The Decision

Again, my first and second jobs got in my way of blogging -- I had to prepare for school vacation week. Although I didn’t get the final RFP post done before I left for vacation, we did make a decision.

After the final agency presented we had a quick hallway conversation rather than a big meeting. (Funny how we were all pretty much on the same page.) There was one agency we wanted to put in front of the VP of Marketing and two “maybes.” We realized that if you combined the two maybes you would get the agency we liked best. So we just brought that one back for the VP sanity check. But we did not tell them that they were “it” -- just in case something went wrong.

By far the worst part of the process was calling the agencies that we did not select. Since I’ve been in their shoes before I wanted to try to give them insight into our decision. I thought it would be better than sending a generic email that left them wondering. While it was the right thing to do, it wasn’t easy.

After defending our choice to the other agencies and the VP of Marketing, I felt good about the decision. We selected Shift because they:
- understood our challenges
- offered the most complete program
- gave us rationale for all the pitch ideas
- had a good conversation with us
- integrate PR & social media
(and I don’t know anyone there, which I think matters)

As I mentioned in the last post, it was necessary for us to go through the whole RFP process to come to our decision. We learned something important about each agency at each step -- the questions asked during the input call; the answers given in the written response; and the content and quality of the presentation.

It's funny, I never thought I would like Shift. After competing with them for years on the agency side (especially during the last two years at Blanc & Otus), Shift was at the bottom of my list. Not because of anything they did or didn’t do, or anything I had heard, just for “stealing” business from B&O. Now that I've gone through the process, I understand why.