New Agency Relationship Management – Case study

 

Company Category: Telecommunications

Challenging Problem: The client had just appointed a new creative lead agency to be included in a mix of existing design, digital, media and sale promotions services providers who had developed a collaborative method of working together.

However, within weeks of appointing the new agency the client was getting disturbing feedback from the incumbent agencies and the marketing team and was worried they had made a poor decision.

Creative Solution: TrinityP3 used the Evalu8ing multiple stakeholder survey system, and with a panel of customised questions agreed by all of the agencies and marketing team, surveyed the relationship between the 6 groups (Marketing, Creative Agency, Media Agency, Digital Agency, Design Studio, Sales Promotion Agency)

Process: The process was a series of meetings and workshops around the survey. The first was with all of the senior stakeholders from client and agencies to agree participants, timeline and questions. Then the survey was undertaken and the results reported to all parties. Then a workshop of all stakeholders to discuss the results and agree solutions.

Timeline: The process from first meeting to the final workshop took 4 weeks.

Result and feedback: With questions focusing on communication, collaboration, responsiveness and process management, it quickly became clear there was a misalignment between the expectations of the client and the new agency and a cultural misalignment between the incumbent agencies and the new agency.

In the post survey meeting and the workshop it became clear that the term “lead” agency had be interpreted differently with the new creative agency trying to control rather than manage the process.

An interesting side finding was that many of the incumbent agencies also had, previously unarticulated, issues with the client team in regards to clarity and consistency of feedback, which often lead to many expensive and wasteful re-works of concepts and production, which lead to the implementation of a process optimisation project.

Cost: Contact TrinityP3 for details.

Further information: A free white paper on the use of Evalu8ing in managing agency relationships can be ordered here.