Borrell Associates Expands Focus Toward SMB Marketers.

Borrell Associates is expanding how it delivers research and insight, putting new emphasis on small and mid-sized businesses that are increasingly managing their own marketing — a move founder Gordon Borrell says reflects market reality rather than a break from media.

“Well, it’s a strategy for both the podcast and the company,” Borrell says in an email. “But to be clear, it’s more of an expansion than a shift. Our hearts will always be with media companies and ad agencies, and the gravitational pull is impossible to escape.”

The change comes as Borrell says SMBs are increasingly dissatisfied with traditional marketing support and are taking matters into their own hands — often inefficiently.

“It’s become painfully clear that the SMBs are still not getting what they want and increasingly taking matters into their own hands,” he says. “As a result, huge amounts of marketing dollars are being wasted, as evidenced by the persistent research showing that half of the money spent on programmatic ads does not go toward buying the ad but to service companies.”

That frustration is echoed in Borrell’s January episode of the “Local Marketing Trends” podcast, where Borrell and VP Corey Elliott lay out why the firm is speaking more directly to SMB marketers and less to ad-sales intermediaries.

“For 25 years, our mission has remained the same — helping local businesses, entrepreneurs grow and thrive,” Borrell says on the podcast. “But we’ve delivered it through intermediaries, mostly media companies. And since there are fewer and fewer, we’re deciding to expand our reach to work with others — or it might be direct to local businesses themselves.”

The employment data supports Borrell’s expansion to working more directly with SMBs. Bureau of Labor Statistics trends showing advertising sales jobs are shrinking while in-house marketing jobs are climbing. Borrell says a dozen years ago ad-sales jobs outnumbered marketing jobs. Today, there are three times as many marketing jobs.

“We’ve got 36,000 fewer people in advertising sales since the pandemic, and this army of 121,000 more people in marketing positions at local businesses managing their own advertising,” he says on the podcast. “Two-thirds of them [are] either novices or apprentice marketers.”

According to Borrell’s surveys, those in-house SMB marketers are asking for help in three specific areas. Elliott says it comes down to a trio of acronyms, including “ROI,” “DIY,” and “AI.”

“They want to understand ROI metrics. How do you track it? How do you calculate it?” Elliott says. DIY tools ranked close behind, followed by 19% who said artificial intelligence is the number one thing they want to know about. Taken together, Elliott says the message is clear. “They aren’t finding what they need,” he says.

Borrell argues that media companies and agencies haven’t fully adapted to that shift, in part because of how they’re compensated. “They’re incentivized by the commissions they get on the media that they buy,” he says. “So there is a conflict there.”

While he stresses that strong salespeople who put advertisers first still exist, Borrell says the industry has not scaled that approach.

“On the surface, not a whole lot is going to change,” he says. “But you’ll hear us addressing issues involving local businesses a lot more, and talking about media companies and their struggles a lot less.”