The Future-Ready Agency: How to Achieve Long-Term Success
According to a 2024 Setup survey, over 50 percent of brands are likely to change their primary agency this year — a 17 percent increase from 2023. This statistic underscores the growing complexity and competitiveness of the agency landscape.
To thrive in this environment, agencies can no longer rely solely on project execution or longstanding relationships — they must challenge conventions, offer strategic insights, and demonstrate their value by delivering tangible business outcomes. But how can you do this?
In this article, you'll learn practical tips and strategies to future-proof your agency, gain a competitive edge over larger firms, and nurture client relationships for sustainable growth.
Tip #1: Continuously Innovate
Agencies are hired to solve marketing challenges. The way agencies win, grow, and retain clients is by frequently bringing strong, fresh, new and innovative ideas, insights or solutions to the plate — things your clients can't easily, quickly or cost-effectively do themselves and that propel their business forward.
By continuously innovating, agencies can position themselves as valuable partners and thought leaders in their respective fields — and build stickiness with clients.
In an ever-changing marketing landscape, agility and adaptability are essential for agency success. This requires not only being agile and adaptable as an agency and applying this innovation internally, but demonstrating innovation to clients and delivering insights and solutions that impact bottom-line results.
Strategies for Continuous Innovation
To develop innovation within your agency, consider having a small team dedicated to innovation, such as a guild or track, or making this one of your core tenants. Staying attuned to industry news and trends and leveraging data to uncover new insights are also crucial for staying ahead of the curve.
To deliver innovation to your clients, uncover what matters to them most. Begin campaigns with a measurement plan and goals in mind to ensure you're measuring the right KPIs from the start. This will help you have an outcome-focused approach when uncovering ideas, insights, or solutions to offer to your clients.
Agencies must also deeply understand consumers to deliver insights. This requires getting diverse perspectives from good thinkers on your own agency team and tapping into outside partners who can fill the gaps.
Tip #2: Prepare for a Cookieless Future
As third-party cookies become obsolete, agencies must rethink their approach to campaign measurement and audience targeting. Here's how.
Rethinking Measurement
To navigate this shift effectively, agencies should start by understanding their clients' goals — i.e., the key questions your advertisers want to answer — and then work backward to identify relevant metrics at each stage of the marketing funnel.
By focusing on the relationships between upper-funnel metrics and lower-funnel conversions, you can develop a more holistic view of campaign performance so you can adapt your strategies to what you can measure against now versus what you'll be able to measure against after cookies go away.
Testing and learning will be crucial in the cookieless era. From a measurement perspective, what's important is to begin testing now. Establish a testing framework to test the Google Privacy Sandbox Reporting API as well as solutions from universal ID (UID) providers such as LiveRamp, The Trade Desk Unified ID 2.0 (UID2), and IntentIQ.
Look to probabilistic model solutions as well, such as incrementality testing and media mix modeling (MMM). Data clean rooms can also play a role in your measurement testing since these privacy-safe environments help two parties share data securely.
Rethinking Targeting
From a targeting perspective, agencies should allocate a portion of their impressions to first-party data efforts, leveraging the valuable information collected directly from their clients' customers. They should also pursue contextual targeting since contextual signals aren't reliant on cookies and are strong indicators of performance.
Feeling overwhelmed? Collaborating with partners who've invested in data, technology and data science expertise can help agencies fill gaps in their capabilities and deliver innovative solutions that drive results in a cookieless world.
Tip #3: Embrace Transparency and Progress Over Perfection
Clients expect faster turnarounds on projects and deliverables than ever. To realistically manage their expectations while delivering what they're looking for, it's important to get things moving without becoming too focused on perfection.
In fact, one of the key behaviors at Goodway Group is "progress over perfection." This means establishing a minimal viable product (MVP) or step with a clear, single owner. Success in today's advertising ecosystem requires continual testing, iterating, and learning. Though you should never sacrifice quality or strategy for expediency, speed to market is paramount for finding out what will work and what won't work with your different client campaigns.
To build trust with clients, agencies should be transparent about deadlines. Partners can have good work in two days, for example, but if you want knock-your-socks-off great work, the timeline could be five days. Be honest with your clients about the time frame involved and see what they prefer in terms of the output. Project management systems — especially those with time tracking built in — are essential for anticipating the scope of projects and what the potential deadlines will be.
