Salz Survey shows there's still issues between advertisers and agencies

Salz Consulting in New York, which has sponsored the Salz Survey of Advertiser-Agency Relations since 1986, will formally release their results for the latest survey today.

According to the results, it seems that there are issues keepigng advertisers and agencies from working well together.

The results "are a real reflection that the industry is in a huge state of flux," Ms. Salz said, as advertisers and agencies scramble to keep up with the seemingly continuous changes in consumer behavior, media choices and categories ranging from automobiles to packaged foods to telecommunications.

Even so, "as different as things are becoming," Ms. Salz said, "this is still about an old-fashioned concept, people communicating with people." And "there's still a huge opportunity to improve sales just by working better together," she said.

Here's a quick breakdown of some of the results:

Advertisers were asked to predict the effect on sales if their agencies were always able to do the best work possible - the respondents estimated an increase by 22.4%

Assess the level of teamwork that exists in their relationships: 59%t of the advertisers said there was more teamwork; 25% of agency respondents agreed. That gap is the second largest since the survey started.

35% of advertisers said there were more hassles in the relationships with their agencies (the highest since that question was added to the survey in '98). 43% of agencies thought there were more hassles with clients (the second-highest since 1998).

41% of the advertisers said there was more tension, an all time high for the survey, and 46% of agencies said there was more tension.

Agencies responded that they were able to do their best work for 53.9% of their major clients. And advertisers asked about the quality of work from agencies (on a 1 to 10 scale) had a mean rating of 7.1.