Underlying the growing cries from client-side marketers seeking more strategic support and input from their agency partners, there seems to be an issue with the under-delivery of strategic input. If marketers aren’t getting the required strategic support when agency partners have the capability to deliver it, they need to reconsider why that is, and that starts with how they approach deploying their resources.
Agency partners are fundamentally the resource of the in-house marketer, whose role it is to allocate resources to maximise the return. When marketers fail to deploy the strategic skill sets of their agencies, they face a basic problem of not maximising ROI from one of their critical resources.
As is the case with many commercial problems faced by an
