Advertising best practice, evidence and insights

What we know about working with agencies

Article • WARC Best Practice, September 2019

Summarises the insights from a series of key papers addressing client-agency relationships, which has seen many changes with globalisation and digital transformation.

How to work most effectively with multiple marketing partners

Article • Deb Giampoli and Karen Adams, WARC Best Practice, October 2018

Highlights characteristics of the most effective teams, barriers to integration, and “how-to’s” for marketers attempting to “orchestrate” the work of multiple agencies and other partners.

How the best marketers get their agencies to deliver the best work

Article • Deb Giampoli and Karen Adams, WARC Best Practice, August 2018

Outlines the skills marketers need to enable their agency’s creative team to deliver the best work.

How Clorox shapes its brand strategy in Latin America

Article • Geoffrey Precourt, Event Reports, Festival of Media LATAM, November 2019

The Clorox Company, which makes products ranging from bleach to charcoal and salad dressing, has a major presence in Latin America, and is making sure its brand strategies are fit for purpose in the region.

Wieden+Kennedy’s creative excellence rests on seven points of agency culture

Article • Geoffrey Precourt, Event Reports, ANA Masters of Marketing Conference, October 2019

Wieden+Kennedy, the agency, is developing an agency culture that reflects the evolving contours of the marketing universe.

WFA: For good agency relationships, budget and scope must be clear

News • 29 October 2019

The key to productive agency work is a combination of a longer relationship, and a careful balance of scope and budget, a new report finds.

Where agencies fit into MarTech conversations

Opinion • Amy Rodgers & Dr. Emma Slade, October 2019

Powerful as MarTech might be, it does not replace an agency for strategic insight – Amy Rodgers and Dr Emma Slade explore the practitioners’ view.

What Shell learned from its Agency of the Future review

News • 22 October 2019

Over the course of a year, Shell, the multinational oil and gas company, undertook a project to rethink its creative and media relationships at both a global and local level.

How Shell built its Agency of the Future roster

Article • Sam Peña-Taylor, Event Reports, Festival of marketing, October 2019

Shell, the oil and gas company, rethought and reviewed its creative and media agency roster to set itself up for the future – and found far deeper value in collaborating closely and at a high level with agency partners.

Managing experience in a crisis: Five lessons from TSB

Article • Anna Hamill and Dom Boyd, Admap, October 2019

Looks at how, in 2018, TSB Bank – one of the UK’s leading challenger banks – experienced the most challenging year in its history and the lessons it learned from this experience.

Media rebates still an issue

News • 26 September 2019

Advertisers are not particularly worried about potential conflicts of interest when media planning and buying are performed by the same agency, but they are far more concerned when media rebates are not disclosed.

Taking a long-term view of creativity

News • 25 September 2019

While many of the winners of the Creative Strategy Lions, Cannes Lions’ newest awards, were examples of product development rather than traditional campaign work, the Grand Prix and Gold-winning campaigns demonstrated the value of a more long-term ...

WARC Webinar: The Future of Strategy

Article • Amy Rodgers, Neil Godber and Emily Rule, WARC Webinars, September 2019

Looks at what strategists are most concerned about in the industry today by revealing findings from the 2019 Future of Strategy report.

Clients sceptical of media agencies

News • 18 September 2019

Client-side media and marketing professionals have a lower opinion of media and media agencies than they did two years ago, according to new research from ID Comms.

Media transparency still an issue, says ANA

News • 17 September 2019

More than two-thirds of advertisers have updated their media agency contracts within the past three years – and one-third in the past year alone – in response to concerns about transparency and alleged rebates in the media buying ecosystem, ...

The Future of Strategy 2019

Article • WARC Exclusive, August 2019

Analysing the results of a global WARC survey of senior strategists, The Future of Strategy report provides both quantitative and qualitative data on the current state and future expectations of the discipline.

Seven agency models designed for a digital age

Article • Ben Lincoln, ANA Magazine, July 2019

Outlines the seven agency models – a mix of in-house, holding, and speciality – built to succeed in 2019 and beyond.

Delivering value beyond traditional agency management

Article • Robin Seasock, ANA Magazine, Forward, July 2019

Outlines the four levels of an agency management program which delivers relevant insights to all stakeholders for swift, effective decision making.

A blueprint for disproportionate growth

Opinion • Mark Hadfield, July 2019

Strategy teams' relationship to their clients can unlock disproportionate value, says iris' Mark Hadfield.

Managing media in the age of complexity

Article • Christian Polman, ANA Magazine, Forward, July 2019

Outlines a framework to help CMOs elevate media and marketing to the C suite, enabling them to maximize their ROI.

Marketers should redirect $19bn to agency creativity

News • 10 July 2019

Marketers need to redirect $19bn of their tech spending to agency creativity over the next six years, according to analysis by Forrester, the research firm.

Apple's 'radical candour' with agencies

News • 01 July 2019

When it comes to product development, Apple says ‘no’ more often than it says ‘yes’, an approach that encourages a culture of debate about how things can be improved – and this also plays into its marketing and its ...

Apple’s secret to iconic marketing: Keep it simple

Article • Anna Hamill, Event Reports, Cannes Lions, June 2019

Apple, one of the world’s iconic brands, has applied its core principles of simplicity, humanity and creativity to produce game-changing products and advertising for more than 30 years.

Why marketers need to redirect $19bn to agency creativity

Article • Stephen Whiteside, Event Reports, Cannes Lions, June 2019

Forrester, the research firm, believes that marketers need to redirect a significant portion of their tech spending to agency creativity in order to more effectively build their brands.

The story behind Droga5’s acquisition

Article • Sam Peña-Taylor, Event Reports, Cannes Lions, June 2019

Accenture Interactive and the recently purchased agency, Droga5, have spoken publicly about what the acquisition means, and what it says about the creative business.

Client-agency relationships