Report: Amnesia, White Agency, Hyro and HotHouse are the digital agencies to beat

This realy does make me wonder where these reports come from and for what purpose. If Forrester actually talked to anyone who actually worked at some of these agencies or their customers the outcome might be very different. It would seem Forrester took the standard bullshit lingo from the agencies, believed it and then printed in a report. Just printing ‘incorporating technology into the marketing funnel’ or ‘online influencer engagement’ shows that they have been taken in the bullshit and not actually looked at how these agencies are servicing their clients needs.

I agree with anon… have staff from one of these agencies and deal with another… Hothouse?? an absolute disaster !!

So Forrester acted like a client in believing the bullsit?

This is utterly disappointing. Disappointing because I thought so much more of Forrester and yet this report seems to reflect the exact opposite of what the market is saying, let alone Clients that had fled from each of those companies or are struggling to get their work serviced.

If only Forrester had walked through the halls of these ‘illustrious’ 4 agencies, the sheer site of the depleted ranks would tell a very different tale.

Whoever wrote this article needs to take a serious look at themselves, as to hold this up as ‘research’ surely debases the entire industry.

Open the flood gates…

One for the who cares basket.

What would forrester know about running an agency.

I think that there a plenty of agencies that do digital that may or may not have been reviewed ? And also many are part of a larger communications group. I don’t know what the ownership of these business is?

Maybe worth Steve Noble articulating the criteria that was used. Because it may be that you had to be a stand alone digital developer and creative business in the specific market?

Steve?

The mass redundencies, reduced hours and near bankruptcies. It would be a brave corporate indeed that would give these agencies any business.

An absolute joke. Forrester continue to do themselves no favours with these reports. The best way as always to work out which agencies are “better” than others is to consult the industry. Hyro and White on the list . . . you have to be kidding!

There wouldn’t be even the slightest hint of sour grapes in any of the previous comments, would there? Must be a tricky balancing act simultaneously claiming the study is bogus while complaining that you haven’t been included 😉

Steven’s a methodical and analytical guy. Sometimes, maddeningly so. He’s also been around agencies and interactive for almost 20 years. I’d say give him the benefit of the doubt.

Want to criticise him? Read the report first. Otherwise, your criticism is ill-informed at best, casting you in a bad light at worst.

@nick. Even if that the criteria, how about Soap, Bullseye, @www, Holler, Deepend to name but a few. It would seem that if Forrester had done some research they would have contacted these agencies as well. Perhaps a cursory glance an agencies homepage is enough nowadays to class as research.

What are the odds that agencies had to be Forrester clients to be included?

If you read the summary of the report http://bit.ly/LtWyO, they only looked at 6 agencies, which is a bit crap.
I agree with all of the other comments above – I think that Steven picked the ones who PR themselves the most, rather than those that the industry rate. I get Amnesia and White (sort of), but Hothouse and Hyro just don’t fit…

It does make you wonder who is at the bleeding edge?
Holler, Soap, Visual Jazz? They would be my nomination for strong creative agencies, but as far as integrated agencies go, it’s tricky.

$1749 for the full report – it’s a steal!

m

@anonymous — happy to discuss the methodology here if you have specific questions. Needless to say it did involve time on site with each vendor, and confidential conversations with each vendor’s clients. The report also discussed the recent contractions at many of these business.

If i were to choose four agencies i didn’t want to work for it would be these. I can’t believe what i am reading here!

The be in the report needed to have a minimum revenue ($20M (?) ), and put forward their figures. Some businesses do not do that kind of revenue, the others did not want to put forward their figures (which could be interpreted many ways). Again, there may be many reasons a business may not have wanted to participate.

@Matt.

Criteria for inclusion were:

# AUD2m in interactive marketing revenue (not total revenue) in Australia in 2008
# 25 “hands on deck” (production/creative/strategy/content roles) focused on interactive marketing (not other services)
# 5% revenue from customer analytics; or 10% from a data-heavy discipline

Naturally, there are some agencies that meet these criteria but were not part of this Wave. Usually this is because they declined to work with us.

i’m curious … what is the market for a report like this? who would buy it?

