Don’t Hire an Agency. Hire A Business Partner.

Most agency searches start with the wrong question

When a brand team decides the brand needs help, the conversation usually starts the same way: We need to hire a creative agency, media agency, or a digital marketing agency. The problem is those are solutions dressed up as problems, and they get picked before anyone has agreed on what’s broken. To do that, the brand team needs to ask: What business outcome are we trying to create, and what combination of expertise gets us there?

Declining sales might not be a media problem. Weak acquisition could be about positioning, the customer experience or where people drop off before they convert, or maybe all three. A problem in retail growth might have to do with creative, shopper marketing, commerce, data, and media—all in the same quarter.

A true brand transformation usually requires organizational change, different creative, a reconstituted digital presence, and a whole other customer experience. And good luck doing all that with four agencies that have never spoken to each other.

Yet, most brands still shop for a marketing agency by category, not by the business outcomes they need to achieve. You have to diagnose the problem before prescribing the remedy. Most of the industry has that backwards and has for a long time.

The Marketing Industry Was Built Around Silos—Business Isn’t

Why does the industry look the way it does? None of it happened by accident. For decades, agencies organized themselves around disciplines and holding companies built portfolios from those disciplines. From an operating standpoint it might have made sense, as that’s how you scale, specialize, and protect your margins. But from the client’s perspective, the arrangement tends to look like this:

• Different agendas by agency
• Multiple contracts; multiple P&Ls
• Overlapping strategies
• Recommendations that often contradict each other
• Data that doesn’t match up across teams
• Slow handoffs

Eventually the question becomes: Who is accountable here?

We’re seeing fragmentation worsen as brands try to bring AI and data into creative, commerce, and media at once. You can’t build a connected intelligence layer on top of teams that were never connected to begin with.

The point isn’t “integrated good, specialists bad.” Specialists are indispensable. After all, you want the best people according to their discipline running those various disciplines.

Specialization is not the problem—it’s fragmentation. Too often those get treated as the same thing, but they’re not even close.

A Marketing Partner Starts with the Business Problem, Not Its Own Capabilities

This is probably the part I care about most.

An agency’s instinct is to ask, right out of the gate, “How can our agency help?” Again, that’s the wrong question. It’s about what the agency sells, not about what the client needs. How about this instead: “What needs to happen for this business to win and what is the best group of people to make it happen?”

Sometimes the answer is brand strategy. Sometimes it’s creative, performance marketing, traditional media, commerce, experiential, technology, data, or AI. Usually, it’s some combination, and the mix will continue to change as the business does.

Build the Team Around the Client vs. the Client Around the Agency

Meet The People (MTP) is structured as a group of independent specialist marketing agencies that stay independent (each with its own expertise, identity, and point of view), but these are independent agencies that come together around a client’s business. Instead of forcing every client through one standard offering, we build an integrated marketing team that fits the assignment.

LOOMIS, which became one of our agencies this summer, is a good example of what that specialist depth looks like: challenger-brand thinking for creative, franchise marketing, social, and content. Add in partners across brand strategy, retail, experiential, media, and analytics, and you start to see the shape of it.

The organizing question is: “Which combination gives this client the strongest answer for this problem?” Not: who is available or who is hungriest for the assignment?

One Business Problem, One Integrated Marketing Strategy, Multiple Superpowers

Ritter Sport is a good example; offering content, retail media, retailer storytelling, trade-show tools, merchandising, performance learning. Normally, this would mean five separate projects run by five separate vendors that never compare notes. Instead, we ran it as one commerce system, with four of our specialist agencies working from a single strategy. In-store sales improved 68%. Total ROAS increased 149%. $57K in Walmart media drove $2.2MM in total sales. Instacart grew 30% YOY.

Nobody solved that by hiring “a commerce agency.” They solved it with an integrated marketing strategy that coordinated several specialist disciplines around one commerce problem, and holding one team accountable for the whole thing.

St. George’s University is another version of the same idea. Six agencies, one strategy; combining creative, media, analytics, and AI-driven optimization. Applications went up. Spend went down. That combination is the story.

Data and AI Should Connect the Team, Not Become Another Silo

AI doesn’t fix fragmentation on its own. When you have creative, media, and analytics teams each running their own AI tools that don’t talk to each other, it can actually make it worse. The better solution: a shared layer that connects creative, campaign, media, performance, business, and commerce data in one place so you can answer the questions that matter:

“What are customers really telling us?”
“What creative is working?”
“What’s moving revenue?”

That’s the reasoning behind our Intelligence platform. This isn’t AI bolted onto each discipline separately, but AI and shared data used as the connective tissue between them. As a line item, AI functions more like an operating system for how the entire team makes decisions together.

Partnership Requires Accountability, Not Just Integration

This is where a real partner must look different from a network that simply cross-sells its agency brands to each other’s clients.

Nobody wants a dozen agencies in a dozen meetings with a dozen agendas. What clients require from an integrated marketing partner is a clearly stated business objective; a single, coordinated strategy; the right specialists; shared data; clear ownership; honest economics; and somebody who is held accountable for results.

Integration isn’t measured by how many capabilities are in the room but whether those capabilities behave like one team. That goal must be deliberately built into how accounts are managed, how strategy gets set and how success gets measured. It’s why we keep account leadership and consultancy sitting across creative, commerce, and media instead of letting each agency represent only its own slice.

What Brands Should Look for in an Integrated Marketing Partner

An integrated marketing partner is one accountable team that starts with your business problem, pulls in the right specialists including creative, media, commerce, data—whatever the problem actually calls for—and runs all of it from a single strategy with a single owner for results. It’s not a holding company cross-selling its logos, and it’s not a vendor with a long list of services. It’s one team, one strategy, one answer for what happened.

If you’re sitting through pitches right now, skip past the highlight reel and ask five questions instead:

1. Does the agency begin with your business problem or with what they sell?
2. Can they bring in expertise they don’t personally own?
3. Can creative, media, commerce, and data run off of one strategy?
4. Will the team change as your needs change?
5. Who’s accountable for outcomes? (If they can’t give you a straight answer on this one, the other four don’t really matter.)

From Agency of Record to Partner of Record

The future probably isn’t one big agency that claims to do everything. It’s also not a dozen unconnected specialists the client has to juggle. It’s a strategic marketing partner that can assemble the right expertise around a specific problem and redesign that team as needs change.

The brands that come out ahead won’t necessarily have the biggest agency rosters but are those that have the smartest group of people pointed at the same business objective. That’s the shift that needs to happen—away from hiring agencies for services and toward choosing a partner that can build the right solution.

That’s what Meet The People is about. We’re not just another holding company. We’re a strategic marketing partner that gives clients access to specialist talent without forcing them to manage the fragmentation that usually comes with it.

TIM RINGEL is global chief executive officer of Meet The People.

LOOMIS is a leading challenger brand advertising agency based in Dallas, specializing in campaign development, digital, social, mobile, and user experience. As part of Meet The People, an international network of independently operated agencies, LOOMIS offers clients access to specialized talent, technology, and capabilities across the network.

For more about LOOMIS, or to discuss how we can help your company succeed, CLICK HERE