management, how it is core to our growth and success as an agency, and look forward to continuing the dialog here on this topic. Much more to come on this topic and others when our new site launches in September.