Cracking The Code: Marketers’ Quest For Seamless Agency Integration – Claire Hollands comments in Creative Salon

Original article by Dani Gibson at Creative Salon

While industry giants like VMLY&R and Wunderman Thompson unite for integrated strength, many marketers remain unconvinced. How can agencies truly deliver diverse, valuable services to clients?

Numerous agencies present themselves as integrated solutions for marketers, offering services encompassing customer experience, above-the-line activities, and more. Interestingly, while agencies aim for seamless integration, many marketers say they operate without a particularly integrated approach.

According to recent findings from global media advisors MediaSense, in collaboration with the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA), a substantial number of major multinational brands are striving to refine their agency model. Merely 11 per cent of respondents believe their current agency model is a fit for their future requirements, while 24 per cfent deem it unsuitable for future purposes.

In the pursuit of integration, some agencies have experimented with consolidating various capabilities under one roof, achieving notable successes. Most recently, VMLY&R and Wunderman Thompson, both born out of significant mergers, are now merging into a consolidated entity under the name VML to create an integrated powerhouse.

However, for others, the process of grafting on capabilities has proven to be more complex than anticipated. Internal development of these capabilities introduces challenges, creating a Catch-22 scenario. The absence of a client makes it difficult to construct the investment case necessary for capability development, resulting in a cycle that brings them back to square one.

We spoke to some industry leaders to find out how agencies can efficiently integrate clients to work better with an integrated agency.

Claire Hollands, CEO, MullenLowe
Break down the silos and make sure your teams are talking to each other before they talk to us.

Integration starts with the brief. Ensure all the right stakeholders are engaged and contributing upfront, not along the way. Create a shared ambition and way of working, which puts integration at the heart.

Our agency positioning ‘positive dissatisfaction’ means we are constantly challenging the status quo and choosing to make things better. In an integrated approach this is great as it means we challenge and innovate across the whole customer journey.

Earlier this year we brought all our capabilities together under one brand MullenLowe. The big shift was placing our clients at the heart of our approach and ensuring we had the right teams and services around each one. This has given new focus to our core offerings, identified our adjacencies and allowed us to focus where we invest inhouse or partner to be future fit. Importantly, this approach has also informed what we don’t do too.

Our approach means clients get the best of both worlds – a breadth of in-house offerings, which we can dial up and down depending on the brief but also deep expertise via our partners.