Brands are inviting agencies inside their organisations, and it's pushing collaborations beyond the usual boundaries.
Collaboration. It’s one of those buzzwords that’s often thrown around in industry circles. It constantly shows up in conversations about the ideal brand-agency relationship too, and for one simple reason: it works.
As brands’ needs get more complex (more channels to manage, more touch points to think about and a continuing rush to efficiency), we’re seeing a growing appetite to push the nature of agency collaboration.
Increasingly, agencies are embedding themselves within brands’ in-house teams, so that ideas can flow more naturally, decisions can be made much faster and extra capacity isn’t tied to the commitment of hiring full-time. It’s ‘augment and improve with us’ rather than ‘bring in the hotshots and leave them to it’.
It’s essentially the best of both worlds, where businesses get an outsider perspective (the reason so many of them hire an agency in the first place) that’s grounded by insider knowledge.
REVEAL THE MESSY TRUTH
“The real benefit, when you have an agency that is truly part of your team, is you get a co-conspirator. They become more than a partner – they’re an ally. An ally that’s hell-bent on helping you achieve your creative and commercial objectives”, says Emily Jeffrey-Barrett, Founder of Among Equals, a creative agency that’s worked with some of the world’s fastest growing companies in this way.
“To some degree, you get that with any good agency partnership. But the difference, when they are a genuine part of your team, is that the trust becomes much deeper – you can have ultra-transparent conversations, reveal the messy truth of your business, and ultimately do better, braver work together. Brands aren’t holding back with their thoughts or feedback; the agency isn’t trying to get to perfect before they share. It’s more progress, less perfection; more ideas, less selling.”
“What we’re trying to do is work closer,” agrees Josh Clarricoats, Founder of Insiders, a creative studio that was intentionally set up to help brands in this way.
“For us, closeness means building a relationship rooted in trust and mutual respect, where both sides feel comfortable challenging each other. It creates positive tension, not friction, allowing ideas to be pushed further without tipping into defensiveness or an ‘us vs them’ dynamic. It also helps us understand the wider business context. Sometimes brands keep an agency at arm’s length and don’t necessarily share what’s really driving the brief.
“Do they want to sell the brand in the next few years? Or does the marketing team need to hit certain targets to grow their influence internally? Even brands that are more forthcoming may only share part of the story with an agency due to time constraints. But knowing more of this context can alter which approach we want to take and ensure we’re creating as much impact as possible.”
A MORE LONG-TERM COLLABORATION
Embedding teams in this way is structurally different from a one-off big rebrand or digital overhaul. These relationships tend to be set up as open-ended retainer agreements, which give agencies more time to understand how a business actually works.
“You need total clarity from the get-go around roles, decision-making, boundaries.”
Emily Jeffrey-Barrett — Founder, Among Equals
It means agencies get involved in strategic conversations much further upstream than they normally would. Ultimately, it’s a relationship that’s richer than the standard 8-12-week project engagement, and one that’s built with longer-term results in mind.
What it looks like in the day-to-day can vary from team to team. For some, it means sharing an office a couple days a week for that unmatched bouncing of ideas you can only really get in person. For others, embedding looks like smaller, simpler things: getting ‘Slacky’ or using WhatsApp to get quick responses on things.
We’ve heard from other agencies in the AUFI network that have done ‘back-to-front’ embedding – inviting smaller-sized clients to embed themselves into the agency. It’s something that Love and Money recently did with their client Telepathic Instruments.
As Founder and ECD Charl Laubscher explains: “Having a ready-made set of disciplines, routines and norms allowed Telepathic to hit the ground sprinting.” He adds that embedding functions as a “natural conduit” between agency and client, which can be particularly helpful for time-strapped startups that need to launch a product in market as quickly as possible.
However a brand decides to do it, the principle is the same: deeper understanding, slower and closer collaboration, and better outcomes for both sides as a result. As Charl says: “A successful partnership is ongoing, but focussed on strategy, systems and one-off projects, not business as usual.”
MORE PROGRESS, LESS PERFECTION
Embedding requires a mindset shift, however. As Josh says, “there’s a lot of value in presenting things as works-in-progress.” Brands need to give agencies the opportunity to be more experimental, showcasing different approaches and demonstrating the value of each.
As Charl says: “An investment in brand is not a one-off thing, it’s an ongoing, iterative process.”
It’s something Emily also references: “We regularly pitch up at weekly meetings with our long-time client, Grind, with surprise decks of ideas we think could be valuable for them, ranging from practical to provocative.
“Many of our most effective campaigns have started out that way, vs as formal briefs. Ideas that feel riskier get surfaced; a one-liner in a deck can form the basis of an entire campaign.”
This approach actually helped Among Equals win a huge OOH campaign to translate the strategy of one of the US’ biggest wellness brands, AG1, for the UK market.
“There wasn’t a formal ‘here are our three ideas, pick one’ presentation, but instead unpolished copy documents, design exploration and multiple directions,” says Emily. “We trusted them to bring ideas and insights, they trusted us to deliver impact.”
And of course, working and presenting in this way makes it easier to move at speed, which is a priority we’re hearing time and time again in brands’ briefs. “It gets to a point where you know each other so well that formal briefings become unnecessary”, Emily explains. “You don’t have to wait weeks for big bang presentations – you’ll get an 8am text with a banging idea that we thought of in the shower, or dreamt up in the middle of the night.”
FINDING THE RIGHT SET UP
Setting up these kinds of embedded client-agency partnerships requires one key thing: everyone’s buy-in from the start.
“You need total clarity from the get-go around roles, decision-making, boundaries,” says Emily. “Total openness around ways of working so that you can co-create processes and communications that work for both sides. And then set shared goals – commercial, creative, cultural – within the relationship itself.”
“The trust becomes much deeper - you can have ultra-transparent conversations, reveal the messy truth of your business, and ultimately do better, braver work together.”
Emily Jeffrey-Barrett — Founder, Among Equals
Finding solutions together isn’t meant to be easy, otherwise brands wouldn’t need agencies in the first place. Occasional moments of tension are normal, but partnerships should be set up so both sides can interrogate each other productively and keep things moving without creating cracks in the relationship (for more on that, read our guide to giving your agency good feedback).
It’s also important to preserve your agency’s outside perspective. While you want them to feel like part of the team, you’re relying on them for outside thinking and objectivity, away from internal politics – so don’t assimilate them into your world completely.
Perhaps most importantly, brand-agency relationships need to retain a sense of enjoyment.
“Fun is an often overlooked and underestimated part of the work our industry does,” says Emily. “You don’t go into branding or advertising because you want a boring, stuffy, serious job. Client relationships should reflect that – and typically, the more enjoyable a collaboration is, the more productive it is.
“In these long-term, close relationships it’s important to treat one another as friends – trusted confidants who are on your side and have your back.”
