If you have ever dealt with Zappos.com you know they have great customer service with it seems like that treatment may not extend to their business partners. They recently launched an agency review which quickly drew tremendous interest since the brand has shown a willingness to embrace new ideas and digital media. By the end of the process they had open up the review to more than 100 agencies. If you have ever been involved in an RFP process you know how insane that number is handling more than 4 or 5 can be an all consuming process.

One of the agencies that submitted an RFP was Ignited who did something smart with their submission. They used Google Analytics to calculated that Zappos viewed only five pages of its 25-page submission with an average page-view time of 14 seconds. Beyond that it showed that they looked at pages like "What's a campaign by another agency that you admire?" and not a testimonial from one of the agency's current clients.

Mr. Wolfsohn made a good point in his blog by saying "The playing field is about to get a bit more level. If we reply to any RFPs in the future, we'll be letting the prospective clients know that our submission will be online and that we'll be measuring how much time is spent reviewing it. And we encourage other shops to do the same. If agencies are going to spend weeks preparing their response, the least any client can do is commit 30 minutes to look at it."

I speak for someone who used to do a tremendous amount of new business work that I love this idea so that all the time and love that is invested into that work actually gets it's day in the sun and agencies aren't just treated like clearing houses and filters to help executives form opinions they can't create on their own.

Labels: Digital culture