I’ll keep an eye on the “click to buy” stats but most reads come from our subscribers, who tend to be marketing and IT decision makers within the world’s largest companies.

It’s starting to sound like Campaign Brief around here. Boo hoo.

I truly hope potential clients get to read the comments here before approaching any of these agencies. Anyone with real inside knowledge and experience of these outfits would run a mile.

thanks steven

6 agencies to shortlist down to 4? Enough said.

HotHouse?? Hilarious….

White agency does have a really strong design/tech team. But “approach to research and strategy”? I thought that’s exactly why White is losing battlefield.

How’s all the bleeting from ad agencies? Wow. Who cares about the report? This was one of those geezus-moments where a wheel turned, someone screamed, we thought they’d been run-over, their foot was a bit squashed, we all laughed and went back to work. Can’t wait for the next instalment!

I’ll be the first person to stand up and voice my respect for Holler, Soap, Deepend, Visual Jazz, Gruden, Sputnik, Profero etc etc who are at first glance missing. They are great digital agencies and if I were a client I would consider all of them for digital projects. I had no idea who was included the report until near the end, so I also asked Steven Noble about where the list came from when I saw the final list. I was expecting to see more agencies in here as well.

So I can only speak for Amnesia Razorfish but it was not a simple choice to enter the WAVE report. I know for a fact there were a lot of agencies who declined to take part – we also had to think long and hard before committing. Creative is NOT scored and Forrester looks at aspect of a business that are rarely on display. It looks at a lot of technical elements and items that are not usually present in predominantly creative digital agencies. It’s nothing like submitting an agency of the year award.

Forrester does not define a “Digital agency” in WAVE by who does the best campaigns or creative so I think some people commenting above may be jumping to conclusions.

Entering a WAVE report can also backfire on an agency as some in the US have found out – If you score low, or you do not like what you read you cannot pull out.

OK. Back to work 🙂

Iain (@eunmac)
Amnesia Razorfish.

Is this all you get for $1700 or is there more:
PDF: http://tinyurl.com/n4hukn

hi @anon — you also get the spreadsheet model that:

# shows exactly how we scored each criteria
# shows exactly why each agency received each score against each criteria
# allows you to weight the criteria differently if you have different needs (while the scores for each criteria stay the same)

This isn’t a “price per word” situation, but just as an FYI the amount of written information in the model is a multiple of the amount of written information in the PDF report.

I wonder how many people have actually read the report here?

Sure, all agencies have different credentials, strengths and weaknesses but if you haven’t read the report how can you make a judgement on what Forrester’s criteria is.

Dear Steve,

As a global strategic digital marketer I am a HUGE fan of Forrester reports but this report is well below the usual standard of Forrester’s Interactive Marketing Agency reports. (USA and Europe in particular)

I would have advised you to not publish it if it didn’t accurately represent the Australian digital agency landscape. Saying some agencies did not choose to participate is a cop out and anybody reading the report or media quoting from it are not going to read the fine print outlining caveats such as certain agencies chose not to participate.

I do consider Amnesia as one of the leading digital agencies in Australia but I wouldn’t have ranked at least 2 of the other agencies in the report in the top 6. I am a digital marketer on the client side who has used 5 Australian digital agencies across 3 major enterprises over the past 11 years and recently I have been exposed to others whilst advising other Australian companies. (The overall knowledge and skills of Australian digital agencies is pretty poor to average). I have used your USA and European Agency reports to review digital agencies in those markets previously and generally they have accurately covered and represented the marketplace.

I also concur with the list provided by Iain from Amnesia and at worst you should have adjusted your criteria to ensure you had more accurate coverage of the Australian market.

Anyway, I think this report is pretty much worthless as is, as it is a totally inaccurate representation and assessment of the Australian digital agency landscape.

