Agencies calling the shots for clients?

If you’re an agency working for one of the nation’s largest marketers like General Mills, can you have your Cheerios and eat them, too? Based on the news this week, it appears totally possible. 

As reported in the June 13th article, “General Mills to Let Agencies Call the Shots,” by Stuart Elliott, “General Mills will let its two principal agencies, Campbell Mithun and Saatchi & Saatchi, determine the media in which ads run and which agencies will create them, in a bottom-up approach.”

Before, says Elliott, General Mills’ brand managers coordinated marketing efforts, working not only with the principal agencies but also with agencies that produced online, retail and minority campaigns.

The new move puts more power to the agency to determine where ads belong most, and not in media outlets predetermined by previous media spends or size of commission, says Elliott, something referred to as being “media neutral.”

Such a shift, says Elliott, telegraphs that General Mills wants to transform the way it works with its agencies — and vice versa — in a shift that underlines the changes that are remaking the advertising industry—like increased competition, the fragmentation of the mass market and the rise of new media.

Such a change, says Elliott, will help the company deal with the new-media landscape as it tries to “reach consumers using nontraditional approaches like the Internet, e-mail marketing and branded entertainment.”

With this shift comes a change in how the company will compensate its agencies. As Elliott reports, the company is shifting to performance-based compensation — that is, payments based on results in the marketplace for the brands being advertised.

And if things work out well for the agencies, perhaps their account teams will show up on the cover of a box of Wheaties.