Picture this. Three days out from the biggest product launch of the year; an Apple-style product launch webinar we'd spent months preparing, on a £20k budget we'd stretched as far as it would go. Hundreds of people from around the world were set to attend on the Thursday, including every board member and the CEO.

The Monday before, we still hadn't received our final assets, due that morning, from our agency partner that we were counting on and had been working on for weeks. We'd followed up throughout the day, then into the evening. When the files finally arrived late Monday night, the problems were immediate: the product renders were in the wrong colour, errors ran throughout, and the work bore little resemblance to what we'd briefed.

It was clear the agency hadn't taken the time to understand what we needed, or how to deliver the work in a way that would actually be useful for the brand.

That left me spending the next two days finding a new agency partner who could fix the issues, ready for Thursday's launch.

Before founding Altogether Now, I worked with agencies all over the world whilst leading channel marketing for a global brand. I had ROI's to meet, budgets cut, then cut, then cut again, and board meetings to make a good impression in. In theory, the agencies I worked with were supposed to make these pressures easier. In reality, they only made things more difficult.

The Problem

Revision after revision, I realised we were the ones doing all the creative thinking and the heavy lifting. The agencies I was working with weren't operating as agencies at all. Instead, they were playing the role of a freelancer: executing on the brief, isolated from senior thinking, and focussed on what their portfolio would look like.

When brand-side, your job is to know the company: the problems that need solving, the product, the internal pressures and goals.

An agency's job is to translate that into a creative solution. When an agency doesn't take the time to digest a brief properly, that translation never happens, and you're left doing both jobs.

What Was Missing

A good agency asks the hard questions.

We make sure these questions are asked on every project at Altogether Now:

Who will see this work?

What will they think?

Will they even care?

What’s +1 more thing we could do to push the work?

How will it drive category leadership for the brand?

Asking those questions, pushing harder, and pressure testing ideas. That’s the mark of an agency that’s genuinely good at what it does and cares about what it delivers for the brand. 

The brief is just the foundation. It’s an agencies job to go beyond that.

Two Kinds of Expertise, In Combination 

The best work happens when brand-side expertise and agency-side expertise meet properly, rather than one simply issuing instruction to the other.  

Neither side does its best work in isolation. It’s only through true partnership that great work can happen.