I was surprised by the list until reading the methodology. I think more than 6 agencies should have been spoken too. can someone send me a copy of the report on the sly 😉 I spent my spare $1000 on handedpants

Get your hand of it Martin. Love those posts from the anon who spend most of the post explaining how important they are.

Not sure that’s what Iain said. He said he respects Holler, Soap, Deepend, Visual Jazz, Gruden, Sputnik, Profero etc etc but they are missing.

Perhaps it’s because Forrester had some criteria

AUD2m in interactive marketing revenue (not total revenue) in Australia in 2008
# 25 “hands on deck” (production/creative/strategy/content roles) focused on interactive marketing (not other services)
# 5% revenue from customer analytics; or 10% from a data-heavy discipline

Also some people who were asked to participate chose not too. So perhpas these guys are not there because they chose not to be or perhaps they don’t meet the criteria. Either way your experience of 5 agencies hardly qualifies you to make an assessment.

Hey Humphrey,

Mate you are a tool. I simply provided the background as a qualification behind my comment to Steve, not you.

Have you read the report? Have you read any of Forresters other Interactive Agency reports for the USA and Europe over the past 4 years? I have and as I said (which was the whole point of my comment), compared to their usual reports for Europe and the USA this one is useless.

The criteria means absolutely nothing if it doesn’t include a broad representation of the digital agency landscape across Australia. It doesn’t matter what criteria is used, the rankings and evaulation is flawed off the bat because some of the best agencies even according to the criteria are not included. Yes, it needs criteria and Forresters USA and European reports always have had the same type of crtiteria. I have even used the Excel worksheet that comes with the reports because their criteria matrix with weightings is good and we’ve adapted and used it to rate our own agencies who sometimes weren’t in the reports.

Are you client or agency side? As a client who has been accountable for hundreds of millions of dollars across a good representative variety of agencies (both digital only and mixed) and local & global, I would say I am well qualified to comment, PARTICULARLY as I pay for a Forrester subscription. Do you pay for Forrester reports? If you don’t then you are the one with your hand on it because the reports are for their paying customers and we are the ones who have a right to complain or provide advice.

And I said I agree with what Iain said, I respect those agencies.What’s your problem with that????

You obvioulsy didn’t read my comment very well because I said that if the problem was that some agencies chose not to participate and only 6 did then Forrester needs to change their process, methodology and or criteria (or not publish it) because a report only covering a non-representative group of the entire Australian agency landscape, is useless to a person / company like me who pays to get these reports.

Sad to see so many unprofessional jerks making comments on these sites these days….

Iain’s said it well.

There’s a lot of good outfits here, and it’s a bit of a fright so few appear up in the quadrant. Dancing cranes is a bit harder than it looks.

All that’s happened is the local field in this sector has been held up to criteria that might ~make the cut in the US.

I’m regularly astounded by the standard ~over the pond, but at the same time there’s talent in Asia that’s interested in nothing but the cloud..

Congrats to the ~50 agencies who had the balls to participate in the survey, read the results and/or be counted against the selection criteria?

To the rest: Swim in the deep end and you *will* get your hair wet 🙂
Lighten up guys – it’s not like we’re curing cancer!

Gee Marty – quite sensitive aren’t we. Why don’t to just tell us who you are so we can bask in the satisfaction someone really important is part of these forums.

Yes I subscribe, yes I have read the report, yes I can use Excel as well. I’m pretty sure more than 6 agencies participated. As you’d know from your subscription, as per the USA they look at agencies with a complete offering from strategy to maintenance and support, social media, technical services. Perhaps a number of those not included don’t provide the breadth of services required. So maybe it reflects those with a complete service. Not everyone wants to deliver that sort of service. For example: Soap deliver cutting edge Flash development it’s their niche and they do it well. Profero concentrate on the strategy and creative and would outsource deep technical work.

