How many people sit around your boardroom table?

With agencies aplenty and a new one popping up weekly, I can’t help but feel that as media agencies we’re bucking the trend of an economic downturn and job losses, but rather booming as an industry. Are we really?

I have worked on a few accounts where our clients’ boardrooms can’t accommodate the number of people in and outside of their own organisations, working on communicating their brand. No matter how strong your brand’s identity and brand strategy is as an advertiser with so many people playing a role, one campaign voice is nearly impossible to achieve.

It is great to have a fresh mind or two in the room for workshops and brainstorms, but this should be consolidated and refined before it gets fed back to the client team. This requires exceptional discipline from brand teams and agencies alike to channel everything through one point of contact.

With specialist agencies in every possible sector of PR, digital, and events, I understand why marketing teams feel the need to have an expert in each sector at their boardroom table, but with each of these agencies focussing on their own bottom line, we can’t possibly devise the best strategy for clients no matter how high our level of integrity. Each individual agency is under pressure to maintain and grow billings and we have to put our own agency’s interests at the forefront of our plans, as the reality is budgets are not exactly experiencing growth spurts right now.

Even though this gives the illusion that as an industry we’re bucking the economic trend, the reality is evident: the marketing pie is the same size, if not smaller than in previous years. The more we slice it up, the more likely we are to be left with crumbs between friends and overworked account teams who can’t immerse themselves in the brand as they are resourced over 100%.

The answer to proliferation is always consolidation, it brings us back to where the agency model began but as a fairly new joiner to the agency model, I can’t help but feel this is the only solution. We are in a rather fortunate position at the company I am a part of, as we have a network of agencies that all contribute towards the same bottom line, meaning that we can look at client briefs objectively as opposed to being forced into decisions that help out only one company’s bottom line.

The majority of client accounts straddle too many agencies, all trying to maintain their spend to give an unbiased opinion on where they should direct their spend.

Consolidation will lead to fewer people around your boardroom table but with one consolidated vision and if expertise is needed outside of the skill set around your table then outsource. However, at this stage of the digital media journey, we should all be up-skilled sufficiently to understand each and every medium and how it can benefit your brand enough to pop back into the office, bounce ideas off your colleagues/experts and get back to your client team with one consolidated campaign.

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