Time for Marketers and Agencies to Shake it Up

Some of the most important partners for marketers are their agencies. But in many cases, the structure of their agency relationships has not changed with their needs. As workflow management systems challenge how agencies and clients work together, soaring needs for content have changed the cost/volume balance of client demands, and earned/owned media growth require new ways to measure impact, the pressures to take a fresh look at agency relationships should be mounting.

Here are a few things to look for:

• What, exactly, is the client paying for? Many agencies have a highly-leveraged, hierarchical structure, with many very junior associates or managers in trafficking, project management, or operations roles. New workflow tools, like Adobe's Marketing and Creative Suites, can drive much smoother collaboration across all parties, with a stream of operational measures automatically generated, approvals, tracked, and all costs easily measured. This should eliminate much of the non-value-adding "processing" labor in agencies, and upend their cost structures towards higher value-adding roles

• What is the output you are looking for? No longer dependent on 30 second spots, today's marketers needs a never-ending stream of content, suited for every size screen, every type of interaction, every personalized situation, and every type of channel. The "content supply chain" that all marketers need to build as they essentially become publishers should put agencies on notice that just generating that 30-second movie is merely one small piece of the puzzle. Having the right production system, management approach, and curation style is essential to brand management today, and agencies who can help their clients build that content engine will find themselves in a much tighter, strategic role

• What defines impact? Well, it will certainly be more than what happens as a result of only paid media. Today's customer journey is an iterative, complex, pinball of touchpoints. Traditional media mix models, with an emphasis on paid media and large historical data sets is less relevant. Last click attribution measures often favor the wrong contributor. It is time to explore new, multi-channel, multi-touch attribution tools and make sure your agencies are contributing to make them feasible. The results may surprise you, as we have had once client realize they needed to amp up their TV spend to open up new minds to their value proposition, while another found out that moving all of their money into better e-commerce placement, generating product reviews, and social media made more sense for them

• Who do you need as a partner? When every different channel has its own specialist agencies claiming expertise in it, a client can get overwhelmed by a mix of as many as 14 different traditional, media, digital, social, mobile, sponsorship, etc. agencies. If each corporate business unit and geography gets to choose their own agency, the complexities are overwhelming and negate much opportunity for scale or cross-channel coordination. Marketing will need to be more muscular in driving more cooperation across agencies. While small, nimble innovators add a lot of value to an agency portfolio, there's also value in knowing a brand, having tight ways of working together, and engaging a network that can take a campaign global.

• How are your agencies making your own people better? Clients turn over frequently through promotions and rotations, and many lack deep marketing experience. The agency then needs to help you be a better client. They should be providing you with libraries of past market research and results, helping you design a more efficient workflow process, offering ideas for new tools that make analytics sharper or speed up production.

We are on the threshold of a sea change in the agency business. Most of the holding companies recognize the challenge and are adding new services, especially technology tools and new operational services, to their mix. BUT until the core nature of the working relationships and the economics change, marketers will remain unsatisfied as the pressure for more volume at lower cost mounts. The capability for change is available. The tools and the general understanding of the challenges are clear. But it takes hard work, dedicated time, and ambitious, shared goals.

Time to shake it up.

Learn more about our latest thinking on the Marketing & Sales site, and please follow us on Twitter @McK_CMSOForum. And please follow me @davidedelman.

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