8 Focus Areas For Enhancing The Advertiser & Agency Partnership

Opinon Article

Context:

The advertiser-agency relationship has become increasingly complex in the past decade due to various factors such as the in-housing of biddable media, the rise of supplier-direct relationships, the shift from traditional to digital spending and the looming and transformation cookie deprecation. These changes have reshaped advertisers' needs and commercial models.

Regardless of media budget size, confidence in advertising spend's impact on core business goals is crucial, whether it's driving immediate sales performance, brand awareness, lead generation, or search demand. Successful partnerships are characterised by clear, measurable goals, optimised workflows and most importantly, trust.

Media leaders often face challenges such as the agency's ability to show focus and impact on commercial goals or an advertiser's reluctance to approve more complex media ideas. These challenges intensify with growing pressure on business performance and shrinking teams.

I'm sharing personal experiences and learnings, not as a prescribed "ways of working" guide, but to highlight my own insights and focus areas for future roles. While many advertisers and agencies may already implement these actions, I believe it is beneficial to discuss and exchange ideas.

Summary of 8 Focus Areas:

The following is a top-line summary of my 8 action areas for enhancing the media agency and advertiser partnership:

1. Foster Commercial Ownership: Invite agency leads to key, senior, advertiser commercial meetings for better alignment, ownership and business understanding. If we want agencies to be an extension of our teams, we need to remove secrecy, increase business context and establish direct access between senior leaders.?
2. Try Before You Plan: We often hire based on craft skill rather than industry knowledge. Whilst this offers many benefits, we need to encourage hands-on experience with products/services to enhance planning effectiveness. Making this a top onboarding action for both agency and advertiser teams.
3. Audience Understanding: Often agency & advertiser staff are not members of our target audience. We need to shift from relying on a data-centric, research and analysis led approach, to also include extensive prospect/customer interviews to understand intent versus actions.
4. Prioritisation Scoring: Establish clear criteria to prioritise tasks effectively amidst resource constraints. Inclusive of impact potential, cost, learning speed, measurement confidence and effort levels.
5. Embrace Vulnerability: Transparently discuss risks and limitations to build trust and facilitate prioritisation.
6. Measurement & Testing: Look to blend frequent causality testing and correlation (econometrics) analysis to improve media effectiveness, understanding and reducing reliance on platform data.?
7. Goal Clarity: Beyond contractual obligations, align with advertisers stakeholders' evolving priorities as they develop throughout the year and have a plan to adapt to these changing needs.
8. Feedback Culture: Cultivate open, two-way feedback loops for continual improvement and agility. Remove reliance on end of year reviews to drive improvements.

For more insight on each of these focus areas, please see below.?

Focus Area Context & Recommended Actions Deep-dive:

1. Foster Commercial Ownership

Advertisers expect their agencies to share their passion for short-term commercial outcomes, especially during challenging times. This expectation often arises as a criticism directed at agencies and is a focus in discussions about in-housing. From my experience, good agencies have a vested interest in client success for two main reasons: it can increase their revenue (either commission or bonus) and fosters a positive, proactive and fun working environment. It's a win-win situation. However, achieving this level of alignment requires transparency, ownership, and commercial understanding.

Addressing the challenge of getting agencies to care as much as advertisers do isn't straightforward. To not only expect this but be confident agency partners get it right, it requires granting agencies access to top-level business discussions and ensuring clarity in contracts. While agencies inherently care about performance to secure their profitability, advertisers must drive the passion for success, through providing clarity and being open about trade-offs.

In many media relationships, operational processes and performance dashboards keep agencies and advertisers informed at a weekly/monthly level. However, a common shortfall is the lack of agency involvement in senior commercial meetings where overall business performance is discussed. This lack of exposure can undermine confidence in the media function among advertiser leadership who are monitoring total business performance, not just those driven by media.

To foster a truly focused relationship, advertisers should advocate for agency representation in senior commercial meetings, and agencies should actively seek it. Transparency in sharing such discussions builds understanding and passion.

Recommendation: Advocate for agency representation, even intermittently, at senior commercial meetings. Ensuring both parties grasp the true performance commentary and align with what CMO’s, COO’s and CFO’s truly care about in any given period.

2. Try Before You Plan

Where feasible, both advertiser and agency teams should experience the product/service or undergo the action/purchase process. While it's impractical for working teams to buy high-end products, they can still engage in the customer journey. Whether it's signing up for a trial, navigating the purchase process, or interacting with the website/app, understanding the offering is crucial. While hiring specialists based on craft skill has obvious benefits, it can lead to a lack of category experience, impacting performance.

The absence of product "trialing" is evident and affects confidence and partnership dynamics. Those who engage in trials foster a sense of integration with the internal team rather than being perceived as external partners. There is nothing quite like the agency noticing a journey optimisation opportunity before the client to generate goodwill.

Recommendation: Advertisers should require, and agencies should ensure, an onboarding process where key personnel engage with the product or service. This should be implemented on both sides.

3. Audience Understanding

Understanding actual customers and potential prospects is crucial for media campaign success. Traditional media planning tools and research-based data assist with mass planning, and advertiser customer data and market research provide a quantitative view of the target audience. However, with the impending loss of insight from third-party cookies, understanding prospect behaviours and intent versus their actions becomes even more vital.

This understanding is especially significant because media professionals are often not the target audience for the campaigns they work on. For example, in B2B offerings, advertiser and agency employees are unlikely to have ever been the target audience. Therefore, investing time to speak with the audience and observing their engagement with the advertiser's offering can provide valuable planning insights and a competitive media advantage.

