Dual approach to improved agency roster performance

Client Category – Financial Services – Agency Roster Performance

Challenging Problem:

The client had launched a new campaign and felt that the agencies across the roster were under-performing, compromising the brand strategy and potentially the effectiveness of the associated campaign.

Creative Solution:

TrinityP3 tendered against a number of competitors to provide a process to:

  1. Diagnose the issues
  2. Advise on improvements
  3. Assist with implementation
  4. Measure improvement

The major differentiator between TrinityP3’s proposal and the competitors was the two streamed approach to measure both qualitative and quantitative performance metrics in the diagnosis and the follow up.

Process:

The process began with defining the marketing ecosystem. In this case the marketing process was initiated within the business and managed by a centralised group marketing function, responsible for the engagement and management of the agencies.

The approach was to undertake a qualitative assessment of this ecosystem using the Evalu8ing process to assess how each of the groups (Business, Marketing and Agencies) were working with each other. The second stream of work, the quantitative approach, was to assess the efficiency of the marketing process by benchmarking the agency resource utilisation and the costs.

The results were used to identify the areas of opportunities for increased performance and efficiency. These results were shared with the key cross-functional stakeholders and through a series of workshops agreed the areas of opportunities and streams of work to effect improvement.

The work streams were implemented across the marketing process from the business through to the agencies with all stakeholders involved in the improvement process.

Timeline:

The diagnosis took six weeks, the implementation was undertaken over a period of three months and the follow up was undertaken three months post the implementation. In total it was eight-month process.

Result and feedback:

The diagnosis found that there were key areas within the agencies that were under-performing. This was partially supported by the fact that the agency retainers were typically under valued and the agencies were making up the short fall in remuneration with a disproportionate level of junior resources. The agencies were also recovering the short fall through non-retainer remuneration or out of scope work.

This meant not only a lack of transparency, but also means the agencies were misaligned to the marketing team as the focus was on the implementation and not the strategic and creative.

It also highlighted some internal issues, within the client organisation, with ill-defined roles and responsibilities and misalignment of shared objectives between the business and the marketing team. The high volume of work and the demanded speed to market exacerbated this misalignment.