How agencies and brands can build highly successful relationships BENOIT CACHEUX examines how in-housing affects the relationship between agencies and clients.
ACCELERATION OF THE IN-HOUSE TREND AND THE ROLE OF AGENCIES The topic of in-housing has not taken over our conversations with clients. We still think it’s an important topic, but the majority of our clients are not accelerating their shift to in-house models. We believe there’s a widespread realisation that taking all media in-house is a very difficult task in terms of talent, processes like finance and overall ways of working. However, we are building hybrid models that create a much deeper connectivity, with teams made up of clients and agency talent 24 I T H E M E D I A Y E A R B O O K 2 0 2 1
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working together as a joint team. It could be called in-housing, but we see it as a positive evolution of the agency and client partnership.
ACHIEVING INTEGRATION AND ALIGNMENT BETWEEN IN-HOUSE AND AGENCIES The better models for in-housing have this integration and alignment at heart, so if there’s a single best practice, it is the focus on ensuring that agency teams are closely connected to in-house teams, rather than in-house teams working more directly with clients’ teams. This connectivity drives not only best practices such as better audience planning, but also reporting and analytics with more data consistency and campaign intelligence. The latter is critical in ensuring there is one version of truth across both the agency team and in-house team.
IF THERE’S A SINGLE BEST PRACTICE, IT IS THE FOCUS ON ENSURING THAT AGENCY TEAMS ARE CLOSELY CONNECTED TO IN-HOUSE TEAMS
CLIENTS RECRUITING MEDIA TALENT FROM AGENCIES: AN OPPORTUNITY OR A THREAT? It’s an interesting evolution as it means the marketplace is becoming progressively more competitive for recruitment. Traditionally, we had to focus on being attractive versus other agency groups. We now have to be competitive in a wider context. However, being a glass-half-full sort of person, I see this as extremely positive: increased expertise on the client side allows us to have more sophisticated conversations, do more innovative things and generally move faster.
WHAT’S THE MEANING OF TRANSPARENCY – THE MOST-USED WORD IN MEDIA? We want to ensure that our clients have full visibility of how their marketing budgets are invested, whether it’s for agency fees, media spend, tech costs, and so forth. This is critical and one of the core pillars of our organisation, Publicis Groupe. We completely agree that this is critical in any agency/client relationship. Over the last few years, the focus has been around programmatic and transparency.
themediaonline.co.za
08.04.21 11:26
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recently had the pleasure of joining an agency-brand fireside chat at the latest Programmatic Pioneers virtual event, titled ‘Thinking partnership, not service: How can agencies and brands build collaborative relationships to ensure mutually beneficial and highly successful alliances?’ Andrew Lowdon, director of agency services at ISBA, moderated the event. I was joined on screen by Richard Bettinson, director of media strategy and planning for EMEA at Hilton. These are some of the areas we discussed.
