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117Chapter 9: Hiring Help for Your Marketing Program

Hiring a marketing manager

By hiring a person to handle your marketing program, you may be able to
delay the decision to hire an agency — because you’ll have a person on staff
who can handle the coordination and marketing management role. But as you
budget for the position, realize that no one person can do it all — design,
copywriting, Internet marketing, public relations, and media planning and
buying. Plan accordingly by budgeting for freelance talent in addition to the
line item that you budget for your new marketing manager.

Forming an in-house agency

Some companies calculate the commissions that their media buys will gener-
ate and decide to form an in-house agency so that they can keep the money
under their own roofs.

An in-house agency (also called a house agency) is a company department set
up to function as an ad agency that serves only one client — the company of
which it is a part.

Forming an in-house agency involves the following steps:

ߜ Establish a marketing department that has the expertise to plan, pro-
duce, and place ads.

ߜ Establish your agency with media organizations to confirm that you
qualify for the discount offered to recognized agencies. Check with pub-
lications and stations that serve your market to learn the criteria they
use to recognize an agency and to see that you meet the requirements.

ߜ Plan to pay media bills promptly in order to qualify for the commission.

Businesses flirt with the idea of forming an in-house agency because they
want to qualify for media commissions. But in order to earn commissions,
you have to spend money — a lot of money — on media. Even if you’re
spending $150,000 on media buys, the commissions are hardly enough to
fund the bare-bone costs involved in staffing your own ad agency. Do the
math: Fifteen percent of $150,000 is $22,500, not enough to pay the salary and
benefits of an assistant, let alone someone with proven expertise to write,
design, and produce ads that can enhance your image in the marketplace.

Using free or almost-free resources

This section is short. You get what you pay for, and if you don’t need much,
then free is a wonderful price. If you’re only adding a tag line to a pre-produced