How to Make Integrated Agency Teams Work

The movement toward hiring specialty agencies for tightly defined projects poses a challenge for bringing marketing together. How so? It shifts the pressure on integrated marketing to teams comprised of people from multiple agencies.

Just as they’re getting more essential, IATs are getting trickier to manage. Marketers need to balance specialists, whose roles increasingly overlap. They need to broaden information sharing to boost performance across disciplines, which can put proprietary information at greater risk. And they need to achieve collaboration without blowing up the timeline and budget.

So, how can you master IAT management? As a member of eight IATs, I can see new best practices emerging — here are the five I recommend for success.

Assign a Strong IAT Client Leader

It takes a strong, experienced client to manage large, diverse IATs. Department-specific client leaders (e.g., brand, PR, shopper) can’t do double duty; they need to focus on their individual priorities. IAT success depends on a client leader who enforces overall business needs and client expectations and makes final decisions. They can’t play Switzerland.

Define Agency Roles Tightly

Make the Agency of Record serve as the strategy chief and project manager for the IAT. Let them lead the working discussion to agree on agency roles, behavioral rules, and agency hours. That establishes the parameters and trust you need for honest, efficient collaboration, such as the retail agency providing shopper data to refine media targeting. Importantly, this also eliminates the impulse for agencies to compete over scope and cross-sell.

Establish Sequential Timelines

Some IAT members need assets earlier than others to meet critical deadlines—sometimes before the IAT strategy is finalized. If the strategy can’t be greenlit beforehand, it’s important to assign and release the long-lead assets and adjust the overall campaign around them.

Get to the Work Fast

It can take two months to assemble an IAT, build the timeline and share a central brief with the agencies. The magic happens in agency work sessions, so plan them from the start. Encourage the agencies to begin collaborating right away to build trust and momentum.

Make the Most of Process Time

Kick off IATs in person. You’ll clarify agency contributions and roles, and forge deeper bonds between agencies and clients, at levels a video call with 30-plus team members can’t establish. And you’ll go a long way toward keeping agency hours within budget.

Increasingly, business success takes more than the sum of marketing parts. Get IATs right, and marketing will get its magic back.