Reducing the Negative Impacts of Agency Change

By Grant Halloran, Orbis CEO

A recent survey of senior marketers by the CMO Council, titled "Marketing Outlook 2008", identified that 45% of marketers expected to change at least one of their agencies in the coming year.

Impact of Agency Change

Changing agencies is often a good thing. Fresh ideas, new creative… better results. But let’s have a look at some of the downsides experienced when marketing changes the roster:

• The client and the agency both need to adapt to new processes and cultures, often impacting productivity.
• Process friction can slow down desired cycle times. Unforeseen bottle-necks can develop.
• Financial processes and reconciliations can be more difficult as the agency learns how the client’s internal systems and procedures work.
• Depending on where the digital assets created under the last regime are housed, Marketing can be up for some unexpected re-production costs.

Creative Supplier Explosion

In reality, the days of having a small number of creative and production suppliers are over. Most major marketers will have dozens of suppliers. In fact, at a recent marketing conference I attended in LA, a CMO told a story about how he discovered his business had over 800 creative suppliers on roster throughout the world. That’s not a typo… yes, 800! Imagine the amount of change that occurs across that roster each year. It makes control of the operation around consistent practices, brand controls and asset re-usage nigh on impossible. Even on a more modest scale, a national-level, consumer package goods client of Orbis’ struggled with the changes in their production supply-base of about 12 companies. None of these suppliers collaborated together and none would share any content. The double-up cost effect was massive.

Marketing used to be this simple:

But now looks more like this:

Minimizing the Downsides – Marketing Supply Chain Advantage

The old-fashioned impacts of agency change do not need to be as heavily borne today. Establishment of a marketing management system, such as Orbis Marketing, gives Marketing unprecedented control over its assets and the processes by which it creates them. At Orbis, we call one of the resulting benefits "Marketing Supply Chain Advantage". Critical to this concept is Marketing seeing itself as the centre of its world and not ceding primary responsibility to any suppliers for marketing efficiency and effectiveness. This means Marketing taking control of its own processes; business rules; procedures and digital assets. A very large number of leading Marketing departments around the globe have already done this, and achieved it through establishment of a system that automates marketing across the operational spectrum of planning, production and financial management.

Smoother and Less Costly Agency Change

When the new agency comes on board in future, it is trained in how to use the system, how the client manages its day-to-day marketing operation, and ultimately achieves productivity much faster than in the pre-system days. This is not to say that the agency can’t, and shouldn’t influence change in the way the client operates. Indeed, a powerful marketing management system, such as Orbis Marketing, allows practices and workflows to be refined and tweaked easily and quickly, and for Marketers and their suppliers to be able to adopt these changes seamlessly.

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