Improving the way you work with your agency is better for you, better for your teams and better for your agency, writes Simon Foster, managing partner at Oystercatchers, and a former director at PHD, Initiative and Mindshare.
According to AdAge, Procter & Gamble, Unilever and General Motors have retained relationships with major agencies dating to 1922 or earlier. William Lever appointed James Walter Thompson in 1902 and Unilever is still working with JWT today. BBDO started working with GEC in 1920 and continues to produce work almost a hundred years later.
Whilst long agency relationships are not unusual on the creative side of our business, they are much less prevalent in media. RECMA reported over 150 media pitches in 2015; there were titanic media moves by P&G, Coca-Cola, DHL, General Mills, L’Oréal, SC Johnson and Unilever. After a year like this, it’s worth asking: are pitches the only way for marketers to solve problems with their agencies?
Four good reasons not to pitch
Opportunity cost: Media pitches consume huge amounts of time and resource. For agencies, a pitch can mean significant unpaid work and risks compromising service for existing clients. For marketers, it’s a distraction from delivering the brand’s strategic objectives.
Trading continuity: Media agencies grow discounts year on year, so long trading histories tend to favour advertisers over media owners. Disrupt this consistency and you risk reducing media value.
Pitches upset daily processes ranging from understanding procurement procedures to managing data feeds.
Knowledge loss: Each day the agency works with you it is gathering knowledge and experience about your brands. When you change agencies, you lose this pool of knowledge and it takes time to rebuild.
Process disruption: Pitches upset daily processes ranging from understanding procurement procedures to managing data feeds. A pitch move can cause significant process disruptions.
Four good ways to improve existing partnerships
Spend time diagnosing problems and causes: When things go wrong, don’t always assume it’s the agency’s fault. Most media agencies employ smart and motivated people. For every perceived problem with an agency team there could be a corresponding issue within your marketing team.
Gain good operational insight: Operational insight is the key. Consider this scenario: the quality of your campaign targeting is falling and it’s impacting your marketing teams. A 360-degree review identifies your media briefs are not concise enough to provide clear direction. Now you know the cause, you’re half way to solving the problem.
When things go wrong, don’t always assume it’s the agency’s fault.
Benchmark for fee fairness: Let’s imagine your CFO is putting you under pressure to reduce agency fees. The agency is resisting an overall fee reduction. But if you can identify resource hours deployed across the different communication channels you can use industry benchmarks to assess the resource value you are receiving. Benchmarks provide the context for fair assessment of resource costs.
Agree an action plan: Once completed, insight gathering and benchmarking are the critical elements of an action plan. Action plans can include agreeing metrics for success, clarity of roles and responsibilities, better briefs, agreed process times, improving cross-agency working and sharing marketing calendars.
The benefits of moving from pitch to partnership
The foremost benefit is that your agency will see you as a genuine partner. The agency retains a client, and, both of you avoid the time and resource upheaval of a pitch. You retain valuable category knowledge residing in your agency whilst maintaining process stability. By focusing on objective data, it is possible to identify relatively small changes in resources and costing that can scale to significant efficiency improvements.
Improving the way you work with your agency is better for you, better for your teams and better for your agency – not to mention the positive benefits that improved marketing communications will bring to your customers.
