• by Sean Hargrave , Staff Writer, December 18, 2015

Do brands want to pick and choose their agency roster, like a row of shots at the bar, or would they rather put most of their eggs in one basket, like a cocktail? It's been a year for huge media deals being renegotiated -- and part of the reasoning has apparently been a desire to avoid being tied into a holding company's agencies as part of a mega global media brief.

So it was interesting to talk with Ogilvy & Mather's UK CEO yesterday about the subject because Annette King believes the relationship between brands and agencies is in the process of changing. Nothing too revolutionary there, of course. However, what is very revealing is that the way Ogilvy believes the relationship is evolving has actually led it to move offices in January to Sea Container's House on the Southbank. The agency will occupy most of the huge building, with each of its ten companies occupying its own space -- but crucially, with central zones where teams drawn from several of those companies can set up camp to work for a client.

The thinking is that brands may not want a one-stop shop for everything -- but for much of their needs, they would rather be talking to a single team from a variety of agencies, preferably all from the same group rather than dotted all across the capital. So as far as Annette is concerned, we will be seeing many more "blended" teams put together by the large agency groups where an advertiser can request different services from one big-name agency and then have all the people they require taken from their sub agency's floor and housed a zone dedicated to the client.

Rather than go to a lead agency -- or at least the agency that believes it's the lead agency -- for regular catch-ups and debriefs, a blended team should be permanently up to date and never be fighting any turf battles over the client, nor looking for someone to blame if something goes wrong -- not that this ever happens around multi-agency breakfast debriefs, of course!

Coming from the same overall company group should also prevent the perennial problem of one agency trying to grow its roll within a multi agency team by selling in extra services that may or may not be needed.

So that's the theory. Blended teams will be like a cocktail poured from multiple bottles but all working together in the same space for the same client-- far simpler and better coordinated than a row of shots lined up at the bar.