You are right the US is different. The telling part of this report is not one mainstream Australian agency is there. In the US many of the mainstream agencies are included because they have invested in companies that do this stuff. In Australia it’s totally different. Most mainstream agencies are currently still making the .net/open source decision.

Regardless of who or what is missing from this report what it does show is the digital agency business has a bunch of new names. Most of those companies were started locally, most have been around 10 years at least and not one of them is a traditional agency group’s interactive area. That’s quite telling and I would suggest a triumph for the local industry.

Seems to me a lot of the angst is from people who were left out and a lot I suspect from traditional shops doing digital. Forrester use a broad definition of agency and look for more than banners and micro sites with outsourced technical services. Marty is suggesting this is a bad thing. I personally think it’s the right way to look at the market.

lighten up guys or start using real names so we can at make up out our own mind who has the bigger penis.

It’s been interesting in following the coverage of this report – some of the stories talk about it being a “rating” of the “best digital agencies”, whereas others talk about it being an evaluation of the current digital agency space. Given it’s only 6 agencies, it’d be hard for it to be a Ranking of agencies, so doesn’t seem to be comparable to something like the New Media Age ranking in the UK.

Clearly, given that we were one of the agencies not included, or even invited to respond, the list does seem a little short (and yes, we would fulfill the requirements 🙂 )

Congrats to Iain, Simon, Craig etc. on a positive report – great to know that the specialist digital agency is alive and well, and fighting off the traditional agency networks.

Steven – love to be considered for the next WAVE, keep us on the radar – clearly i’m not doing enough PR 🙂

Mike Zeederberg – MD – Profero

Fair point Ashley – so I’m using my real name this time … hehehe

I have been a client of both agencies here in Australia and overseas plus have worked for an agency here in Australia.

It basically boils down to each agency having their own strengths and weaknesses. Some have been stayers and others have gone by the wayside.

Through the tender process one finds a fit with an agency that understands what you need and can provide the technology, creative and stategy to get that outcome. Maybe they made this list, maybe they didn’t what does it matter if they deliver what you want.

All these agencies have has their successes and failures what matters is they are still around, employing Australians and surviving in a very competive and volatile arena.

John Holmes… boom tish

Can anyone confirm:
1) Whether it is true that only 6 agencies were reviewed?
2) If so, what were the criteria for the selection of these 6 agencies?

I’m not sure I understand the point of ranking 6 random agencies, if you’re trying to get an accurate picture of the leading agencies in Australia.

Hi anonymous.

Thanks for your comment/ question. Pretty much anyone who reads the thread above can confirm that, and indeed answer that question.

Steven Noble explains his methodology on the 13th and 16th comments down, and Ian mcDonald from Amnesia, posting as eunmac, gives some more context. Do have a read…

Cheers,

Tim – Mumbrella

We’re not particularly good at PR at Visual Jazz, and for the most part we’re happy to fly under the radar, so it would have been a bonus to get a freebie via Forrester. I’d be very surprised if they’d even heard of us. Fair enough, but at 85 employees and hiring it would seem that we’re in pretty good shape compared to some of the others on that list.

Feel free to give us a call next time, and maybe Google ‘Soap’ as well!

Thanks Tim, although I’ve re-read those answers and I’m still not clear how Forrester came up with the initial list.

@eunmac said:
“I also asked Steven Noble about where the list came from when I saw the final list. I was expecting to see more agencies in here as well.”

But then doesn’t tell us what Steven’s answer was.

Any analysis and reporting within our industry is a good start. Hopefully the breadth and depth of information will improve. I have bought and read the report, which is based upon the criteria that Forester believes relevant to Forester subscribers. It is not a heavily weighted creative review.

It appears the review may be flawed in the seemingly random selection of the 6 companies. The suggestion that the 4 leaders are the ‘leaders of the industry’ as opposed to the ‘leaders of the 6 companies selected’ is sweeping. The implications of this are what I believe everybody is getting upset about. There are many great companies that meet the selection criteria that have not been included.

