Over the past several years, recalls William Lapointe, CEO of Pathlabs, a media execution partner, “there has been a trend toward ‘in-housing’ that’s been fascinating to watch.” With more and more independent advertising shops “trying to do everything themselves”—from technology acquisition to reporting to analytics—“we just watched them try to pull it off and, we said, ‘There aren’t enough people on these teams. There’s not enough time for implementation. There’s not enough expertise in these topics.’” The result, Lapointe and his colleagues concluded, was that these agencies were unable to function as the sort of world-class operations they sought to be, thanks to budget constraints that led to lower profits, compromised quality products for brands, and slower agency growth.

But this was just the outcome of a host of issues Pathlabs found clients asking them to solve.

There was what Pathlabs Chief Services Officer Cortland Fondon calls “the carousel of talent,” where, as he describes it, new hires, tasked with “ad trafficking, tagging, placements, and wrangling all this technology together,” move on quickly, looking for more challenging, less mundane “opportunities elsewhere.”

And there was technology. Overwhelmed by choices—and by, in Fondon’s words, “hundreds of salespeople coming in telling you why this platform is better than the one you heard about yesterday,” agencies are spending their time “trying to understand and break down all that minutia, while they’re also trying to get a job done for their advertisers.”

Duct Tape and Bubble Gum

The technology problem, Lapointe adds, ends up revealing itself in reporting. Agencies, he says, “are trying to cobble together their own tech stack with duct tape and bubble gum on a shoestring budget.” But it’s not working. “The data’s not normalized,” he notes. “The triggers haven’t been set up properly, the tagging has been placed incorrectly. One technology partner isn’t talking to another technology partner.” There is, he adds, “a clear lack of integration and synchronization in the way these tech stacks are being created.”

And the problem, he adds, goes well beyond just reporting. “It’s actually an execution and technology problem,” he says, “where the different pieces of the campaign have not been integrated appropriately because the agencies just don’t have the resources from a financial perspective to pull it together.”

The answer, Lapointe and Fondon suggest, is a retreat from in-housing, from trying to do it all, and instead an adoption of outsourcing, of finding a media execution partner that can  not only be agile in integrating new technologies at scale but also put all the pieces together, freeing up the people in the agency to, as Fondon puts it, “focus back on what they were passionate about when they got into this business.” Most marketers, Lapointe notes, “became marketers to be marketers, not to be technology operators living in the depths of the bellies of different marketing software.”

An Inescapable Premise

Over the course of the next several months, through a series of six articles, Pathlabs is going to dig deeply into some of the key challenges that they’ve found, through their work, agencies are facing today. As noted above, these are tied to people as well as to tools and technology utilized across the complex ecosystem of advertising today. They have a critical impact on growth and profitability, can undermine the sense of purpose and passion with which agency personnel approach their jobs, and are reflected in the workflows that often just don’t work for the agencies that have developed them—or the brands for whom the work is being created.

In these articles we’ll talk with various agencies to shed light not only on how to recruit the best talent, but also how to retain them. We’ll look at how agencies have managed to get access to the best tools and technology without breaking the bank. Starting with the increasingly inescapable premise that the fixed-cost component of hiring people and having hard technology costs is not scalable and often results in reductions in both service and profit, we’ll examine alternative ways that agencies—and their brands—can have it all without doing it all.

In a future article, we’ll explore some of the ways in which partnering with a media execution partner can allow the talent within an agency to stay focused on its main purpose, expanding its creative and strategic capabilities.

And finally, we’ll put it all together to look at how, through a well-oiled workflow that’s not hamstrung by trying to do it all in-house, agencies and their advertisers can align their media execution with their business goals.

Learning Lessons from Clients

Not surprisingly, perhaps, the lessons Pathlabs has learned from its clients have found their way into Pathlabs’ workflow as well. As the firm came to understand the need to provide their people with the appropriate level of support, Fondon says, “we’ve created more management layers across the service team. We’ve invested a lot in continuing to develop our people and our education over time.” This has translated, he explains, into structuring out “more departments within the organization that are focused on specific aspects, whether it’s workflow solutions, how we communicate with each other, or how we move projects along in the most efficient manner.” And this approach, he adds, has required a significant investment in the “team that is responsible for technology development and the tools and resources we use in order to execute campaigns at the highest level.”

As this series will prove, focusing on how to balance people, workflows, and technology while achieving growth and profitability through partnership is increasingly the key to succeeding in this rapidly changing industry. Doing this correctly, Lapointe concludes, doesn’t require using “the most revolutionary tactics in the world.” To this point, he adds, “we’re talking about an industry that’s gotten so complicated in terms of how we execute the things we do on a day-to-day basis, how we communicate. Everything’s a process. Everything’s a challenge. What we’re talking about is just working with people and talking to each other and communicating really well. We find that is so much more effective, both internally and externally.”

In the next installment of this series, we’ll look at the importance of people, even in—and maybe because of—this highly technological age.