Agency collaboration, it’s a love and hate thing
Clients be forewarned: making agency rosters hum harmoniously requires effort and time. In this guest post, 303 MullenLowe CEO Nick Cleaver explains some of the structures and processes that lead to more effective inter agency collaboration.
Agency collaboration, it’s a love and hate thing.
The issue of inter-agency collaboration seems to be something of a hot topic. Well that’s certainly what I discovered when a throw-away comment of mine at the Mumbrella Finance Marketing Summit aroused such a passionate response.
With my tongue planted firmly in my cheek, I did respond to a client’s comments that suggested their multiple agency roster was just a harmonious love-fest by provocatively suggesting that I, along with most agencies, hated the idea.
I have been following this debate and I struggle to see what’s so controversial about Nick’s opinion. We have to recognise that as competitors it can be hard to collaborate…why would anyone pretend it is enjoyable to partner with agencies that try to outdo each other, sometimes encouraged by clients, to keep everyone on their toes.
So of course it is possible but it requires very strong leadership on behalf of both the client(s) and agencies. I remember only a couple of years ago the Nestle CMO complaining that his marketing team were spending way to much time managing agency relationships and had become “process managers” as opposed to marketers.
Also, as an industry (clients and agencies) we have high churn rates which automatically impacts: trust, honesty, team spirit and roles and responsibilities etc. All essentials for true collaboration.
Hi Nick
Actions speak louder than words. And as far as I’ve ever seen – you’ve always collaborated wonderfully.
All the best.
Hey Anastasia, it is actually impossible to collaborate when you are competing with each other. In fact competition is the antithesis of collaboration. The work done by the Economist Intelligence Unit on this proves that for collaboration to occur all parties must be aligned to the agreed objective of the collaboration and that they must all share in the value generated. With out this it is difficult to create trust between the parties and therefore the best you can hope for is possibly cooperation, but not collaboration.