Partnership, collaboration necessary to drive agency growth
By Abimbola Mohammed
Integrated Marketing Communication (IMC) industry experts have affirmed that collaboration and partnership between global and local agencies will help create a healthy competitive landscape, shared responsibility, and collective knowledge which will, in turn, engender innovation and industry success.
According to the agency eggheads, although it may seem counterintuitive to partner with organizations competing for attention in the same industry, still many organizations can also benefit deeply by participating in collaboration, as it creates higher value for all stakeholders.
In an interview with MARKETING EDGE, Dr. Ken Onyeali Ikpe, none executive director at Redefini Nigeria, expressed his preference for partnership between foreign and local agencies. The IMC industry guru said he prefers partnership to be referred to as a relationship to make the agencies see themselves as part of everything that concerns the agencies to enable transfer of knowledge.
“In fact, I don’t like the word partnership because you are what you are. So, instead of considering that relationship as a partnership, just consider yourself a part of it. If you say partnership, it can become technical partnership, but it doesn’t transfer knowledge and expertise.
“But if you begin to see the world as a global place and understand that there are global practices all over the world where you can leverage using technology or even using the human concept of up-scaling skillsets and expertise, you will key into it. That is the only way to do it; there is no other way at all,” he said.
However, Sola Antwi, The Chief Operating Officer at Divergent Marketing Services, expressed reservation on mergers & acquisitions as a panacea to reverse the dwindling fortunes of agencies in the marketing communications industry.
“For us, we wouldn’t mind collaborating or merging with another agency, but the terms of agreement must be clear from the beginning. We must be ready to honour agreed terms and conditions. We must be ready to believe that whatever we plan to do is workable and achievable, and go all out for it. Once we have that clear cut understanding and we all work towards this, I think collaborations would work out,” she said.
She pointed out that, everywhere in the world, there have always been issues of trust.
“If I have toiled so hard for a business and I am to merge with another business to increase business strength and profitability, but on merging I get nothing in return, I would rather die with my business than merge! The trust issue is one factor that affects mergers & acquisitions. Are we able to trust ourselves? Are we able to get the benefits out of this merger & acquisitions?” she queried.
Antwi, however, advised that agencies must not just jump at collaboration without having well defined terms of collaboration that is equally beneficial to all parties in the merger or partnership.
Shedding light on how brand managers can confront their challenges through collaborations, Femi Adelusi, Founder/ Group CEO of BrandEye/ Mediaplus, said: “In driving better efficiency, brands should consider partnerships and collaborations, for there exists lots of opportunities in this area, particularly for none competing brands. Agencies have major roles to play as they manage portfolios of brands. They should plan on pulling resources and ideas of various clients together to drive better value and impact marketing investment.”
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