As brands want more services delivered in more ways it becomes clear that agency partnerships need to evolve. That’s the expert view of Nick Bell, founder of Ask Us For Ideas and an expert matchmaker for businesses and creatives.
Client-agency structures and briefs have changed and now often fall into three categories
The nature of the brand-agency relationship is ever-shifting, and that’s one reason the creative industry is such a fascinating beast. Modern brands are living organisms. Year-to-year they’re facing different – and often wholly unexpected – challenges prompted by economic pressures, new digital platforms, changing expectations, and an unending list of other influences. In response, agencies are adapting their models.
As a brand-agency matchmaker, we’re constantly looking at briefs, and increasingly, brands want agencies to do more things in more ways. That ranges from faster, more reactive engagements to questions of business transformation and embedded insights. It’s a world that’s more exciting and more multifarious than the agency x brand = big creative project formula of years gone by.
That’s not to say those 10-week, project-based, bring-in-an-agency-to-carry-out-a-big-rebrand engagements have disappeared, but brands are thinking more broadly when it comes to what agencies are capable of. These ‘less traditional’ asks generally fall into three buckets:
Brands need to move faster than ever. The opportunity to capture a moment is fleeting, which means they’re often looking for immediate creative firepower, and teams that can be on-hand to deliver a bank of concepts ready to adapt or refine. In some cases this is a one-off engagement, but more often these grow into long-term partnerships, defined by flexibility and fresh ideas.
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As a recent example, we introduced a global beer brand to agencies that could inspire their internal teams, and generate ideas and content quickly and reactively. These were evolved in-house and became the basis for a brand campaign and social media content.
Given the often sprint-like nature of this work and the expectation of less polished output, these engagements can be built around leaner pricing – which is obviously appealing for brands. But perhaps most importantly, these collaborations truly thrive because there’s a deep sense of trust developed between brand and agency.
On the slower end of the spectrum, brands are increasingly inviting agencies to do jobs that would previously have gone to a loosely titled ‘management consultant’.
Why? Agencies are fast, agile, and able to tackle business challenges through a more creative lens (and, as we shared in some recent research, creativity is responsible for around 60% of a brand’s success). They’re also culturally more in touch with the modern consumer, particularly when compared to traditional, long-established and often staid management consultancies.
That means agencies are collaborating closely with senior management, and finding answers to bigger transformation-based questions that inform long-term business moves.
We know, from speaking to certain agencies in our network, that the C-Suite is increasingly seeing them as advisors who bring as much value to the boardroom as they do the world of brand, design and marketing. This makes them deeply strategic partners and not just the art department. Invisible Dynamics have been working with Gap Inc in this way, which has led to some sector-defining campaign work, designed to bring cultural relevance back into some of their portfolio brands.
There’s a growing appetite for agencies to embed with brands’ in-house teams (often in-office), and collaborate and iterate on things like digital product, content plans or social media strategies. These tend to be set up as more open-ended, retainer agreements that give agencies time to grasp the inner workings of a business.
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These partnerships tend to be slower, but they burn no less bright. Agencies can create ongoing, incremental value, and brands can scale up and invigorate their teams without committing to full-time roles. It’s a best-of-both-worlds situation, which gives businesses outsider perspective – the reason so many of them hire agencies – grounded by insider knowledge. Ultimately, it’s a relationship that’s deeper and richer than the usual 8-12-week project engagement, and one that’s built with more long-term results in mind.
Big Human’s work with Fusion is one example of this: after revamping the brand identity and website and producing marketing assets, they continue to partner on website maintenance, new feature integrations, and additional marketing efforts.
None of the above means we’re seeing an end to the big ‘new identity’ or ‘new website’ challenges, and we’ll never tire of helping brands find teams to solve them. But as founders and the C-Suite explore how to get the most value out of their teams and marketing budgets, more truly collaborative agency engagements are hitting the mark.
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By bringing agencies alongside brands, rather than out front, they can feed into and support streams of work that would typically have been solved by in-house people. Equally, brands are coming to the table with their own talented, strategic thinkers on-staff, and looking for agencies to get the most out of them.
It’s a mindset of ‘augment and improve with us’ rather than ‘bring in the hotshots and leave them to it’.