Tip #4: Leverage AI and Automation
Artificial intelligence (AI) and automation are becoming increasingly prevalent in the marketing industry, offering agencies powerful tools to streamline processes and deliver better results for clients. However, to harness the full potential of these technologies, agencies must ensure they are feeding AI systems with good data, clear objectives and a thorough understanding of the desired outcomes.
Creating an AI task force within the agency can help focus efforts on specific goals and involve passionate team members in experimenting with AI applications across various areas, such as copywriting support, creative design, and data analysis. By striking a balance between leveraging AI and maintaining human expertise, you can unlock new efficiencies and drive meaningful results for your clients.
Tip #5: Invest Intentionally to Attract and Retain Top Talent
In a competitive job market, attracting and retaining skilled employees is a critical challenge for agencies. To win the talent war, agencies must provide clear growth paths and opportunities for talented individuals to pursue their passions and develop expertise in emerging areas. This requires more than just lip service — agencies must dedicate time and resources to employee development and create an environment that fosters learning, creativity, and collaboration.
You also may want to consider thinking outside the box when it comes to traditional job descriptions. For instance, at Karsh Hagan, they found that traditional job descriptions didn't always cut it post-pandemic. They reimagined how to service a client's social needs by building a "mini social agency" within their agency.
To do this, Karsh Hagan strategically combined social experts from media, account service and creative instead of just hiring a social media specialist or manager. Thus far, it's worked much better than relying on a traditional job role. This has allowed Karsh Hagan's team members to develop new strengths, foster new perspectives and build their confidence in different areas.
In summary, by investing in their people and offering a supportive, engaging workplace culture, agencies can position themselves as attractive employers and build loyal, high-performing teams that drive long-term success.
Tip #6: Foster Strong Industry Partnerships
Building strong, lasting relationships with partners is essential for agency growth and stability. Whether working with digital marketing partners, publishers, platforms or more, you can access new opportunities you wouldn't have been able to and round out your own internal expertise with outside talent that can be brought to the table on your behalf.
To foster these relationships, agencies should seek out partners who share their philosophies and values on client service, bring best-in-class solutions, are willing to push boundaries, and have skin in the game — that is, are invested in the growth of both the agency and its clients.
What's Next?
Future-proofing an agency for long-term growth requires a proactive, multifaceted approach that encompasses adapting to technological changes, embracing transparency and progress over perfection, leveraging AI and automation, attracting, and retaining top talent by intentionally investing in your team and reconsidering traditional job descriptions, and building strong relationships with outside partners.
By focusing on these key areas and implementing strategies that prioritize data-driven decision-making, collaboration and continuous improvement, agencies can position themselves for success in an increasingly complex and competitive landscape.
The views and opinions expressed are solely those of the contributor and do not necessarily reflect the official position of the ANA or imply endorsement from the ANA.
Scott Blessman is the VP of analytics and data insights at Goodway Group. Scott is an analytics expert with over 17 years of industry experience helping brands grow through strategic, actionable insights and a clear understanding of success. He has worked on numerous award-winning campaigns for brands in various industry verticals.
Tracy Broderick is the president of Karsh Hagan, a boldly independent, multi-disciplined marketing, design and technology company based in Denver, Colorado. After sharpening her skills at Leo Burnett, she joined Karsh Hagan and built the most respected media department in the region. Now as president, Tracy's role is to nurture and grow the agency's creative and strategic capabilities to meet the modern marketing challenges in the digital age.
Amy O'Hara is a sales and marketing leader with over 20 years of experience in digital media. As VP of agency partners at Goodway Group, she specializes in helping agency partners leverage analytics and insights to achieve better results. Amy's expertise includes managing sales teams, developing business strategies and driving revenue. She has experience in both B2C and B2B with national, regional and local brands across all verticals.
Elizabeth "EZ" Zupkow has proudly been a Goodway Group family member for over eight years. She currently serves as a senior director, where she is responsible for the post-sale client relationship. Her superpower is being a business partner to agencies and building collaborative relationships that lead to tangible results and profits. EZ is passionate about the American Advertising Federation mission, currently serving as lieutenant governor for district 12.