• by Jim Meskauskas , December 4, 2003

If you've been reading the online trade press and specifically the Online Spin these last two weeks, you are acutely aware of the move AOL made recently to eliminate the formal position of director of agency relations.

My business partner, cohort and friend, Tom Hespos, has covered off eloquently about this matter and why he thinks AOL has made a mistake.

Jason Burnham, the president of Mass Transit, an agency here in New York, went so far as to get a petition going around the agency community in support of the agency relations role.

In the true spirit of the diablo avocati, I think that the brouhaha over the issue, though warranted, misses the larger point which AOL itself doesn't seem to understand.

In an article on Internetnews.com two weeks ago, Michael Barrett, executive vice president of interactive marketing and head of national sales at AOL, said: "AOL is more committed than ever to nurturing and growing meaningful relationships with ad agencies across the country. We have figured out a way to be sensitive to agencies' needs throughout the whole sales force. We felt as though having one person in that position was kind of just a vestige of several years ago when we weren't even paying attention to agencies."

Though AOL's motives for the statements they made may be suspect, the verity of the statements themselves remains unchanged.

I look at it this way. No media sales organization should make it one person's mission to represent an agency's concern inside the sales organization. It should be every sales person's responsibility to give his or her customer top-notch service, and that includes representing that customer's interest. Creating a position like director of agency relations was just an outward facing panacea. Not to take away from the benefits this role was able to provide, but by virtue of having it be someone's "job" to make agencies feel warm and fuzzy about AOL meant that AOL wouldn't have to take responsibility for their own image.

It also means that AOL as an organization was not willing to make it a mandate internally to become part of the media, marketing, and advertising community. It suggests that as a company, AOL was going to continue to act the ronin in the advertising community, working alone and going to the highest bidder. This has usually meant, and still means for the most part, going straight to the client so that the experts at the agency can be kept out of the loop. The reason for this is obvious; in the role of media experts, the agency will stand in the way of AOL's lazy selling of sub-par inventory for inflated rates to clients who are not familiar enough with online to know any better, still being frightened into buying one of the few media properties whose name they recognize.

But no organization whose focus is sales should need a position like that of director of agency relations. Agencies are service category businesses. So are the sales arms of media companies. If your regular contact with a media organization cannot adequately represent an agency's needs, within reason, to the media company for whom they work, they should not be working at all. Free market economics says that if the company cannot do what it is supposed to do successfully, it will fail. If agencies find they don't want to work with AOL given the way AOL works, AOL will eventually have to change the way they do things or suffer the consequences that all companies do in an open market.

I am not suggesting that AOL does a good job, by any stretch of the imagination, of dealing with agencies, but it should be the ENTIRE sales staff's responsibility to maintain positive agency relationships and not just the domain of one single individual. If the corporate will isn't there to provide a better product and service, then it doesn't matter if AOL has 100 people assigned to agency relations, it will still suck to do business with them.

AOL needs a culture change; a genetic reengineering of their DNA. It would be great if they could inherit from either Momma Time or Father Warner. The role of "nice guy" just gives them an excuse not to do anything at all.