Stratum’s customers typically ask us for ways to help them reach their customers. We take our own advice. Maintaining access to a bullpen of talent is a key benefit that keeps your costs down. (Maintaining talent fulltime can mean maintaining less than fully productive overhead and want to guess who pays for the downtime?) Oh and here’s the little secret – our talent wants to be selective about their projects too and they want to work with Project Managers who know what they do. So flexible teams are a win, win, win. As a flock of birds moves and cuts and stretches it may pick up some members while a few move on to a different group for a while. Doing this in the age of the internet is easy, controls costs, taps the right people at the right time for specific work and frankly just makes sense. The alternative is a monolithic marketing agency that tries to have the client morph and change objectives to match its makeup.

You may have seen this over the past ten years or so. The traditional firms keeping in-house media planners or other service folks only to be unable to get answers to your questions about Google Advertising or some other internet-based service. Why is that? Because it was better for their bottom line to serve up the same plan again and again than to take on the risks of the internet. But meanwhile you were hearing about the rewards of the internet and weren’t getting it from your agency. At Stratum we will pull a team in and manage them to a successful effort and keep continuity should the next project come along or a long-term engagement make sense.