Helping agencies find their True North

For this month’s Newsletter, covering all things agencies, we had to call in the big guns.

Meet Robin Bonn, an expert agency coach and consultant with more than 20 years of experience driving growth for both indie and global network agencies. During a long agency career, he led winning pitches for the likes of Experian, Procter & Gamble, ITV, Microsoft, Facebook and Ford Motor Company, to name a few.

In recent years, as well as being a True & North facilitator, Robin advises agency CEOs on getting super clear on what they’re uniquely good at and how to sell it at a premium. Having repositioned close to 100 agencies around the world, the business he founded, Co:definery, is a global leader in agency strategy and differentiation.

So when he tells us how #agencies can win with #clients, we listen!

Rob, tell us about your love for agencies. How did it all begin?

Ha, it was love at first sight!

Having done a very dull degree in cell biology, I fell into a sales role in a technology business. I loved the selling part, but I did not love wearing a suit every day. So when my next move took me into agencies — and comfy shoes! — I knew I was home.

Since then, I’ve always massively enjoyed spending time with agency people — 99% of whom I’ve found are smart, generous and hugely energising to be around. What’s not to love?!

And tell us what (occasionally) drives you mad about agencies.

This is a tricky question for me. As a solver of agency problems, I am simultaneously exasperated and commercially sustained by their challenges. So while I wouldn’t say that agencies drive me mad, I do see familiar patterns of thinking and behaviours that hold them back.

For example, agencies are often not commercial enough. They lack clarity on what they do, where they’re heading and how to get there. For me, these are fundamental business strategy questions.

At an individual level, connected to the commerciality point, agencies also have an endemic habit of ‘busyness’. This is really dangerous. So many working practices aren’t healthy — the long hours, the culture of urgency, the subservience to clients. These aren’t sustainable, so they cause burnout and our industry loses wonderful, talented people - not least a lot of mums.

Happily, I think agencies are getting better at both of these issues.

What does growth look like these days for agencies?

Since the pandemic, I see a lot of agency leaders thinking more broadly about growth — especially within independents, where the founders have more control than network agency CEOs.

Before Covid, the defining quality of growth was often overly numerical — profit, revenue, headcount etc. Now I’m seeing a richer perspective more often, including questions of diversity and gender equality, as well as simply optimising the business around people seeing their kids, having time to recharge and enjoying their lives.

For CEOs, ‘work hard, play hard’ is a much tougher sell these days. They can’t buy discretionary effort with free pizza any more and I think that’s great.

With the entire advertising ecosystem being tested to its limits, what would you say are the winning characteristics that will enable agencies to endure in the future?

I don’t buy into any fatalistic assertions about our industry — there are far too many smart, kind, motivated people for us to go down the pan, regardless of what AI advocates might say.

But despite being a sector that preaches ‘agility’, we do have an issue with inertia. If you track agency history back to digital arrival, or media and creative being split, or even back to Procurement arriving in the seventies — plenty of agencies have failed to adapt.

Certainly, many agencies struggle to stand out and competently value what they do. Without that, it’s so much harder to consistently attract great brands and sustain healthy — i.e. non co-dependent — client relationships, or to thrive in the talent market.

So for me, a winning agency has a clear strategy — not just vague aspirations to be ‘the best’ or whatever — and can solve a problem for a discrete segment of clients. Otherwise, their proposition is just ‘we do stuff for clients’, which is just the kind of self-commoditising rhetoric that encourages Procurement to walk all over them.

Why is commerciality so important for agencies?

Because agencies are businesses! Being in a ‘market of one’ enables you to command a premium, which funds all the good things that agency leaders want — like healthy salaries, top talent, building great cultures and investing in communities, all of which contribute to doing great work.

So being more commercial doesn’t make an agency any less about ‘the work’ — on the contrary, by understanding, for example, differentiation, sales and pricing more deeply, they can create precisely this kind of sustainable success. It’s a virtuous circle.

How can agencies truly differentiate themselves from the pack?

One common problem is treating the agency like a consumer brand. But brand building works differently for comparatively tiny B2B brands. They have far less visibility for a start, so they have to be super clear to clients about what they do. If they don’t, they’re scuppered.

This shows up as empty straplines that masquerade as propositions. Or overly ‘creative’ positioning statements that invite the question ‘er, that’s great — but what do you do?’.

Another common issue is treating differentiation like packaging. It’s not about being distinctive on a shelf; it’s a question of demonstrating a meaningful business strategy. Differentiation isn’t just a line on a website, a new creds deck and some tweaked case studies — every touchpoint is an opportunity to substantiate your differentiation, including leadership and business models, as well as structures, processes, people and pricing.

Finally, 2 words that pop up too often when we talk about agencies are transformation and innovation. What does this mean for agencies and their clients?

When I was a new-business director, I realised that it was one of the vaguest job titles in the agency. Everyone had a slightly different view of where my remit began and ended. And it’s the same with words like ‘transformation’ and ‘innovation’ — and ‘strategy’ for that matter. That vagueness creates problems.

The word ‘innovative’ is about as subjective as it gets. Like ‘beauty’, it’s completely in the eye of the beholder. So, while it’s easy to see innovation as fundamentally useful, to avoid a ton of wasted effort, there are plenty of nuances to consider.

This is why ‘innovation’ needs to be tightly contextualised in the overall business strategy. What do we mean? Why do we need it? How will we consistently identify, promote and protect our innovations? All this takes clarity and commitment — as well as a willingness to fail; efficiency and innovation are uneasy bedfellows.

For agencies that offer ‘transformation’ to clients, clarity is harder to pin down — from business transformation, which I would define around business models and core digital infrastructure, to marketing transformation, which, for me, speaks more to the digitalisation of marketing operations, or even just trying new digital marketing channels.

This is another good reason why having a discrete target audience matters! Using language that’s tailored to your ideal client is a great sign of clear, audience-centric thinking.

Bottom line — instead of tossing these words around like confetti, we all need to be better at buttoning down what we mean. The same goes for clients. The more we all speak the language of business, the more our collective commercial impact will be recognised in the world’s most exciting boardrooms.

And that will help more agencies become the thriving, diverse, inclusive and effective business partners that we all want them to be.