Too hot to handle? Why digital agencies are a challenge for marketing teams

Libby Child, CEO, Aprais UK

The challenge posed by digital agencies to mainstream ad agency networks is a global industry staple of discussion. Headlines such as "Network agencies decline as digitals grow", "Is this the year digitals come of age?" and "Will digital as a separate agency channel soon cease to exist?" appear in trade journals round the world - week in, week out. It is the hot topic and digitals are the hot agencies.

Far less analysed is the impact the rise of digital is having on the sanity and confidence of client marketing teams worldwide. To admit that the digital arena is confusing or frustrating is like admitting you are out of touch. To acknowledge that, in digital, the tasks of leading the development process, understanding agency fees or demonstrating the success of activity are all far from straightforward management challenges is seen almost as an admission of failure.

Digital communications can thus all too easily become the "emperor's new clothes", with all sides colluding to talk it up. Surely, however, it should be permissible to admit that digital activity is still relatively new, represents an ongoing journey rather than a destination, and will inevitably involve mistakes? Given this, it is pertinent to ask why the management of digital agencies is such a headache for clients, and what can be done to make it easier. Below are some rules to navigating the process based on our experience.

1) Find an architect, not just a builder

The initial challenge is finding the right agency for your needs. That often means facing the problem of identifying EXACTLY what you need. To employ a housing analogy, you may think you need somewhere to live. Maybe it is a bungalow, maybe a camper van. And you may go out with that broad brief. Before you know it, you are being sold a loft extension. Whoa! How did that happen?

In digital, the market is over-fragmented and the agencies over-specialised. Just as when building a house you need plumbers, electricians, plasterers et al., so it is with digital. There are myriad niche companies, some of which specialise only in certain areas, such as web design, search-engine optimisation or viral marketing, and will not run end-to-end digital marketing campaigns.

2) Plan for "Launch and Live" not "Launch and Leave"

Marketing departments have to be reconfigured so that digital agencies, and the campaigns they create, are actively and constantly monitored. It is no longer possible to work feverishly towards a campaign launch deadline, then stand back and wait to see its impact. With interactive, the fun starts on the "go live" date, so to get the most out of their interactive communications, management need to allocate more time to the activity. Given that most marketing departments have fewer resources than in previous years this is an obvious source of tension.

3) Accept digital will take marketing to scary new places

Digital agencies inevitably take companies away from the tried and trusted. The problem is you and the agency will not always get it right, and failures feel more obvious in digital than they do in traditional channels.

4) Brief a vision, not a tactic

When seeking to find an agency, clients often brief digital agencies too narrowly - treating them merely as executional partners - and then wonder why they have creative burnout as the agency fails to understand the brand and its key consumer insight, and shows the client round after round of nearmiss work. In fairness, digital agencies can also be guilty of mistaking implementational wizardry for strategic relevance. Strong strategic leadership is essential and has to come from the client marketing team.

5) Be a ring master, not a coach

The newly-emerging model of brand communications demands collaboration, not just integration. This is particularly important because digital has the potential to cause added unrest and infighting between newcomer digital suppliers and the client's existing agencies. This is not the fault of the digital agency. But it does help explain the client's headache factor. To a greater or lesser extent, all the traditional agencies sitting around the table will believe they also have the right and capability to deliver digital solutions. So when a digital agency comes along, your ad agency, media agency, relationship marketing agency etc., will resent the digital team and think "We can do that". And they may waste their time and your money trying to prove it. The above scenario underlines the need for marketing departments to be the strategic ring masters, uniting a multi-disciplined team around well-defined objectives, and being clear on everybody's roles and responsibilities. An increasing number of Aprais' clients around the world are including the ability to perform in cross-team collaboration as criteria in formal assessments of their agencies. Clients realise the instruction "Play nicely together" is no longer enough.

6) Ease analysis paralysis

Genuinely proving return on investments can be tough, and there is no shortage of data from digital activity which can be used to calculate return on particular marketing investments. Putting digital in its wider communications context and understanding what success looks like in absolute terms are both hard. It is not a question of whether, relatively speaking, Banner Ad A worked better then Banner Ad B, but whether banner advertising was a cost effective option among communications alternatives. To solve this particular headache, it can help to have a culture of "live and learn" which believes in trialing digital and accepts that campaign results can be assessed but not measured perfectly.

7) Pay enough... but what is "enough"?

Given the sector's immaturity, and the fact that some agencies have come of age after being acquired by larger communication groups while others remain small and independently-owned, differences between agencies are only to be expected. But this compensation confusion is not a reality which client-side procurement departments will readily accept. Thus it can develop into yet another headache for the marketing executives. Again, the answer is to trial various solutions. Have a structure which is a mix of results and time-based compensation, such as a base retainer with topped-up project fees - one of which is purely results-based. Learn to trust the agency and your gut instincts. Is the agency staff giving their all? Have they done good work and gone above and beyond the call of duty? Do claimed hours look right?

Factor in bonuses for good working practices and work with the agency, not against it. Ultimately, accept this area may be a judgment call. As a result of all of the above factors, successful digital agency management requires a mixture of clarity of purpose, risk-taking, instinct and trial and error. That is a mix which traditional marketing departments have not had in their DNA for many years. But it also explains why, much to the creative ad agencies' concern, some digital agencies are beginning to get very, very close to their marketing clients. They have gone from being suppliers to partners. When you have explored, learnt and succeeded together, it creates a bond which makes the inevitable growing pains seem a price worth paying.