From CMOs to agency consultants, marketing leaders on both sides of the fence share their view on getting the best out of client-agency partnerships
Most marketing departments rely on external agencies for at least a portion of the marketing process, whether that’s research, creative, media planning, or all of the above and more. And yet building good agency partnerships is rarely considered an important skill.
Those marriage-made-in-heaven partnerships – the Volkswagen and DDBs, the McDonald’s and Leo Burnetts, the Häagen-Dazs and BBHs – are held up as something to dream about, not work towards. But these groups didn’t lock eyes across a crowded bar, they didn’t “just click” – these relationships are built and maintained by skilled marketers on both sides.
We spoke to senior leaders on all sides of the equation, to understand what goes into building a successful client-agency partnership. And how MiniMBA in Marketing can help both clients and agencies get the most out of the relationship.
Stick or twist? There’s a third option, says agency intermediary
Oystercatchers is known as the team behind some big agency land shake-ups, including the much-talked-about reunion of Häagen-Dazs and BBH after 30 years. But they also work with brand-side teams to accelerate marketing performance. That could include in-house capabilities, optimising operations and team training – “the whole marketing ecosystem,” explains Managing Director Becky McKinlay.
“The famous bit, if you like, is when we help a client find a new agency,” says Becky. “But actually, our position is that we are in favour of long-term relationships.
“If you can avoid a pitch as a client, it’s often the best thing to do, because they’re disruptive. They take up a lot of time. They cost a lot of money. And if things are broken from a marketing perspective at your end, no new agency partner is going to help solve that.”
if things are broken from a marketing perspective … no new agency partner is going to help solve that
Another thing Becky advises clients against is going out to pitch “because they feel like they should.” If there’s no real intent to go in another direction, it can often do more harm than good. It puts the onus on the agency to impress, rather than both parties working together to get the best results for the business.
“If you think your incumbent is going to win it anyway, why are you going to waste their time putting them through? Why don’t we just work on the relationship and look at the capability set and ways of working?”
The training gap
Becky has worked in-house, as a commissioning client and ran her own successful agency for more than a decade, so she’s been on both sides of the fence throughout her career. Now, as a consultant and intermediary, she’s got a bird’s eye view of the whole arena – and she believes a lack of training is a key factor in the breakdown of client-agency partnerships.
“The global financial crisis took a whole swathe of people out. People were promoted and they hadn’t been through that foundational marketing training. They found themselves at a marketing director level and they’d never appointed an agency.
“And again, it’s happened with COVID … Marketers are sitting on the C-Suite, they’ve got to talk the language of the boardroom and they haven’t been trained in that. They’re having to manage stakeholders who think marketing is still colouring in and they need agency partners who can really support them and demonstrate the effectiveness of everything that they’re doing.”
Marketers are sitting on the C-Suite, they’ve got to talk the language of the boardroom and they haven’t been trained in that
Another shortfall comes from the specialisation of our industry, says Becky. “People haven’t had the same trajectory. They might have grown up through performance marketing or through brand, but they haven’t experienced that full marketing world. When I grew up as a client, I had to cover everything, so I got a view across the lot. Whereas now we’ve got people who are running big media pitches and they’ve come out of a social background – they don’t have that core experience in their toolkit.”
You can see that training need reflected in the typical seniority of a MiniMBA in Marketing class. Around 90% are already in a leadership role, and almost 40% of those are Head of Department level or above (class exit survey April 2025).
That’s because the course is designed to give experienced marketers a fundamental grounding across the whole discipline – and, more importantly, to show how it all fits together to make a business run profitably. Becky says that core understanding is essential to marketing effectiveness and, as part of that, good client-agency partnerships.
“Relationships is one of the key areas that we try to own – how to be a better client,” says Becky. “Our clients are predominantly marketing or procurement. A lot of them have done MiniMBA and we do training with clients as well, because you get the best out of your agency when your communication lines are clear, when the evaluation is clear, all of those things. So, MiniMBA is a foundational and core thing for clients who are working with agencies.”
