Not sure if partnering with a digital agency is a good idea or not? We’ve got you. This article takes a look at digital partnerships between agencies using SMACK, our very own digital agency, as an example to illustrate how two entities (even if both are digital) can collaborate successfully. Emphasis will be placed on the approach, collaboration process, solution development and execution of the digital agency that is brought onboard for a digital marketing campaign or project.
As the third decade of the 2000s (i.e., the digital age) kicks off, the level of digital marketing and communication consumers demand from brands only continues to rise. This has been brought into sharp focus by the coronavirus, which caused a global pandemic that has forced businesses across most industries to rely on some form of online marketing activity.
To satisfy this consumer demand, brands are in turn pushed to demand more from the digital marketing agencies they work with.
To satisfy both their clients (the brands) and the consumer, an integrated approach needs to be taken by these agencies. Whether it’s a content creation agency partnering up with a digital agency in order to have a digital arm for a client’s campaign, or a PR agency bringing a creative digital agency on board to build digital collateral for the online aspect of a client’s campaign, partnerships have become integral to online marketing.
Before we get into digital partnership examples and scenarios, let’s look at some exact reasons why agencies build digital partnerships.
An agency can go into a partnership with a third-party digital agency for various reasons including:
Now, let’s use a few of these reasons, with SMACK as the digital agency, to analyse partnerships between agencies of all kinds (media, social events, PR etc.) and digital agencies.
Before we start, it’s worth mentioning SMACK’s collaboration process as this will aid further understanding of a digital agency’s approach to working with other agencies.
SMACK’s collaboration process is:
SMACK has been fortunate enough to work with some world class brands such as Gucci, Amazon, The Body Shop, Molton Brown, Dominos, Ted Baker, Karl Lagerfeld and more, helping them build various digital assets to help them achieve their marketing goals and objectives. The agency has worked on websites, microsites, gamification, booking systems, virtual events, gift finders, chatbots, augmented reality, digital campaigns and more.
The aim here is not to toot our own horn, but to highlight the fact that the opportunities the agency has had to build some of these digital solutions multiple times (especially microsites, gamification, websites and digital campaign assets) has allowed us to become experts in the development and creation of these marketing tools.
So when a brand like Poundland wanted a digital activation for its Christmas campaign, its social media agency, Why Social, was confident that SMACK would build something (which ended up being ‘Basket Chase’, a gamified digital activation) that would be successful based on our previous work.
Why Social also partnered with SMACK because our agency had created digital solutions for other agencies and clients that could easily be adapted for future usage either for other campaigns or other regions, something Poundland wanted for their solution too.
But previous experience wasn’t the only thing that won us this opportunity. SMACK carries out thorough research and analysis of the partner agency’s client (brand, organisation, business, company etc.) so it’s easier to sync – in this example – Poundland’s brand objectives with SMACKS product development and implementation ethos. For us, successful digital partnerships are all about synergy, integration and building a relationship with our partners that leads to positive results.
The coronavirus has thrown more than a few curve balls at the marketing industry. You could, for example, be an event agency who handles a huge brand’s yearly in-person Christmas live PR event that can’t take place that year due to the lockdown caused by the pandemic. Because of the lockdown, this huge brand might task you with creating a virtual event instead. In that case, a strategy your agency should consider is bringing a creative digital agency on board to help develop and execute this online event.
This was exactly the case with events agency Jubba and their client Amazon in 2020. The team at Jubba are excellent at what they do, but in order to meet Amazon’s unique, heavily digital demand and execute the campaign to as high a standard as possible, they reached out to SMACK to partner with them on this idiosyncratic endeavour.
It was a wonderful collaborative effort that involved Jubba’s vision for Amazon’s virtual event and SMACK’s digital development and execution – Jubba’s events experience interlocked with SMACK’s digital knowhow. The fruit of this agency-to-agency digital partnership was Amazon Smile, a memorable, innovative digital Christmas story experience that captured both the spirit of Christmas and the spirit of the usual in-person, live event it was replacing.
To further highlight the power of partnerships, it would be unfair not to mention Venus in Fur who assisted with concept, illustration, and animation in the creation of this digital experience, which you can have a sample of here.
Global media agencies often deal with big name clients who demand solutions for complex digital campaigns. These big brands want to stay one step ahead of the competition and understand the importance of embracing new technology to stand out from the crowd. At times – even for large media agencies – it makes more business sense to create a partnership with an outside agency to meet the demands of a client.
This could be for several reasons such as the complexity of the demand, a lack of in-house specialty, lack of knowledge on a specific emerging tech, the location of the media agency itself or that of the digital agency it partners with, and so on.
A great example of this sort of agency partnership is when Gucci’s Bloom fragrance was chosen as one of the initial brands to launch on Facebook’s augmented reality development studio, Camera Effects. As its media agency, Gucci tasked Mediacom (a global media agency network) with creating a sophisticated digital experience for the launch.
