Featured on the ANA:

— Read the published ANA article —

No matter what kind of marketer you are, you’ll spend years acquiring essential skills to master your craft. One of the most critical skills is often the least: how to work effectively with your agency partners. This is an important muscle for any marketer to build, as the quality and effectiveness of the work you produce is often a direct reflection of a strong agency relationship and how well you collaborate together.

We all want the best work from our agencies. Agency partnerships are often a brand’s secret weapon in delivering advertising and marketing success. Whether external or internal, brands rely heavily on agencies as valuable partners, intrinsically linked to brand building and market success. So why do some relationships thrive while others fail? What works and what doesn’t? The answers are not always obvious, but they do exist.

If you are interacting with agencies on a regular basis, these are the questions you need to regularly ask yourself:

• What is the best agency model for my organization, and how do I find the right agency?
• What do I need to know about our contractual relationship, what is the appropriate compensation approach with them, and how do I become a more effective negotiator?
• How do I best manage the creative process, accurately scope the work I want my agencies to take on, brief them successfully, and provide actionable feedback that yields stronger work?
• How do I build an outstanding relationship with my agencies, evaluate their performance, and strengthen the partnership over time?

Are you ready to improve how you work with your agencies and take your work to the next level? I invite you to build that important muscle and become the client every agency wants to have. The new ANA on-demand training course, Agency Management, will help you acquire the skills to turn volatile agency relationships into effective partnerships that drive better ROI. This course is available now and complimentary to ANA client-side marketer members.

Bruno Gralpois is an ANA faculty member and the co-founder and principal at Agency Mania Solutions, an agency management SaaS platform and professional services firm. He has been instrumental in establishing agency management as a central global discipline for many of the Leading 200 Advertisers.

By Bruno Gralpois, ANA Faculty | December 6, 2018