Over the past two months, we’ve taken a close look at why many independent agencies have chosen to move from in-housing to outsourced media execution partnerships. Agency heads with whom we’ve spoken have talked about strengthened teams, better access to technology, enhanced growth and profitability, and the opportunity for team members to focus on the tasks that inspired them to seek careers in advertising to begin with. In this final installment of our six-part series, we explore how all of this comes together to create an informed, sustainable, and predictable workflow.

When Sam Burn, principal, strategy, of the Birmingham, Alabama-based agency Cayenne Creative, looks at today’s advertising industry, he sees what could, he believes, be a no-win situation. “Margins are declining,” he says. “Costs are increasing. There’s more demand for high-touch relationships and increased engagement with clients. It means more time, more money.”

What’s an agency to do? “Well, you don’t ask a weatherman when you need a sailor,” he says. “We could complain about the storms, or we can face them.”

For Cayenne, facing these storms has meant forging a relationship with Pathlabs, a media execution partner. This partnership, Burn says, “has given us an affordable way to overcome some of the sea change that’s happening in the industry, live out what our brand mission is, and connect on a deeper, more collaborative level with our clients.”

Hope Vergara, Cayenne’s integrated media director, explains how this works.

“At the heart of the partnership is a combination of technology, research, and people,” she says. “Workflow-wise, this has freed us up from being in the minutiae of shuffling through paperwork, which is something that, in advertising, you can drown in. This allows us to focus on what drives our passion, which is educating and working with our clients to find actionable media solutions to their business needs.”

“Keeping Us in Line”

As important as the tech and the research, Vergara stresses, are the people behind it, the Pathlabs team that has been seamlessly integrated into the Cayenne workforce. On the one hand, she says, “they’re there to provide both access to and research myriad thoughts, ideas, and questions coming from us and our clients.” But, more importantly, they’re the people “keeping us in line and keeping things funneled,” providing media specialists who might otherwise have to be on the Cayenne payroll, with the “knowledge base, the training, the cutting edge to allow us to execute anything that I want to execute for our clients—but with zero overhead for Cayenne.”

The key differentiator, Vergara notes, is that with this partnership in place, “We’re able to go out—as the face of the agency—and just talk about media and instruct and educate our clients on what media is. And if there’s something new” that the Cayenne team isn’t familiar with, “we can easily say [to the Pathlabs team], ‘Hey, can you give me some information on where this movement is now?’”

It's that access to research and insights, beyond “just the executional element,” that David Heimlich, a partner in the Los Angeles-based The Blossom Project, says plays a critical role in his agency’s workflow. “They will provide insights,” he says. “They will provide wrap-up decks. They’ll do some of the things we can do, but they’ll do it in a manner that’s bringing thoughtful insights to what they’re doing on the optimizations and managing the businesses. Ultimately, I’m the face to either the agency or the client, but they’re bringing me product that I feel is worthy to take to both the agency and the client.”

Evann Bishop, executive vice president at the Atlanta-based media agency Conquer, notes that this overlap of responsibilities is a strength. “There may be some hesitancy on the part of some agencies or team members within agencies to partner with someone like Pathlabs,” she explains, “because they’d think, ‘Well, if they’re doing the same job I’m doing, is that duplicative? Are they trying to outsource my role.’ We haven’t found that at all. We still have our ad operations team and our marketing science team, but now they feel like they have a bigger pool to play in.” As a result, she notes, “we’ve gained huge efficiencies, which means quicker turnaround, quicker changes in optimizations to client campaigns, and quicker reporting.”

Blurred Lines

In doing this work, Jordan Person, managing partner at New York City-based Town Hall, admits, “there are blurred lines. But that is where the collaborative piece becomes so important in terms of how the work gets done.” While Town Hall owns the relationship with the client and “is sitting with the client to understand what the needs are, we’re then sitting with the Pathlabs team and saying, ‘OK, here’s what we understand. Now let’s talk about the multiple ways this could be executed and the pros and cons of what this could look like.’ It’s not just a pass off to them. It is truly collaborative. 

And this sense of collaboration, Marc Stryker, vice president of Channel Marketing at Salt Lake City-based Penna Powers, adds, “keeps the workflow pretty calm, whatever scenario we’re in. It gives me a lot of peace of mind to know I don’t have to worry about that aspect of things.”

Calmness, of course, is not often the defining feature of an agency’s workflow. “A day in the life of someone at an independent agency is all over the place,” says Cortland Fondon, Pathlabs’ chief service officer. “And that’s what makes it exciting.” However, he cautions, “that lack of consistency opens up opportunities for inconsistent delivery, and if you’re not consistent in the digital space at every step along the way, the process can break. Having consistency in the workflow brings more positive outcomes.” It also, adds Pathlabs CEO William Lapointe, “frees up time to do more strategic work, to do the right things and not just check the boxes.”

Distributing the Workflow

Workflow consistency, notes Burn, helps an agency avoid the “roller coaster ride” in which an agency is facing constant “pickups and putdowns. That’s when you start to work on something and you focus your mind on that and then, bam, there’s a challenge in another area that you have to focus on.” The way to overcome that, Burn says, “is by distributing the workflow more evenly, so you can spend some time concentrating on strategy and planning, then transforming the job to execution, then concentrating on measuring and analysis and drawing on those learnings, and then shifting to execution without having to try to flow freely between all of those modalities simultaneously.”

Ly Tran, founder of Austin-based Stiletto Collective, likens the collaborative workflow consistency her agency has achieved through its partnership with Pathlabs to making music. “I think we’re pretty good,” she says, “about knowing where Pathlabs shines and where they can be an extension of our team, knowing which levers to pull in our cooperative.” Stiletto, she suggests “could be Beyonce, but we could also be Destiny’s Child, and we could have collaborations with other artists. We are our own music label, and we’re happy to do other EPs and albums and one-off songs with other partners.”

For Vergara, when it comes to designing workflow that advances the interests of 25 to 30 different clients, balancing hundreds of different tasks, all at the same time, it’s Pathlabs that helps Cayenne keep the beat. “I don’t have a concern of not having control over who my team is,” she says. “Yes, their tech is great, their research is great, but it’s the knowledgeable, professional, capable people who make them stick—and who bring predictability” to every aspect of the work.