The business I run, DTDigital meets all the criteria and would happily open the books. With 13 years in business, approaching $10m in interactive revenue, 65 people, a dedicated analytics team, a bunch of awards, low staff turnover, top brands as clients, and continuing rapid growth in the current market – you would think we would get a phone call if this was a comprehensive review of the Australian market.

I’m in the same boat as Damian at Visual Jazz. Perhaps lack of PR is the key?

I would like to see how we stack up against these measures. Hopefully next time…

Friends!…. we have to stop squabbling amongst ourselves, and unite against the common enemy (the Judean people’s front!)

w.r.t. the report, which I have not read…. I suggest another criteria: we put Icarus, our designer and Brazilian BBQ chef, forward against any other digital agency in a BBQ cook off at our new office. I challenge any other digital agency to cook a better piece of rump. Steven, are you available to judge?

And another thing… our milkshakes are better than yours.

Love from Luke Janssen
CEO TigerSpike

That’s the best suggestion yet, Luke. Anyone know a potential beer sponsor?

Cheers,

Tim – Mumbrella

Luke – there’s no squabbling going on here at all. I have total respect for all the agencies that were included in the report, they do awesome work and are run by awesome people.

My issue is with Forrester’s approach in this instance. It looks like they have chosen 6 fairly big agencies at random and ranked them. This doesn’t seem very helpful to the industry as a whole.

http://www.bandt.com.au/news/5B/0C062D5B.asp

This article by B&T is more accurate.

Wow, the above comments have been rather interesting to read indeed.

The fact is, Australia has a heap of capable agencies some in the report, some that are not.

It’s worth having a read of the methodology (thanks Ash).

However, I have to say I’m with Luke regarding the cook off.

Best

Guy – Autumn:01

Here is the ‘criteria’ Forrester used for their assessment and the weighting for each category:

Selection Criteria:

– At least AUD$2m in interactive marketing revenue in 2008

– At least 25 full-time staff in design, production, development, strategy & creative in Australia focusing on interactive marketing to local clients

– At least 5% of their interactive revenue from customer analytics or at least 10% from CRM and or electronic direct marketing.

CURRENT OFFERING 50%
Agency background 5%
Research and planning 20%
Data and measurement 25%
Program execution 25%
Client service 25%

STRATEGY 50%
Management team 65%
Direction 35%

MARKET PRESENCE 0%
Client base 35%
Financial position 30%
Employees 35%

Data sources:

Forrester used a combination of three data sources to assess the strengths and weaknesses of each agency:

· Agency surveys. Forrester surveyed agencies on their capabilities as they relate to the evaluation criteria. Once we analyzed the completed surveys, we conducted interviews with each agency to gather details of qualifications and services features.

· Customer reference interviews. To validate agency qualifications, we conducted reference calls with two of each agency’s current customers.

· Secondary research. To validate agency qualifications, we conducted secondary research. For example, to assess the level of debate inspired by the vendors’ leadership teams through their blogs, we measured the conversation ratio — the ratio of blog posts to reader comments.

According to Steve Noble, Forrester ‘…asked more agencies to participate but those agencies declined…’ but according to other agencies on here other agencies would have participated and they certainly meet the selection criteria so it begs the question of why weren’t they asked? And, we don’t know which agencies declined.

Hothouse and Hyro?? leaders in the field???

This is the funniest thing ive read in years! baaahahaa!

Seriously though, Ive had the unpleasant experience of working with these companies from time to time and I would have to say this couldn’t be further from the truth.

My money is on Icarus.

S.

It’s kind of funny that the ‘flawed’ research report has created a heated discussion which has resulted in a pretty comprehensive list of some of the best digital agencies.

Digital Strategist, Visual Jazz

I work at a digital agency that exceeds all the criteria listed above, and wasn’t contacted by Forrester to participate in this report.

I wonder how many other agencies that would have met the criteria weren’t contacted. Also it sounds like Visual Jazz weren’t contacted as well, which highlights how broken Forrester’s process was.

