Marketing Procurement

For marketing, efficiency and effectiveness are two sides of the same coin

Efficiency & Effectiveness

Here’s the rub for agencies. Clients require you to be simpler, cheaper and faster while simultaneously providing them with better, more comprehensive and more integrated solutions. Efficiency and effectiveness. Two sides of the same coin.

“Frankly, your complexity should not be our problem”, said P&G marketing supremo Marc Pritchard – with, you suspect, more than a hint of frustration in his voice – almost five years ago. “We want you to make that complexity invisible.”

And so, marketing companies set about doing just that. Some merged disparate entities under one brand, while others, taking quasi-inspiration from the ‘Village’ model pioneered by Havas since 2012, simply stuck them under the same roof.

But merging dilutes specialisms. And simply masking years of built-up structural and cultural complexity with a fancy façade doesn’t actually address the problem itself: that agencies and their legacy models remain siloed, slow and inefficient, while they cannibalise themselves over slices of pie that were once, but are no longer, exclusively theirs.

Combine this with procurement-driven downward pressure on costs, the demand for greater accountability – with CMOs under pressure to justify every pound of marketing spend – and the extensive transformation required by many businesses post-COVID, and agencies have been left facing somewhat of an existential crisis.

The trouble – and opportunity – for agencies is that genuine transformation does not happen in any one vertical. Rather, they need to be able to identify, and then help solve, clients’ wider business issues. And this approach has to be holistic: even to a man with several hammers, everything inevitably still looks like a nail.

Over the past decade or so, the industry’s most common answer to this problem has been to build multi-discipline, slightly Frankenstein-ish teams out of various affiliated agencies to service a specific client. Yet by determining the composition of such teams up front, you limit the potential solutions it can generate – and therefore the range of problems it can address. These ‘one-size-fits-all…the time’ models lack flexibility and are inherently inefficient.

Also read from Havas:  Shapeshifters: morphing the agency model by removing complexity

Or listen to Xavier & Patrick:  Webinar: Reinventing the agency model by removing complexity

Instead, with lines between disciplines increasingly translucent, ‘scope of work’ a constantly evolving beast and agility a top priority, what clients now require from their agencies is a scalable, genuinely fluid model based on shifting needs. For agencies and all their historical, inbuilt inefficiencies, it’s fair to say this is fairly antithetical. Their ability to pull it off relies not just on how they structure themselves, but fundamentally how they behave.

One point of contact

 Gone are the days of expensive, large, dedicated teams. With an eye firmly on efficiency but also simplicity, what’s needed now is a much smaller core team – with one point of contact allowing clients to have one overarching conversation instead of, say, 10 piecemeal ones, as well as enabling absolute goal and KPI alignment across all stakeholders, both agency and client-side.

For this to work requires a new breed of progressive account leads who are much more intimately attuned to their clients’ business needs and challenges, and who possess broader, multi-dimensional skillsets, from business strategy through tech. These discipline-agnostic leaders will be crucial in helping clients access relevant, varied expertise from any discipline, faster and without friction, where and when it’s needed – and release it just as fast when it isn’t.

But efficiency is only half of it. For this approach to be effective requires access to a genuine breadth and depth of specialist expertise. It also requires an innate spirit of collaboration, not competition – which is why at Havas, we’ve deliberately assembled one specialist agency per discipline, across the entire marketing mix, under our overarching P&L.

This model, very intentionally, motivates our agencies to work together, helping us develop the right solution to any given problem – whether that involves strategy, creative, consultancy, CX, media, experiential, digital, branding and design, eCommerce, PR, entertainment, production or public affairs, or, more likely, a coordinated approach across multiple disciplines. It also renders internal competition largely pointless, incentivising collaboration by design.

Facilitating this kind of agile resourcing and ease of access to deep wells of specialist talent works much harder both for clients – who can buy a bank of hours they can use where, how and when they need, cutting waste and making it easier to prove the benefits in the boardroom – but also for agencies, who can maximise their resource, getting the right people to the point of need quicker and more often.

Here’s the rub for agencies. Clients require you to be simpler, cheaper and faster while simultaneously providing them with better, more comprehensive and more integrated solutions. Efficiency and effectiveness. Two sides of the same coin.

About the authors

Xavier Rees is CEO Havas London and Havas CX helia & Patrick Affleck is CEO, Havas Media Group UK&I