What does the new client-agency relationship look like?

Hav­ing spent the first 15 years of his career as a mar­keter for brands includ­ing Unilever, Coca-Cola, Nokia and Orange, Justin Billings­ley knows how com­pli­cat­ed the life of a chief mar­ket­ing offi­cer can be and how that’s esca­lat­ed.

“As a senior mar­keter, think­ing about adver­tis­ing and media was prob­a­bly only about 20 per cent of my life. I only had around five chan­nels to wor­ry about and only about three or four agen­cies,” Billings­ley, now chief mar­ket­ing offi­cer at agency net­work Pub­li­cis Groupe, recalls.

“In the ten years since I’ve been a client, the frag­men­ta­tion of how to reach peo­ple and con­sid­er­ing things like whether you’re spend­ing mon­ey effec­tive­ly, invest­ments in tech and whether you need to own it or ‘rent’ it, and who my part­ners should be, that lev­el of com­plex­i­ty has increased expo­nen­tial­ly.”

Those chal­lenges, of course, become the chal­lenges of adver­tis­ing agen­cies, whether they’re heart­land is in media or cre­ative. They are being put under more pres­sure to jus­ti­fy why they shouldn’t be squeezed out of an equa­tion where brands are tak­ing more own­er­ship of every­thing from sales chan­nels to data, cus­tomers and tech part­ner­ships.

“Brands are split­ting into two cat­e­gories: the direct-to-con­sumer brands that have flour­ished and have always had less reliance on a media agency because they have the capa­bil­i­ties in-house, or lega­cy brands, like Unilever and Proc­ter & Gam­ble, that are devel­op­ing direct-to-con­sumer chan­nels and increas­ing their ecom­merce exper­tise, which is bring­ing in-hous­ing into play,” observes Char­lie Crowe, founder of the Fes­ti­val of Media and for­mer indus­try edi­tor who now runs his own con­sul­tan­cy. 

This means more tech­nol­o­gy com­pa­nies seek­ing out direct con­ver­sa­tions with brands, Crowe says, adding anoth­er bar­ri­er to the brand-agency rela­tion­ship. “It’s clear there will con­tin­ue to be a mas­sive trans­fer of reliance from the agency to the tech­nol­o­gy plat­form,” he pre­dicts.

Innovating to develop new models

The response from Billings­ley and the lead­er­ship team at Pub­li­cis Groupe has been to devel­op new agency mod­els to meet more client needs. For exam­ple, the Le Pub bespoke hub devel­oped for Heineken, the Le Truc cre­ativ­i­ty cen­tre and the Mar­cel inter­nal employ­ee plat­form, which claims to have saved more than 2,000 jobs with­in the group dur­ing the pan­dem­ic. 

Sim­i­lar­ly, agency group VCCP has dou­bled down on its “four areas of excel­lence”: com­mu­ni­ca­tions, media, expe­ri­ence and data. This comes as ris­ing demand for app devel­op­ment, user expe­ri­ence and user inter­face exper­tise has seen it become more agile at work­ing to mul­ti­ple sce­nar­ios, says chief strat­e­gy offi­cer Michael Lee.

“Some of our clients have need­ed more agency time than ever giv­en the sheer scale of work that needs to be done or redone,” he says. “It’s a com­bi­na­tion of many things, depen­dent on the client and their sit­u­a­tion: reduc­ing bud­gets, the need for trans­paren­cy and flex­i­bil­i­ty, in-hous­ing, a crowd­ed dig­i­tal space, to name a few.

“It’s the holy grail to devel­op brand plat­forms that deliv­er a seam­less, con­sis­tent brand idea across adver­tis­ing and expe­ri­ence. Those who can inter­pret the fire­hose of cus­tomer and media data we get, and turn that into action­able insights to become great cre­ative ideas, are going to be valu­able.”