Good relationships are built over time
Like any relationship, client-agency relationships can come to “irreconcilable differences” and it’s best to move on. Typically, that happens when a honeymoon period gives way to complacency, teams change too much, or clients feel like they aren’t getting access to the best people. Or it can be something as intangible as whether both parties can bear to spend time locked in a room together, says Becky. “That might feel like quite a low bar, but that’s where things can break. For a client, going to an agency should be the best part of their week – it’s the fun stuff.”
But for the most part, Becky would recommend that clients and agencies work on strengthening the relationship and – importantly – give it enough time to mature.
“We believe in and promote long standing relationships. Typically, we see the best work comes from agencies and clients that have been working together for over three years. A good example is Tesco and BBH. They’ve been working together for eight years. There is brilliant understanding of the Tesco business by BBH – there’s a real shorthand between them.
“Tesco’s work has increased creatively, exponentially, in the last three years, once they’ve really learned to trust each other,” says Becky.
“Build up that trust. Build up that shorthand. Bring them into your world. Don’t blame them for everything that isn’t working at your end.”
Creative agencies are “guardians” of brand
CMO Frankie Coulter has had an incredible few years at the helm of New Zealand’s largest FMCG company, Goodman Fielder. A fresh approach to advertising has breathed life into some heritage brands – winning ground in awareness and consideration, as well as market share gains of up to +10%.
Though it was no simple journey, Frankie says. When he took up the CMO role in 2022, he also inherited the company’s standing creative agency. DDB is one of the best advertising agencies in the world and their New Zealand office is no exception, but together with Goodman Fielder they weren’t producing good work.
Instead of changing agencies, he changed the relationship – and the first step in that process was looking inward at his own internal capabilities and skills gaps. Every marketer at Goodman Fielder now completes the MiniMBA in Marketing as standard, and it’s made a huge difference in the way they work with their agencies. Where they had previously “outsourced” the entire creative process, Frankie’s team is now able to lead the strategy – working together with DDB on creative briefs that provide clear strategic backing and tangible campaign goals.
“We have been having many proper brand conversations that my team could not have had before doing the course … The conversations and work we are doing has transformed,” Frankie says.
The next step was redefining the agency’s role in the partnership. Frankie kicked off his own marketing career at Kellogg in the 90s, brushing up against the likes of advertising legends Charity Charity and Jeremy Bullmore – and he carries some of those early lessons with him to this day.
“I got a crack on Special K as an assistant brand manager, and the account director at the time said to me, ‘Frankie, we are the guardians of this brand. Don’t you try and **** it up.’
“The agency always owned the brand from an intellectual point of view. That’s one of the things I’m trying to bring into my business, because marketers come and go on a much more regular basis than your agency should.
marketers come and go on a much more regular basis than your agency should
“I’ve made a long-term partnership deal with our agency, where it’s not just a 12-month contract or a fleeting partnership – it’s a real partnership. As part of that, I demand the best people on my account … that can intellectually understand the fundamentals of marketing and branding. They need to be the guardians of that and hold my team to account if they’re trying to do something that isn’t right for the brands. The agency has got licence to push back to my team and say no.
“I’ve given my agency back guardianship of the brand, because the brand manager is custodian of the business and their job is to make profit for the company. They’re two different behaviours that you need to have, and both are really important, but it’s clear whose role is what.
“We’re still on the journey with this one, but the biggest difference is how we work with our agencies.”
Should you train with your agency?
Marketing leader Simon Peel took things a step further. Over the years, Simon has put hundreds of marketers through MiniMBA. But during his seven-year stint as Global Head of Media at adidas, he started putting his agency partners through MiniMBA training too.
“We wanted to think more strategically about the brand rather than just following trends or the zeitgeist. That’s when I started looking for something to fill those skill gaps. At first, I put just a few marketers through MiniMBA. But once we saw the impact it had, we were all in. We started rolling it out to more of the team and brought some of our agency partners on board.
