confidence, and are tempted to grab any account you can get. Don’t. Above all, don’t join the melancholy procession of agencies which always accompanies a dying brand on its way to the cemetery. When Pan American fell on hard times, they moved their account from J. Walter Thompson, who had done an exceptionally good job for 29 years, to Carl Ally. Seven years later, when they continued to decline, they moved to N. W. Ayer. Three years later, they moved to Doyle Dane Bernbach. Six months later they moved to Wells, Rich, Greene. But this kind of instability is rare. The American Telephone Company, General Motors and Exxon have employed the same agencies for more than 70 years; DuPont, General Electric, Procter & Gamble and Scott Paper have employed the same agencies for more than 50 years. It is important to know how your agency is regarded in the marketing community. Don’t trust your own ears; you will only hear favorable opinions. It is safer, if you can afford it, to have a research organization conduct an impartial survey. When they report weak spots in your reputation, you can probably correct them, but it will take longer than you expect. Opinion always lags behind reality. If you aspire to building a portfolio of accounts in a wide variety of industries, you must be able to produce different kinds of advertising. An agency which can only play the package-goods tune disqualifies itself from corporate accounts. An agency which always produces emotional advertising is unlikely to be hired by a manufacturer of power tools. The broader your range, the broader the spectrum of accounts you will get. It follows that you should recruit people with a wide range of talents. An agency should be like an orchestra, able to play anything from Palestrina to Jean-Michel Jarre with equal virtuosity. Big agencies vs. small It is very difficult for small agencies to get big accounts. They cannot afford the range of specialized departments which big accounts require – regional offices, research, sales promotion, direct mail, public relations, and so on. They cannot deploy enough bodies to match the bodies at the client end. And the risk of losing a big client scares them out of that independence of judgment which should be one of any agency’s principal values to its clients.