Putting the spotlight on agility and collaboration

So what is the per­spec­tive of client-side mar­keters? Height­ened agency agili­ty has been key for Andrew Smith, glob­al mar­ket­ing direc­tor at pet nutri­tion brand YuMOVE, who last April deliv­ered a TV cam­paign from brief to broad­cast in three weeks, thanks to remote work­ing. It’s this swifter pace and more direct col­lab­o­ra­tion with cre­ative teams he wants to con­tin­ue post-pan­dem­ic.

“We actu­al­ly had more reg­u­lar access to the cre­ative teams, and we’ve had to work more col­lab­o­ra­tive­ly through screens and get as much as we can from each oth­er, rather than be one or two steps removed through plan­ners and account man­agers,” he says. 

A clos­er work­ing rela­tion­ship has also become more valu­able for Ross Far­quhar, mar­ket­ing direc­tor at ice cream brand Lit­tle Moons, who took on the role in Octo­ber 2020, hir­ing a new cre­ative and media agency. He decid­ed to aban­don the tra­di­tion­al, and arguably ardu­ous, pitch­ing process of brief, pre­sen­ta­tion and selec­tion in favour of a more chem­istry-based approach.

“It was pur­pose­ful­ly not a pitch,” he says. “We said we just want to have a ses­sion to get to know you and work out whether we have good chem­istry. I’m going to give you a brief so you can give me your instinc­tive hypothe­ses. But I don’t want to see the answer, because I want to work with who­ev­er we’re going with to get there. I just want to see how you think and where you might go fish­ing. So it felt fair­er and more respect­ful.”

Mean­while, Page & Page and Part­ners’ client Fre­se­nius Kabi, a health­care com­pa­ny, has worked more close­ly with the agency to use insights to bet­ter reach its audi­ence, which nat­u­ral­ly has grav­i­tat­ed online.

“One of the chal­lenges that has emerged is get­ting that cut through in a crowd­ed dig­i­tal space. I’d expect this to play into brands’ expec­ta­tions for agen­cies going for­ward, look­ing for the blend of knowl­edge, design and cre­ativ­i­ty that can real­ly make them stand out,” says Lyn­d­say Woodall, senior con­tract ser­vices man­ag­er at the com­pa­ny.

Pub­li­cis Groupe’s Billings­ley also gives the exam­ple of Mar­riott, which the agency works with on not just its loy­al­ty pro­gramme and book­ing plat­form, but the wider cus­tomer expe­ri­ence and jour­ney. This is indica­tive, he says, of that wider trend of brands want­i­ng to own their cus­tomer rela­tion­ships.

The future of agencies as strategic business partners

With briefs becom­ing more busi­ness ori­ent­ed, Billings­ley ven­tures that the agency is no longer play­ing sole­ly in the adver­tis­ing space. The grow­ing scope for solv­ing wider client busi­ness prob­lems opens the door to become “pur­vey­ors of growth”, he believes.

“We are not an adver­tis­ing agency or media com­pa­ny, we’re also not a con­sul­tan­cy. They hap­pen to be things we do. Our job is to work with a client and help them find growth in a plat­form world. The future of the busi­ness is to be able to solve those high-lev­el client prob­lems,” says Billings­ley.

But is it real­is­tic for agen­cies to play this role, in a world where con­sul­tan­cies like Accen­ture now have a stake in the cre­ativ­i­ty game through its pur­chase of agency Kar­mara­ma?

Crowe agrees media agen­cies have the tal­ent and data to suc­cess­ful­ly become more con­sul­ta­tive busi­ness­es, but he ques­tions whether they or their cre­ative coun­ter­parts have the ear of chief exec­u­tives in the same way the “Big Four” do.

Billings­ley is con­vinced that by becom­ing growth enablers, agen­cies like his can help more chief mar­ket­ing offi­cers get into the C‑suite and this will be para­mount in com­ing out on top.

“Our job is to help our CMOs get up to the top table, where they can be the voice of their cus­tomers. If you’re respon­si­ble for know­ing who your cus­tomers are, then you’re respon­si­ble for growth because you know where that growth is going to come from,” he con­cludes.