It’s no secret that technology is becoming increasingly important to advertisers, as it greatly improves their ability to use paid media to directly drive and measure business outcomes. As a result, and as agency-land has been chattering about for a while now, it is increasingly important that agencies are able to deftly navigate the advertising and marketing technology space and demonstrate that they can build the right technology-enabled solutions to drive their clients’ businesses forward. As all those involved in the Agency Pitch Season of 2015 can attest, this is not only important for ongoing client management, but also, tech-enabled, client-specific solutions are critical to winning new business pitches as well.
This has been a difficult realization for the major global media agencies, as the correct response to this insight involves a major cultural shift and realignment in expertise. This cultural evolution is unlikely to turn media agencies into producers of technology, as that is a job best left to the experts. As a result, an agency’s ability to productively partner with technology producers to jointly deliver innovative, tech-enabled solutions will determine their fate over the coming years. Those agencies that are able to successfully navigate their technology partnerships are likely to thrive in 2016 and beyond, while those that are not will be left on the sidelines. In this context, we’ve come up with the top three ways we think agencies can better navigate their technology partnerships to drive improved client business outcomes and to help their own businesses grow.
- Pick relatively few core technology platform partners—and truly partner with them
Adtech and martech are very crowded spaces (have you checked out the latest LUMAscape?) with lots of players saying they can do lots of different and overlapping things. Not all of them have good technology nor will prove to be good partners. In order to get the most out of your technology providers, you have to truly partner with them. This means being willing to make commitments, sharing information and building differentiated things together—and expecting them to do the same. Almost by definition, you can’t truly partner with a huge number of technology providers. The right answer is to choose relatively few core partners with which you can partner deeply. The choice should be made on the basis of a few criteria:
- Do they have good technology that’s gotten some organic traction with your teams and clients and driven positive results?
- Do they staff your account with good people who understand their technology and your business, and who are capable of designing and implementing complicated solutions that solve your business needs? Are these people trustworthy business partners?
- Is the technology platform open, customizable and flexible? Can other technologies, supply sources and data sources be plugged in with relative ease such that more direct partnerships are not necessary?
- Is the technology partner aligned with you strategically? Are they willing and able to build a differentiated, joint offering with you to commercialize to your clients? Are they more interested in working with your clients directly with or without the involvement of your agency?
- Is the technology partner a healthy business that is likely to continue to thrive and maintain a consistent strategy and vision in the coming funding crunch and consolidation in the space?
Once you’ve picked your core partners, truly partner with them. Let them engage with various teams and entities within your business. Introduce them to your clients where appropriate. Openly share the specifics of your business opportunities and problems with which they are well-positioned to help. When they earn it, treat them as trusted advisors for your business.
- Engage them to build custom products that are exclusive to your agency
Tech partners typically have core products that go a long way towards solving for specific agency or client needs. However, more often than not, agencies have unique and nuanced needs, and some tech partners are set up to be able to build bespoke products specifically for a given agency partner. Custom products are especially effective for the agency when they interact with an existing agency differentiating asset, such as a proprietary data source or privileged supply. These custom projects could involve anything from building bespoke insight dashboards which ingest client-specific or agency-specific data, tools that mitigate agency-specific operational pain points or entire platforms built to the particular strategic and workflow needs of the agency to manage planning, buying and reporting for agency media deals.
Ideally, custom-built products can enrich or help more effectively activate differentiated, existing agency assets. Often these custom offerings involve more than one of your top technology partners, which further differentiates the offering and puts the agency in an even better business position. In this way, tech partners and agencies can work together to build a new offering that is differentiated from other agencies—even if those agencies also partner with that same tech provider.
- Articulate a joint value proposition and let them help you commercialize it
If point No. 2 is about building actual products together, point No. 3 is about strategic sales alignment to effectively commercialize those products you’ve jointly built. In the context of custom tools you’ve developed, it makes sense to articulate clearly what it is you do with your technology partners, a.k.a. your joint value proposition, in the form of client-centric offerings that you have developed and are able to implement together.
Once this has been defined, it’s time to sell. Technology partners can get into the habit of selling to their agency partners rather than with them. By the same token, agencies can have a habit of keeping their technology partners behind the scenes for fear of, at best, creating confusion and, at worst, disintermediation. The best agency-tech partnerships don’t look like this. The best partnerships look more like the technology partner representatives being nearly indistinguishable from the people that work at the agency itself. If you’ve selected good technology providers and created a true partnership (Step 1), and worked to build differentiated offerings together (Step 2), the logical third step is to let them help you jointly commercialize these offerings to different entities within your organization as well as, when appropriate, to your clients.
The right answer is probably not a carte blanche for your tech partners to speak to anyone about anything, but rather a framework by which you feel comfortable allowing the tech partner to help commercialize your joint offering. This framework should certainly involve high levels of transparency around all conversations, and likely also includes alignment on content and co-development of collateral where appropriate. In other words, similar to how you’d work with people and teams within your own organization. And that is the key to any good partnership.