“We began the approach by having extra money at the end of the year that needed to be spent. Rather than buying some last-minute adverts on YouTube, we spent the money on training the marketing and agency teams.” Simon says this approach raised a few eyebrows at first, but it quickly became part of their budgeting process.
“Most clients don’t tend to think of their agency as a partner … They don’t see the wider implications of sharing a belief and approach. It enables better questioning of the way things are done.”
clients don’t tend to think of their agency as a partner
Today, Simon is Managing Partner at strategic media consultancy, The Other Lot. They work with both client-side and agency-side partners on media effectiveness – agency relationships being an area they specialise in. In a recent episode of The Marketing Architects podcast, Simon says brands need to address their contract with agencies when thinking about overall marketing effectiveness, such as the long and the short.
“Are the agencies incentivised to do the long and short of it? Are they incentivised to put brand over performance? Have you got the measurement structures correct? Have you got the KPI framework correct?”
Again, it comes back to time, trust and communication. If the agency is being judged by quick wins or working under the threat of a ticking clock, you’re not going to achieve meaningful results. Marketers must bring agencies into the fold of their long-term business strategy to make sure everyone is pulling in the right direction.
Agencies must learn the strategic power of no
Rebecca Lalonde is a MiniMBA in Marketing and MiniMBA in Brand Management alumnus who specialises in helping agencies find the right positioning and new business infrastructure at her consultancy Good Circles.
She says it’s vital that agencies practice good marketing too and treat their own product as carefully as they would a commissioning client’s. That means getting clear on their own strategy, with defined targeting, positioning and business objectives.
“These are decision-making tools that impact everything you do. Does this fit our strategy in terms of the customers we’re going after? Does this piece of work support our position? Can we articulate how what we do creates value for our clients?
Clients don’t want to find the best agency. They want to find the right agency
“Clients don’t want to find the best agency. They want to find the right agency – a subtle but important distinction. They’re looking for an agency who understands them, their business and their customers; who has the right skills and capabilities. They don’t want an agency that can do everything. They want an agency who fits their brief and who is right for their brand.”
Rebecca warns agencies against scope creep: “When clients ask, ‘Can you do this too?’ the temptation is to say yes. But then how do you talk about what you do in any meaningful way? You can’t build a strategy on doing everything for everyone. The wider you go, the harder it becomes to maintain real expertise and knowledge. It dilutes your product and makes you less valuable to a client.”
She notes that smaller agencies can also fall foul of this through referrals. “Word of mouth is powerful, but without positioning you have no strategic control over the direction your business is taking. For new agencies especially, new business often comes from founders’ existing networks. But if you don’t have clarity on what you offer and to whom, once that black book runs out, if you’ve said yes to everything, you risk becoming just another generalist agency.
“Positioning is as much about what you don’t do as what you do. Saying no to the wrong things might feel hard in the short term, but it’s what creates long-term value – for you, and for your clients.”
Agencies need to be seen as a valuable consultant sounding board
The importance of saying no is something Oystercatchers’ Becky McKinlay believes in too. As a former agency founder, Becky says she would sometimes refuse briefs, telling the client, “We’re not set up for success.”
Similarly, the agency must be able to push back when ways of working are not compatible. She says, “Sometimes we’d get a briefing with ‘I need a response tomorrow.’ In which case I’d say, ‘Do you want my best ideas, or do you want my first ideas?’ Agencies need to be seen as a valuable consultant sounding board.
“Clients and agencies get the relationships and the outputs that they deserve. So, if as a client you are lastminute.com, you’re a bit of a bully, you pay late… Agencies are not going to go the extra mile. But if you are that client that provides long enough time windows, gives the feedback when it’s needed, has proper budget and expectations that fit within that budget, agencies will walk over hot coals for you. And it is absolutely incumbent on both sides to do their part.”
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