Andy Bargery, Client Director at Oystercatchers, explores the value of long-term agency relationships and reveals how sustained partnerships drive brand success.
Marketers are notorious for job-hopping, and it’s understood they often stay in role for just a couple of years. But let’s bust that myth: Forbes found the average CMO tenure is 3.5 years. It’s a bit shorter for agency relationships. The Association of National Advertisers revealed in 2018 that agencies maintain client relationships for only 3.2 years, although, according to Forrester, full-service shops do a bit better averaging between 4 and 6 years. Still, it’s hardly long enough to build lasting impact.
If you believe in the value of building brand equity to deliver business results – and any disciple of Binet and Fields knows you should – then you understand the necessity of a long-term horizon. The reality is you can’t build brand equity or transform business results with constant switching of marketers, strategies, tactics, and agencies.
Long Term Agency Partnerships
Assuming you have a long term perspective for your brand, it’s not too big a leap of faith to think you need to give your agency partners time to grow with you too. We’re frequently approached by brand marketers looking to replace their agencies. Our first question is always why? Is there another approach to accelerating marketing performance we can explore first, without the disruption and cost of a pitch?
In some cases, a new agency is the best way forward. You might need a new discipline to bolster your roster, or perhaps the agency team has changed beyond recognition and consequently service levels have dropped. In these cases, and others, it’s time to run an orderly and equitable search and selection process, following the principles of the Pitch Positive Pledge.
But, where there’s an opportunity to address current team performance without the cost, hard work and change involved in a pitch, this is likely to be a quicker route to marketing performance. Long term results need long term partnerships.
Building Brands over the Long-Term
If you attended Marketing Week’s Festival of Marketing, you would have heard examples of brands delivering significant results with work delivered by agencies with long tenures. A great example is Matt Reischauer from McDonald’s who was joined on stage by Tom Sussman from Leo Burnett, in a session chaired by Oystercatchers’ very own Becky McKinlay. McDonald’s and Leo’s put a value of £5.4bn on the incremental revenue generated over the past 20-years of their working relationship. Not bad eh.
But it’s not just McDonald’s that invest in their agency partnerships. Other examples are the fourteen-year partnership between Carlsberg and Fold7, Saatchi and Saatchi with EE, M&C Saatchi and Coca-Cola, Tesco and BBH, IKEA and Mother, Guiness and AMV. I could go on.
Is it a coincidence that all these brands are leaders in their categories?
Fostering Long-Term Relationships with Optimise?
If you would like to emulate their success, there are some clear avenues to explore that lead to great client and agency relationships. Oystercatchers has built its Optimise programme to work with marketers who want to build stronger relationships with their agencies and recognise the value of a 3rd party objective review. In the past ten years, we’ve worked with countless brands to investigate, on a two-way street, what’s working well, what’s not working well and what could be done differently to drive marketing results.
We always look at this in a 360 degree format using qualitative and quantitative research to uncover opportunities for growth in four core areas: People, Thinking, Creative and Process. Taking a ‘client on agency’ and an ‘agency on client’ perspective is critical, and it requires a commitment to fearless listening – the foundation stone of any feedback and review process.
Brand side marketers need to be comfortable with hearing the warts and all about their impact on agency performance. It’s almost never just the agency that needs to sharpen their pencil to build a great working relationship. Don’t get me started on the creative briefing process.
Find out more
Get in touch if you would like to explore how to build a great working relationship with your agencies. You never know, it could be you up on stage at Festival of Marketing in a few years, extolling the virtues of investing in your agency relationships for delivering brand performance and marketing results.