Of course, the only talk of it on twitter was positive. God forbid an agency tell a client their idea sucks Glad someone else saw it for what it was.

If you notice, the majority of agencies that made the shortlist were ones that publicly and aggressively kissed Current’s a$$.

To me, the RFP process is personal and private. It’s no one’s business who or why you chose an agency, except for the agencies involved. Furthermore, making the RFP process public opens up the door for scrutiny, criticism and outside opinions that have no business enterting into the process.

On the other hand, like I said in the post, it opened my eyes to a few agencies- both ones I’ve been looking at and ones I would never have considered and/or known about.

The – in hindsight – embarrassing piece of information is that I run an agency and had to somehow participate. How could I justify otherwise? We did it in one single tweet which answered his initial request and gave a link to the amount of good work we’ve done in social media, knowing that the assignment had already morphed into something else that nobody quite knew what it was.

It was kind of like someone you don’t know giving you money and saying “here, now go buy a lottery ticket and make sure that you win” – you can’t afford not to, but you know that the short list has less to do with the quality of the work (empirical, reliable knowledge) and more to do with how cool you are because you have a lot of friends on Twitter, or something as random as that.

And I get it, probably a serious response was never the intention. Having been on the client side, though, I still wonder what Kretchmer truly got out of it other than a lot of exposure for himself and a great deal of agencies kissing up to him. Egos and more egos. One thing I know, if you end up with a list of 20-25 agencies on your RFP list, you haven’t done your homework right.

Everyone is hurting for business, my agency is no exception. But you can’t possibly win a business by begging your way into it. Nor you can judge an agency by evaluating their tweet, 12 second video, or a landing page that says “Current, we want your business ” (I’m paraphrasing). So to me, this whole thing was a big debacle that has since deflated like a balloon.

I was initially intrigued on how this was going to shake things up, but other than raise @jktrech’s profile and expose a lot of agencies in a less than gracious way, not sure what else came out of it. In the end, one thing is true. It’s sometimes hard to tell your grandma what you do in this business, because it ain’t always pretty.