There are a few reasons Mediacom is one of the world’s best, and one of these is its willingness to work with not only the agency partners of its clients, but also other third-party digital agencies to provide the best service possible for its clients. Recognising that a collaborative effort is important for success, Mediacom have no problem stating on its website that they: “Harness our deep relationships with technology partners to create campaigns that deliver unrivalled results.”
Although Mediacom has an in-house team, this collaborative and agency partnership mindset (especially in the digital sphere) is why the media agency brought an outside agency on board. Recognising the uniqueness and sophistication of AR technology and how it would require technical expertise, Mediacom sort out a creative, innovative, technically astute digital agency to assist in creating a digital activation worthy of its client’s name, the development studio, and of course, the end user.
SMACK won the honour of being that agency.
Mediacom tasked our agency with creating an interactive flower crown for social media users to wear in order to create awareness for Facebook’s Camera Effects launch on social channels. What resulted was a sophisticated augmented reality tool that led the way in functionality and design. Inspired by Gucci’s TV adverts, the AR experience involved a very realistic filter built using a 3D modeled crown made of real flowers and an animated stop-motion frame to create a dreamy effect.
Because of its openness to partnering with another agency, Mediacom met the challenge set by its client (the Gucci flower crown was a big hit, gaining more than 500k shares on social media) by collaborating with a digital agency.
PR agency The Academy are brilliant at what they do. You’d have to be brilliant to name huge food and drink brands Dominos and Italian restaurant chain Zizzi as clients. Like Mediacom above, a big part of this is the PR agency’s willingness to have digital partners so it can provide an integrated service to clients.
SMACK – serving as the digital arm – just so happens to be one of the digital agencies The Academy has a partnership with so it can deliver digital solutions to its clients. Our creative digital agency has worked with the PR agency on campaigns for both of the food chains mentioned.
For Dominos, we’ve collaborated with the PR agency on a few digital marketing campaigns including a Cheesy Chat Up Line generator and the new ‘Meatfielder’ pizza that was launched in time for the Football World Cup.
For Zizzi, we helped the brand engage its online audience and increase product awareness during the Christmas period by building a digital advent calendar. SMACK also used gamification – in the form of an interactive game that required users to correctly identify one of an A to Z of ingredients – to boost awareness for its Mediterranean spring menu.
This collaborative effort between two agencies has not only led to successful campaigns, but client retention for both parties.
If two heads are better than one, imagine having four or more…
This reason for partnering up with a digital agency is foundational to the other reasons given thus far.
With digital marketing, when it comes to idea generation, strategy development, campaign execution, and success-benchmarking, it is vital that an agency use all the in-house expertise at its disposal to meet its clients demands.
However, sometimes it’s necessary for an agency to stretch beyond the four walls of its office and reach out to third party digital agencies. Sometimes thinking out of the box requires a head that is out of the box, so to speak. Sometimes the arm being stretched needs a digital one attached to it to generate ideas to reach goals set by a client (dodgy metaphors, but you get the point). The fresh takes and perspectives a creative digital marketing agency partner can provide to an agency can lead to unforgettable marketing campaigns.
From PR agencies to global media agencies to events agencies to marketing agencies: SMACK is grateful to have had all these partners be open to our collaboration process and therefore our ideas and suggestions.
Luckily, even when not every single one of our ideas (our creative team are, well, creative) make the cut, elements of the ideas have been taken on board by both partner and client (as was the case with Weave – a marketing agency – and Royal British Legion and how the latter’s gamified quiz would pan out) and has influenced the final product.
Also, say you’re an agency whose client is looking to penetrate a new market outside of its usual regions or whose client has just developed a product that is different from its usual product line; wouldn’t it make sense to pick the brains of a digital agency that has experience in targeting that market or potential buyers of the new product respectively? In these sorts of situations, partnerships are a no-brainer.
If you’ve made it this far, you deserve to leave this article with a finance-focused (not that the other reasons don’t bring money in, they all do) reason for partnering up with a digital agency. Here at SMACK, we truly enjoy seeing our agency partners earning profit from our collaborations as much as we enjoy doing the same.
Providing integrated services was mentioned earlier in this article. Over the last two decades there has been a rise in the demand (from brands, businesses, organisations etc.) for agencies that are multi-faceted in the services they provide. This makes sense because it allows companies to have a more concentrated and streamlined way of achieving marketing goals. There is less delegation, less complexity, less strings to tie into a campaign’s web.
No matter the agency-type: PR; marketing; events; social media; media etc.,- although they all do digital in their own ways – these businesses have been able to increase their revenue by offering an integrated service with a specialist digital arm to clients. The great thing about this is that clients are more than happy to have the primary agency they work with collaborate with third party digital agencies to deliver on a project. The final result is what is paramount.
What having a relationship with a digital agency means is that agencies who don’t specialise in specific areas of digital (especially in the area of building certain complex digital collateral) can upsell and cross-sell to their clients, opening the door to more revenue generation.
Winning the client over is the fifth step in SMACK’s collaboration process: agencies can do the same by offering digital solutions to clients by partnering up with specialist creative digital agencies.
Contact SMACK to discover more on how we work with partner agencies to deliver impactful digital solutions to clients across various industries.