For years I have worked with agencies and brands simultaneously, mainly on the optimisation of the brands social marketing efforts which should be supported by the brands agency of choice.

In the second I ask a brand manager “Who is you agency?”, a large proportion of Brands consider their Media agency to be their agency. I always assume that truth is derived from the fact that the biggest absolute numbers of Budget in the Marketing department is spent on Media, while the lower absolute numbers of the budget are saved for creative and PR.

My understanding grew that  the media agency spends the money in the way they deem it best allocated at their or the clients key performance indicator, while the rest such as creating social microsites or landing pages, storing data in a social CRM and making use of that in retargeting is left in the oblivion, managing the community is left to the PR agency who is usually not 100% involved in the activation plan or media plan. Still, PR agencies that manage communities on the other hand are spending media budget as well on Promoting content posts.

So because Media is the most budget it gets the lead on an account, while PR manages the community and Creative the deliverables for the posts and ads probably. In an ideal world, all involved parties would exchange information and learnings for the sake of the success of the Brand they mutually cater to. But in all the years I worked in this environment I have rarely seen a beneficial cooperation because each of these contributors have their own agenda for revenue maximisation and only a low incentive for successful interaction in-between each other.

Technically this lack of data transparency and access can be solved through intelligent software. All three parties make use of a unified system that creates accessible data and makes it available in the first step to the Brand client but also to the other parties where relevant. This works for the situation of Brand and 3 Agencies, even in the scenario in which the brand decides to execute creative, media and PR in house.

I find it interesting that now today several agencies tend to internalise the other functionalities to be able to do all of the 3 functions, while knowingly competing with their sister agency. A creative agency that does also do Page management and Media budget allocation is competing with the sister media agency that adds a creative layer to the existing media buying service and communication management.

I would be happy to hear your opinion on this!?