The agency village promise isn’t bullsh*t. The execution usually is.

I’ve seen it in the HoldCos. The moment when they promise clients a beautifully integrated team across media, creative, PR, data and everything in between, they’re not lying.

The people in that pitch room genuinely believe it. And then Monday arrives. Unproductive WIP’s are scheduled. Media goes back to owning all the insights. Creative goes back to a consumer truth found off the internet. PR gets invited once the idea is already baked. Research sits in a different budget all together. Data is in a meeting nobody else knew was happening.

Everyone has their own boss, process, priorities, P&L and slightly different version of what the client actually asked for. What a bloody mess!!  The client buys an integrated agency and somehow becomes its unpaid project manager. The integration promise is real. The execution is often shit. That’s the bit we don’t say out loud.

The integration promise is real. The execution is often shit.

A recent piece by Ivan Fernandes got me thinking about this. He argues that clients are building more capability internally while engaging more external specialists. The question is no longer simply what should be in-housed or outsourced, but what should be owned, accessed and orchestrated.

I agree.

But I think there’s another question hiding underneath it:

What if the most valuable agency isn’t the one that owns every capability, but the one that makes every capability work better together?

HoldCos have operated on the thought… “Buy enough capabilities. Put them under one corporate structure. Add a diagram with lots of circles. Call it a name and brand it something pretty to signal seamlessness.”

But owning all the capabilities doesn’t automatically connect them nor does it make them all right based on the client needs. 

Perhaps the deviation for an independent agency is to stop pretending we need to do everything and become bloody brilliant at working with everyone.

That sounds lovely in theory. It also sounds suspiciously like something every agency already claims (including us, but I do think we are still better than most).

So it needs to be more than “we collaborate well.”

It needs to be productised.

I’ve been playing with the idea of something called Nodes.

Before the work begins, map every capability involved: the client team, media agency, creative agency, PR partner, researchers, data specialists and whoever else has a meaningful role. Then make the connections painfully clear.

Where does each specialist’s job begin and end? What information do they owe the others? When do they enter the process? Who owns which decisions? Where are the dependencies? What commercial outcome are we all actually trying to influence?

One connective brief instead of six slightly contradictory ones.

IMAGINE!!! Just Imagine a world where there was enough trust for the research agency to dismantle the strategy, the PR team to spot the cultural opportunity, the creative agency to reshape the media idea or the data to kill the hypothesis everyone had already fallen in love with.

That would be fucking brilliant! That is what specialists are there for and what the client has ultimately hired us to do.

The client doesn’t need every agency to colour inside its designated box. It needs the boxes to build on top of eachother.

I don’t know if Nodes is the final name. It may be too clever. It may not be clever enough. My team may roll their eyes and come up with something better by Tuesday.

But the principle feels right.

Perhaps the agency of the future may not be the one capable of doing everything. It may be the one confident enough to know where it ends and intelligent enough to make everything beyond it work better.