By Nancy Rabern
Recently I had the pleasure of speaking with Michael McCathren, the Director of Digital Marketing for Chick-fil-A. I was curious about how they manage working with so many agencies across so many new marketing platforms.
There are so many agencies in fact that Michael could spend all of his 40 hours (as if!) each week just managing Engauge, The Foundry, Brightwave Marketing, Search Discovery, Mobilization Labs and others. As I learned, that with a department of only 3 full time people and 1 part-timer, Michael truly relies on the agencies to work well together and to actually be his department. McCathren told them from the beginning, “I don’t want to be the middle man here. If you need something from each other, then by all means go direct.” Amazingly, the agencies have all embraced this community style of working together. I love the idea of a “rising tide raises all ships” and the fact that each group brings a different niche perspective in the marketing for Chick-fil-A.
Once a quarter they all meet for a CFA Marketing Summit of sorts (an agency “round up” if you will). It is here that all the agencies have a chance to tell McCathren and his team about new opportunities in social and traditional marketing. The agencies provide strategic thinking about what is out there and how to execute it. This allows McCathren to rely on the agencies to have done the research and just present ideas on how to maximize Twitter, Facebook and now Geo-location marketing.
Chick-fil-A will then test these ideas with some key locations. If it works, then they duplicate it 1400 times. If not, well, there’s another summit in three months and no loss for opinions on what to do next!
