Through the Line with Andy Bargery

In the 20+ years I have worked in marketing, there's been one constant: change.

The marketing industry is pretty fast-paced, whichever discipline or side of the client-agency world you occupy. This is partly what makes it a great space to build a career. But it can also be a challenge. Not everyone is comfortable with change or able to manage it well.

How, then, do you build a resilient marketing team? List to my conversation with Jo Twiselton of Twist Consultants as we explore everything from communication, leadership and the impact of the pandemic to emotional agility and whether or not office-based workers should go back to five days a week in the office.

How do you put a price on ideas or creativity?

It’s a perennial challenge faced by marketing, advertising and PR agency owners. You know you can make a massive difference to your client’s brand challenges, yet you’re often stuck simply selling time. But not any more. Not if you listen to Alastair Dryburgh, that is, anyway.

Alastair is an advocate of agencies charging based on the value they create rather than the time it takes to deliver it. If you're currently selling time for money, you will enjoy Alastair's thinking.

Running an agency can be a mixed bag of emotions. One minute you're full of elation at winning an award for a successful campaign. The next, you're dealing with a crisis of confidence or trying every trick in the book to win some new business.

But there is another way. It's called the self-running agency, and Rob Da Costa has calculated a formula that works for all types of agencies: vision + marketing plan + systems and process + succession planning = happy agency owner.

Listen to the show to find out more.

Hiring agencies is a critical task in most marketing roles. In the modern world of marketing, there are so many expert disciplines that it's tough, if not impossible, to do everything in-house. That's where the agency world comes in.

Need an expert to increase your web traffic? Think search marketing. Want someone to design an impactful brand campaign? Look for an ad agency. And so on and so on. But how do you find the right agency? What is the process for getting from a marketing challenge to an agency solution? That's where procurement maestro Tina Fegent comes in. Tina is a true expert in buying marketing agency services, with years of experience in client, agency and consultancy roles. What Tina doesn't know about procuring agency services simply isn't worth knowing. Good job she agreed to come on the podcast to share some of that expertise then isn't it? Enjoy the show.

In this podcast, I explore what neurodiversity and neurodivergent traits are with Nathan Whitbread, an expert who works with employers to help them build neuro-inclusive workplaces. We look at what neurodiversity is, why it seems to be more commonplace, and what brands can/should do to enable individuals to be themselves at work. The goal is to create opportunities for brands to find economic and innovative advantages by allowing people to play to their strengths, whatever they are.

One of the primary tasks of a marketer is to understand people and to put them at the centre of your thinking. More often than not, that's your customers or prospective customers. What do they genuinely care about? What makes them choose Coca-cola over Pepsi cola, or why do they shop at Waitrose and not Tesco? The problem is only some marketers do this; instead, we often have a more inward-looking orientation. We put the brand at the centre of our universe when that's rarely the case with our customers. As Mark Ritson might say, people don't give a shit about our brands.

Human-centred marketing is different. It's our approach to understanding the human condition and connecting people to our brands through an iterative process of empathising, defining, ideating, prototyping and testing. At least, that's Richard Hewitt's approach, founded on anthropology and the research discipline of ethnography. In a world where marketers rely heavily on realms of data to make decisions, wouldn't it be nice actually to study human behaviour in person for a change?

In marketing, you have two big career choices: work for a brand or work at an agency. The two sides of the marketing coin work closely together as partners. Well, that's what you'd believe if you read almost any agency website. The truth is often rather different. Client-side and agency-side marketers look at the world through very different lenses, and it's useful for both to understand the others' perspectives.

Welcome, Dan Ince. Dan was a big brand buy, including spells as a brand custodian at Heinz, Jordan's, Cadbury, Mr Kipling, Ambrosia...the list goes on. He's a smart guy. But a few years ago, Dan turned his back on corporate life and jumped over to the agency side via a few consultancy gigs, setting up his own shop, Brand Works Social. So I asked Dan to explore the differences between the two sides on the podcast. This show explores the topic of agency briefs, proposals and pitching, personal branding, and networking, amongst other topics.

Great client service and successful agencies go hand in hand. In my opinion (and I'm a client service guy), you can't run a successful agency without knowing how to handle clients. It's that simple.

The problem is not every agency leader understands this and even fewer invest in training their account teams. So I invited Jenny Plant from Account Management Skills to join me and explore what it takes to be great at account management. Or, in a nutshell, how do you retain and grow client accounts?

Jenny explores how the role of account management has evolved over the last decade. We unpack the key ingredients of good client handling, how account management and project management are becoming separate roles, what it takes to build tight client relationships and what to look out for in the people you hire to fill this critical role in agency life.

If you're looking for some insight into the world of first-class account management, then you're in the right place.

What does the agency of the future look like? That's what I wanted to know from John Bottom, an experienced agency pro and a very nice chap to boot.

Shortly after the credit crunch in 2008, I had the idea of launching a marketing agency built on a network model. Like many agency professionals, I had worked for a large holding group agency and saw an opportunity to strike out on my own. But I didn't want all of the overhead attached to growing a brick-and-mortar "full-service agency". So I banded together all of the other ex-big agency marketers I knew, liked and trusted to create a networked agency. It worked well for a time, with my core team of marketing managers pulling in expertise for client challenges as and when required.

Fast forward a decade, and I no longer run an agency this way. But there's still an appetite for it, as John Bottom argues, in how to run an agency fit for the 21st century. There's space at the table for agile, transparent agency teams structured around where the talent is and not where the agency wants them to be. If you are planning your agency's strategy for growth, you'll enjoy listening to John's perspective. Maybe you could be more flexible, open and honest with your clients about how you will deliver great marketing.

Last summer, I met up with a talented and intelligent agency owner – let’s call her Susie. I have known and respected Susie for quite a few years, and she runs a mid-size agency in the B2B space. We were catching up on the state of her business, what was working, and what wasn’t; the usual stuff I love to talk about with agency owners. It turns out an area causing Susie some issues is imposter syndrome. That feeling of not being confident or the self-doubt that creeps in now and then. After a couple of years in lockdown, it turns out that getting out and about, networking, and meeting prospects was not that simple. Much less comfortable than it used to be.

Agency owners aren’t known for lacking in confidence. In fact, quite the opposite. To learn more about imposter syndrome and how to handle it, I invited Thor A Rain, founder of the Helpful Clinic, to come on the show and explore it in more detail. What could Susie do to overcome her challenges and get back out there, plying her trade? What could other agency or small business owners like Susie learn to help them overcome that nagging feeling of ‘am I good enough?’, ‘or should I be here?’.