The Surprising Evolution of a Client-Centric Agency

What would happen if you tried to create a true client-centric agency today? What services would the agency provide? How would its business evolve? We found out — and the results say a lot about the advertising marketplace today.

Two years ago, we set out to create a different kind of agency: a client-centric firm that would serve a handful of C-level executives (and senior level staff) at mid-sized organizations. These types of clients are generally ill-served by both big agencies and smaller creative shops. 

Our agency would be fixated on delivering business value, beyond marketing communications. But the agency would also be competent in all marketing channels. It would have no profit center it needed to push… no arbitraged media inventory it had to sell… and no holding company margin it was required to meet. 

To us, our services would evolve in a logical fashion: we would immerse ourselves in our clients’ businesses, including their financials, products, organizational structure, customer experience, data, communications, and more. We would help diagnose their needs from a business perspective (not just a creative point-of-view). Then we would handle most (if not all) of their marketing communications requirements.

Two years later, we have succeeded, but not in the way we expected. We’re working with fewer clients than we thought. It turns out that delivering true client value via a bespoke model takes a greater investment in time than we expected. Secondly, our service offering has become different for each of our clients, as shown below. Each of these variant service models says something about contemporary clients’ needs:

1. A Strategic Consultancy.For one client, we do virtually no creative. We have evolved to become their strategic/business partner. Their primary challenges were strategic, not related to communications (which is the case for many clients who seek a new agency partner). In this circumstance, we have ended up helping the client rework their pricing strategy, customer experience, online reputation, organizational structure, and provided a new framework for communications. While we also helped enhance their use of SEM, retargeting, email marketing, and customer communications, it was/is more efficient for the client’s internal marketing team to handle these channels, as well as develop their creative communications in-house. Our time is best spent driving their business and organizational transformation. While marketing communications is always important, this relationship confirms that the skills of a strategic business/marketing partner can often be better applied to more impactful endeavors than developing marketing messages.

1. A Content Marketing Shop. For another client (a nonprofit), their key issue was/is making them relevant to a new generation and ensuring they effectively leverage the power of social media to galvanize support and effect change. For this client, we dedicate the majority of our time developing compelling video content for social media deployment. The challenge here is to maximize impact, while minimizing the time spent developing communications. This required us to invent a highly efficient creative delivery model to provide appropriate value, an approach that’s radically different than most agencies use.

1. A Product Development Resource. Marketing today is first and foremost about the products an organization offers, not the messaging it conveys. For a third client, we found the need to constantly help formulate new products and bring them to market, since this client competes in a rapidly-changing market sector. 

1. A De Facto Marketing Department. Lastly, for another client, we are more than we expected we would be. We are their de facto marketing department. This client realized that we were more efficient and effective than their internal resources in marketing, communications, and technology. Now, more of these responsibilities have been outsourced to us.  

Wall Street has soured on the large agency holding companies as of late. This makes sense to us. From our perspective, we see that an agency model that easily scales (and provides strong margins to shareholders) is not what most clients need these days. At the same time, while a bespoke, client-centric agency model does not scale easily; it sure is working for each of our clients. 

Lawrence M. Kimmel is CEO of Rung-UP, the first agency custom built for C-Level executives at mid-sized organizations. He can be reached at Hi@Rung-UP.com.