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When Brad Simms, CEO and president of the Stagwell agency, Gale, decided to launch the agency’s media practice, he bought a book about it.
“We all went out and bought a whole bunch of physical books to read. I mean, I didn’t know what an effective commission rate was five years ago,” Simms told ADWEEK.
Now, Gale manages more than $1 billion in media spend for its clients.
More agencies are revisiting media integration to keep up with marketers’ needs. Many like Gale are building media practices from scratch—a challenging task for agency leaders to tackle. Expanding is necessary for top-line growth, but growing too fast has its pitfalls. Three leaders at full-service agencies of varying sizes—Gale, FerebeeLane and Walz Tetrick Advertising—told ADWEEK the secret to building a successful department is going all-in—no half measures—on the unavoidably costly investment.
“Building a media department is daunting. It’s also kind of a bigger deal than you might think,” Charlie Tetrick, president and CEO of the Kansas-based independent shop, Walz Tetrick Advertising, told ADWEEK. “To think you can hop in the game and start buying media without knowing that you’re going to have a seven-figure investment would be a mistake,” Tetrick added.
Be selective with talent
It’s important that a media department leader have both strategic and functional knowledge, said Jessie Thomas, group media director at Walz Tetrick Advertising.
“You’ve just got to make sure you’re always hiring experts, [and that you’re] always upgrading your game. That is probably the key rule that we live by around here,” Tetrick told ADWEEK.
When Walz Tetrick organically expanded its relationship with Dairy Queen, Tetrick hired a competitor—a marketing leader at Sonic.
That hire “quickly brought on lots more people and brought on a lot of these different media tools that we needed to be able to do the job better. Dairy Queen, I think, saw that activity,” Tetrick said.
After 12 years in business, Greenville, South Carolina-based independent agency FerebeeLane began adding clients who wanted the agency to provide media management.
Co-founders Matt Ferebee and Josh Lane hired Katie Driggs, now vp and director of media and analytics at the agency, to launch and scale the nascent practice. Driggs told ADWEEK she started by tackling existing media clients’ needs before considering the next steps necessary to grow FerebeeLane’s nascent practice.
Skill building within a young department
Driggs told ADWEEK that getting new employees up to speed on how to plan and buy media requires a heavy lift and a willingness to let early-career employees shadow more experienced staff.
“It’s similar [to] some of the other departments, but because in media we’re dealing with our clients’ dollars and our clients’ reporting, which ultimately can affect the return on investment or return on ad spend, we have to make sure that we’re being diligent in the training and the oversight with everything that a new hire is doing,” said Driggs.
Assembling the right team requires hiring experts in subject areas that used to be unrelated, given that media practice employees might handle anything from billing to data privacy and compliance to vendor management.
“[Becoming] interdependent upon all those factors to make the team work cohesively is really what needs to be thought of [when building a media department from scratch],” said Thomas. “It feels like media is a little bit of a unicorn.”
Building trust with the market
Rolling out a media practice is not only a significant investment but takes time to generate ROI, agency leaders agreed.
Over a six-month time frame, Gale hired six employees to take on different areas of expertise like search, programmatic and strategy. Simms then invited those employees to join “integrated huddles”—group conversations about how practice areas across the Gale ecosystem can deliver on a client’s brief.
Simply including media staff in those conversations allowed the agency to organically sell its media services. This went on for a year before Gale felt comfortable advertising its media services to search consultants.
“One of the things I take away from adding a lot of capabilities is they always take longer to germinate than you expect,” Simms said.
Tetrick began circulating his media practice capabilities to search consultants early on but suggests new media practice leaders prioritize gathering case studies and success stories to broaden marketing activities.
“You need to build up a track record and build up some trust in the market,” Tetrick said. “You’ve got to prove to a lot of people [that] you’re able to steward and manage … be beholden to … their millions of dollars they are entrusting you with,” Tetrick said.
