Red Herring Digital

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I am the owner of Custom Neon, We sell LED neon signs all over the world.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire Red Herring Digital, and what were your goals?

Social media advertising, gain more traction online.

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor and what were the deciding factors?

Had an existing relationship with the company.

Describe the scope of work in detail, including the project steps, key deliverables, and marking tools used.

Scope of work was to manage our FB, Insta advertising for our AU, UK & USA divisions. Key deliverables were to make a profitable return on the advertising spend and agency fees

How many resources from the vendor's team worked with you, and what were their positions?

2-3 people, Ads manager, account lead + support person

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Can you share any measurable outcomes of the project or general feedback about the deliverables?

After a couple of months of working with them I noticed that they were heavily under-resourced. They had one main account manager who was working on over 20+ clients. He did his best to manage the workload, but they struggled to deliver on the level of service I would expect from a good digital agency.

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

We had lots of issues with getting our main weekly agenda points actioned. We would continuously be going round in circles asking why we had not had responses to questions asked weeks ago. One of the big problems was that we didn’t have access to the main point of contact who was setting up our Ads across Facebook and Instagram. We would be speaking to the account manager in our weekly meeting and asking questions specifically about our Facebook setup and performance and the account manager couldn’t answer our questions.

He had to go back and speak to the person setting up the Ads. These meetings were very unproductive. We ran a huge sale for Black Friday in 2021. We asked Red Herring for some detailed performance insights on how our creative performed. The owner Alex came back to us and said they could do this, but it would be an additional cost. I have never heard of this before, that a digital agency would charge the client extra, for what I would consider part of the standard service.

I have always had these types of reports delivered to me as a client. It is a way for the agency and client to improve together and optimise performance. After I provided some feedback through a client survey that this was disappointing, Alex did deliver this report to us with no extra charge, but said it would be a once off. We never received another creative insights report. In my honest opinion Red Herring have a set and forget mindset. They setup your Ads and let them run without making many changes to them.

They are not strategic in their approach towards achieving long-term goals and trialling new things. We had to go to them with ideas on new things we wanted to try. I asked them early on to let us know when social platforms had new products and Ad formats available, and they never once came to us. We asked them to provide us with budget splits for our campaigns along with strategic direction around objectives and targeting.

This was briefed to them 4 weeks before a campaign would go live with assets supplied to them at least 2 weeks before the go live date. We were continuously following up where our campaign plans were, only receiving these 1-2 days before the campaign started.

What did you find most impressive or unique about this company?

NA

Are there any areas for improvement or something they could have done differently?

When we were speaking to other agencies about moving from Red Herring, I mentioned that they said our Facebook and Tik Tok accounts were their IP and they would not hand them back. These other agencies were legitimately shocked by this. They had never heard of anything like this, and said that we should be seriously concerned. These other agencies said that if we partnered with them our accounts would remain 100% owned by Custom Neon, and we would have full transparency to get access to backend data.

This makes me think that Red Herring are one of the only agencies holding their clients accounts and claiming them as their own. To all current clients who work with Red Herring, this is a warning that if you ever want to move to another agency, you will have to go through the same difficulties and problems that we have had to endure. You will lose all of your owned data, audiences and Ad account history. You will be starting from scratch.