Reporting
One of the worst outcomes of a multiple-agency approach is that each agency believes positive marketing outcomes are the result of their singlehanded hard work and tactics. Each agency might provide you with glowing reports of their good work, but they may not know or mention that those reports are showing the halo effect of all of the agencies’ combined efforts.
When you use multiple agencies, they won’t have an attribution model to distinguish which tactics resulted in the best outcomes because they won’t have visibility into the other agencies’ work. Even if the agencies share cleaned-up reports and high-level conversations, these often scrape the seemingly irrelevant data about tactics another agency might be running that could lead to a major tactical breakthrough. If the agencies don’t know that you’re using other agencies or running other tactics, then their reports will be based on false assumptions and exclude trends that could serve your knowledge base.
While you could create internal reports to synthesize and compare each agency’s reports, the attribution model will still be convoluted and fragmented, because their individual assumptions and methodologies won’t align. As everyone who has done reporting knows, there are a lot of variables left to the discretion of the reporter, just like in accounting. Having to consolidate your agency reports also adds an internal burden to your plate when agencies are supposed to relieve your workload.
So, what’s a new leader to do if she inherits several multiyear agency relationships? While there are countless ways to consolidate, the fastest track would be to assimilate complementary tactics under each agency to disambiguate reports as much as possible, then to reduce the number of agencies when it’s possible. Rather than managing multiple contracts and educating multiple teams on your brand, it’s best to build a relationship with one trusted agency partner who can holistically champion the KPIs you care about most.