It is a scenario played out in glass-walled meeting rooms and over tense Zoom calls around the world: a frustrated marketer lamenting that their agency, be it a global holding company giant, a nimble independent shop, or even their own in-house team, is simply not "delivering value". The reflex, sharpened by years of procurement-led conditioning, is to reach for the spreadsheet and prepare for another round of the "beauty parade" known as the speculative pitch.
But before we descend back into that game of random chance, we need to address a fundamental truth often ignored in the rush to find a new partner: you cannot benchmark your way to brilliance. If you are already paying a fee commensurate with the skills required, or better yet, paying for the actual value the work represents, then the problem isn't the invoice; it is the environment in which that work is being produced.
To expect 95th-percentile performance while treating the relationship like a standard vendor transaction is not just optimistic; it is a clear failure to understand the economics of expertise. If we assume the financial "table stakes" are settled and you have abandoned the self-defeating strategy of anchoring fees to a mediocre industry average, how do you actually shift the needle on performance?.
The first and most potent lever is the nature of the brief itself. Too many marketers treat their agencies like order-takers for tactical execution, effectively selecting a thoroughbred racehorse and hitching it to a heavy milk cart. If you want an agency to operate at the far right of the bell curve, you must offer them big, juicy problems to solve.
Nothing motivates a strategic or creative thinker more than a real challenge that touches the structural levers of a business rather than just the next banner or half-off campaign. When you present an agency with a genuine opportunity to maximise value, they don't stop working when they leave the office; the problem stays with them, percolating in the background, because "extraordinary" is a result of cognitive agility, not just billable hours.
The second requirement is perhaps the most scarce resource in modern marketing: time. In an era where AI can spit out a thousand variations of an ad in seconds, we have become dangerously obsessed with productivity over performance. Speed is a seductive metric for procurement, but it is often a false economy. Choosing a partner based on how fast they can stitch rather than whether they can actually fix the problem is a recipe for high-speed mediocrity.
Fast ideas are almost always the obvious ones - the low-hanging fruit of the B-team. If the problem is significant, the solution is likely complex, and giving an agency the space to move beyond the first "advertising" idea requires a level of patience that many of today’s marketers struggle to maintain. You are paying for a creative leap, and those leaps rarely happen on a stopwatch. If the work doesn't work, it doesn't matter how efficiently it was produced.
This leads to the third pillar of performance: radical collaboration. For a relationship to be transformative, it must move beyond the vendor-buyer dynamic toward a horizontal partnership where both parties share a mutual fiduciary duty. This isn't just about the marketing team; it means encouraging the agency to collaborate with other relevant parts of the business and with other specialist agencies on the roster.
This requires the marketer to roll up their sleeves and provide more than just feedback. It requires active direction, encouragement, and the willingness to adjudicate on disputes between specialists who bring alternative perspectives to the table. A true partner provides proactive, forward-thinking guidance, but they can only do so if they aren't being treated like a supplier of office stationery or electricity. When you treat an agency as a disposable vendor, you shouldn't be surprised when they start acting like one, waiting for instructions rather than offering the strategic agility you claim to crave.
Finally, there is the matter of recognition. In a world where AI makes average free and instant, the premium on messy, brilliant, emotional spark has never been higher. While an agency is rarely the only party working on a business problem, its contribution to the big idea that transforms a brand's fortunes is often the most critical variable.
Ensuring they get the right acknowledgement and credit for the results is not just a polite gesture; it is a vital part of maintaining the talent density required for high-level output. The top five per cent of agencies do things differently. They know the transformative value that they bring to the table and they are acutely aware of when their intellectual rigour is being undervalued or ignored.
If all of this sounds like too much hard work, if you would rather not invest the time, the intellectual energy, or the collaborative effort required to build a partnership, then there is always the alternative. You can continue to take your agencies to tender every couple of years, using a blunt competitive process to drive down costs to the lowest common denominator.
You can lean into the race to the bottom and take comfort in the fair market rate found on a procurement spreadsheet. But understand the mathematical reality of that choice: if you benchmark for the middle, you are guaranteeing an average outcome. In this industry, you get exactly what you measure and exactly what you are prepared to nurture. So, by all means, cut the fee and squeeze the timeline, but don't complain when the magic vanishes, and you're left with nothing but a faster milk cart.
Woolley Marketing is a monthly column for Campaign Asia-Pacific, penned by Darren Woolley, the founder and global CEO of Trinity P3. The illustration accompanying this piece is by Dennis Flad, a Zurich-based marketing and advertising veteran.