Although the industry excels at using data for planning, there's a need to enhance this knowledge by directly interacting with customers.

Recommendation: Implement a combined advertiser/agency process for interviewing current and prospective customers to gain insights and context to augment data-driven planning.

4. Prioritisation Scoring

With a heightened emphasis on return on ad spend, marketing and media have come under intense scrutiny. Many advertisers and agencies are facing the challenge of achieving more with fewer resources. In 2023 and continuing into 2024, prioritisation, or the creation of a "no list," has become a central focus.

While prioritisation has always been essential, the complexity of media measurement often makes it difficult to determine what should take precedence. Advertisers and agencies acknowledge the need for prioritisation, but without a clear scoring system, the prioritised actions may not align. For example, should the priority be a performance/digital test with quick but limited scale learnings, a transformation project with long-term impact, or a social media post requested by a senior client? Often, it's deemed to be all three.

A common frustration arises when one side of the media relationship believes they are meeting prioritisation requirements, but the other side fails to deliver due to differing perspectives. For instance, a basic radio sponsorship buy may seem straightforward from an agency's viewpoint, offering monetary value, reach and low production requirements. However, it may require significant time and resources from the advertiser's perspective, including involvement from marketing managers and legal support.

Implementing a basic audit process can mitigate these challenges by evaluating factors such as estimated impact, cost, learning speed, measurement capability and effort. However, it's crucial for both parties to understand how to score against these criteria.

Recommendation: Develop a combined priority scoring card for key proposals outside of day-to-day operations. Ensure clarity for both agency and advertiser stakeholders on the scoring criteria, including factors like impact, measurement capability, cost, and human effort. Projects lacking significantly in these areas risk being deprioritised by the advertiser later on.

5. Embrace Vulnerability?

In addition to the above points, effective prioritisation requires acknowledging limitations. Whether it's a shortage of staff, availability for creative approval on the advertiser side, or the agency's capacity to execute campaigns within tight deadlines.

Despite the emphasis on the "no list," the media industry is driven by creative passion. While it's natural to push for ideas we believe in, it's important to recognize when certain activities may not be feasible due to constraints. Understanding the risks and trade-offs associated with an execution before committing is crucial for ensuring clarity and alignment between both parties on what success looks like.

Recommendation: Implement a trade-off/risk analysis for projects requiring significant staff effort before making commitments. This ensures tasks can be delivered without adversely affecting business performance or staffing elsewhere. Be prepared to acknowledge when a good idea may not be feasible and identify necessary steps before proceeding.

6. Measurement and Testing is Key

Understanding the impact of media spend is crucial, regardless of budget size. While measurement methods vary depending on business stage and media complexity, having an effective measurement solution is vital. With the increasing complexity of measurement in the industry, it's essential to invest in the best possible solution for your business.

For advertisers with lower budgets, causality testing can help challenge perceived impacts of media spend on business performance. It's important to differentiate between causality and correlation (correlations can be misleading), especially considering seasonal fluctuations in budgets and sales. Implementing control and exposed testing, akin to clinical trials, over significant periods can enhance confidence in spend and performance relationships.

Higher-spending, multi-channel advertisers can face challenges in isolating causality tests due to various factors affecting performance. Long-term correlational analysis, such as Econometrics (Media Mix Modelling), becomes crucial for understanding media effectiveness. Additionally, the frequency of MMM is increasingly important, as annual dips may lead to outdated recommendations in today's fast-paced marketplace

Recommendation: Establish a clear causality and correlation analysis system, tailored to scale. Challenging linear or short-term knowledge is key to optimising media investment, with the benefits of insights and optimisations outweighing the installation costs.

7. Goal Clarity

Clear contractual goals are essential for setting quality and value requirements, but advertisers' objectives often extend beyond simple sales volume and may evolve throughout the year based on business performance. While meeting contractual obligations is crucial, understanding the broader business goals is equally important.

Media and marketing effectiveness are not solely measured by contract metrics; senior stakeholders evaluate how well initiatives address business challenges and adapt to changing priorities. Understanding the most pressing issues for leadership, such as sales, revenue, or base growth, informs strategic decisions. Prioritising these challenges strengthens relationships and boosts confidence in media effectiveness.

Recommendation: Clearly identify senior client/advertiser’s' pressing goals and focus areas. Pivoting to address evolving needs, going beyond contractual obligations, will have a bigger impact on the confidence levels of senior leaders when assessing media effectiveness.

8. Feedback Culture

Effective feedback loops between advertisers and agencies are crucial given the significant impact of the media function on business success. While it's common for clients to focus on agency performance, a two-way feedback process is essential. This process allows both parties to share observations on processes, performance, and staffing.

Annual performance reviews remain necessary to evaluate contractual goals, but regular, two-way quarterly feedback sessions are vital for ongoing improvement. These sessions facilitate faster problem-solving, foster genuine ownership, and strengthen relationships. They also enable early identification of significant challenges for timely adaptation.

Having confidence to be honest is key. Softened feedback can lead to surprises in end-of-year reviews. Implementing specific templates and focused reviews based on business needs ensures valuable feedback and actionable insights.

Recommendation: Establish open, two-way quarterly feedback sessions to share strengths and concerns collaboratively. Encourage honesty and proactive problem-solving without fear of damaging relationships.

Conclusion:

While each media partnership is unique, tailored to the specific needs of each advertiser, I am confident that by integrating the aforementioned areas into our 'ways of working' processes for each partnership, we can continue to increase the impact of our relationships. I welcome any feedback, thoughts, or additional suggestions.