Innocean USA and United Parks & Resorts on building a strong brand-agency relationship
Brands often treat agencies purely as vendors, which can harm the quality of creative output. In this month’s edition of Convene. Challenge. Change., an editorial partnership between The Drum and the 4A’s, Marla Kaplowitz sits down in Cannes with Jason Sperling and Marisa Thalberg to dig into the fading art of building a durable connection between a brand and an agency.
Every strong brand-agency partnership maintains balance through mutual respect and trust. / Adobe Stock
If you were to poll a random group of people selected from any part of the world and from any point in history, asking them to list the attributes of a strong friendship, you’d probably hear some combination of the following responses: shared interests; a mutual ability to listen; steadfast loyalty, especially during hardship; respect; and above all, trust.
Those same qualities are necessarily found in any solid partnership between a brand and an agency, according to Jason Sperling, chief creative officer at Innocean USA, and Marisa Thalberg, chief marketing and communications officer at United Parks & Resorts. (The two companies have been collaborating since late last year.)
In a recent conversation with 4A’s president Marla Kaplowitz – hosted at this year’s Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity – Sperling and Thalberg discussed the evolving nature of the brand-agency relationship and how clear communication can unlock more creative and compelling work.
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As Kaplowitz pointed out early in the conversation, it’s often the case today that brands will treat an agency merely as a vendor – a partner who’s expected (and contractually obligated) to deliver a product or service without ever really being allowed to get to know the ethos that’s driving a brand’s mission.
In order to transcend what Kaplowitz describes as “that vendor dynamic,” Sperling and Thalberg insist that brands and agencies both need to embrace one another as partners, in the true sense of that word, with a shared vision and shared values. “The second that you engage with an agency, you have to treat them like an extended part of your team – because [that’s what] they are,” Thalberg says.
Why might this be a difficult feat to achieve these days? Why, in other words, might a brand and an agency struggle to reach the common ground that can serve as the foundation for work that truly stands out?
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According to Sperling, it’s a simple matter of shifting priorities within the marketing industry. On the one hand, he says, brands have had to “tighten their belts” – that is, slash their marketing budgets. At the same time, he points to the proliferation of a specialization mindset: Agencies are increasingly expected to provide expertise in a particular domain of advertising, like social or programmatic. As a result, a brand may need to partner with several agencies at once, each of them responsible for handling a specific component of creative output, thus negating the possibility of a durable and rewarding long-term union with a single agency.
“It’s hard for an agency to hold on to the totality of a business – the totality of a relationship – so they just become a part of the herd, so to speak,” Sperling says. “It just diminishes what I think is special and really important, which is this connection.”
(Sounds a bit like dating advice many of us have once given to a friend, no? Uncoincidentally, an analogy between the brand-agency relationship and a marriage was drawn in a previous edition of the Convene. Challenge. Change. series.)
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The key to finding and maintaining that kind of one-on-one connection was nicely summarized by Thalberg at the end of the conversation: “Partner mindset versus vendor mindset.”
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