BBQ cook-off sounds great. Lets also add Foosball to the mix.

The key issue here is the selection of the 6 companies. The names of these companies is THE biggest part of the story going out to the world on Australia’s Digital leaders. Particularly when the media typically reports on (and people digest and remember) the top line and not the detail.

The selection process has been the least transparent, analytical, disciplined and inclusive part of the research, and at best seems random. Which discredits the whole report.

Shane

Which agencies that you worked at would you actually recommend?

James

Steven Noble = Out of touch

Leading the pack? Leading the pack in over inflated dev solutions, and churn-and-burn employee practices.

hothouse, hyro and amnesia are all in bed with forester! And the term ‘agency’ suggests they have something creative to offer. They are glorfied web dev/sweat shops that add extra zeros to quotes and don’t deliever on time or on budget.

If we can get Martin and Steven in a room I’ll happily bring a case of beer.

Thanks Steven for jumping on the thread to comment. For the rest of you hiding behind no names or first names..

This is the best discussion in history.

Keep it coming!

I dont care.

I’m just dissapointed with the list. I’ve had some dealing with all 4 of the agencies in question. Honesty with the client, does not particularly rank highly.

Thanks to everyone who mentioned us (Holler). Truly flattering.

Anyway, just thought I would throw in a comment here. We were in fact approached by Steven (I presume for this research).

Unfortunately we did no reach the criteria of the study. I think at the time we were under 25 people, and possibly something else….I don’t have the greatest attention span these days…..

Either way, if those really are the criteria then i would challenge the relevance of the work.

I suggest a table tennis tournament. Holler, Next month, BYO, Friday arvo, 2 people per agency. Winner announced Best Aussie Agency. Deal?

if so, ping me a message @hollersydney

Mike.
(Judge’s decision is final)

Would be great to read the report & its findings. But unfortunately you have to fork out $1.8k to read it.

I work at nextdigital and if any of you play basketball, we’ll take you on =p

I believe Gruden were in a similar situation to Holler – shortlisted but didn’t meet headcount criteria.

But everyone knows that the only way to establish the best agency is with a game of football. There have been rumours of the Gruden/Soap match for years, but nothing came of it…

The sooner people working in this industry introduce a tolerance level toward this kind of score-card activity the better… all the moaning smacks of too many big fish in a small pond who can’t handle not being told they are amazing.

I appreciate the Forrester methodology is somewhat limited, but attempting to paint a picture of a part of the industry in this way is a deeply interesting and useful thing to do… constructive criticsm should be the name of the game here.

@Grow up you lot

Spot on… If you have to rely on a report from Forrester to tell you how good you are, then you’re in pretty bad shape…

Also, the sooner we stop celebrating mediocrity the better.

No more bitching, it’s wearing us down.

Anyone who wants a copy can download it from the very kind people at Digital Media

They’ve included a link to the PDF report at the bottom of the article:

http://www.hyro.com/Documents/.....3_2009.pdf

Is that allowed?

Public distribution of any Forrester report without their express written permission is a breach of their copyright and is expressly prohibited.

Details here – http://www.forrester.com/CitationPolicy

If their proprietary reports were made publicly available then why would companies pay for their research reports?

Because the report is a pile of garbage and the biggest waste of ~$1800 since Packer introduced Star City

this thread is hurting my brain.

Hi Simon and Martin,

The link to the PDF of the report is hosted on the Hyro site. I gather from Forrester that Hyro have licenced the right to distribute the report in that way, so they’re not breaching copyright.

Cheers,

Tim – Mumbrella

I’ve worked for a couple of these agencies namely Hyro and Avenue A and the report hits pretty clost to the mark – as far as I can tell.

Echo some of the comments on Hothouse, I hear its a bit of a churn and burn outfit…

Web site / digi / online builds…?

Just bosh it on Renter coder (like many of the Aussie agencies do anyway) and save yourself tens of thousands…

Money grabbing middle men if you ask me 😉