Historically, marketing and corporate affairs were separated for sensible reasons. Marketing focused on reach and commercial outcomes, while corporate affairs managed risk, reputation, and stakeholder relationships. 

But today, with sustainability, regulation, politics, and brand all colliding in real-time, that separation is costing organisations real outcomes. In a world where campaigns can trigger regulatory scrutiny overnight and reputation is shaped at the speed marketing operates, the question isn’t why these functions don’t work together. It’s whether organisations, agencies, and leaders can still afford not to.

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Obviously you can’t have 100 technical experts within your organisation, but I think the lack of access to academics, to scientists, to key people will hold us back in the complexity of the environment that we’re working in.

Transcription (Edited):

Darren Woolley: Hi, I’m Darren Woolley, founder and CEO of Trinity P3 Marketing Management Consultancy, and welcome to Managing Marketing, a weekly podcast where we discuss the issues and opportunities facing marketing, media, and advertising with industry thought leaders and practitioners.

Historically, marketing and corporate affairs were separate for sensible reasons. Marketing focused on reach and commercial outcomes, while corporate affairs managed risk, reputation, and stakeholder relationships. But today, with sustainability, regulation, politics, and brand all colliding in real time, that separation is costing organisations real outcomes.

In a world where campaigns can trigger regulatory scrutiny overnight and reputation is shaped at the speed that marketing operates, the question isn’t why these functions don’t work together, it’s whether organisations, agencies, and leaders can still afford not to. To discuss why bridging this divide is a critical leadership issue, please welcome partner at boutique corporate advisory Horizontis, Vanessa Liell. Welcome, Vanessa.

Vanessa Liell: Hi Darren, it’s great to be here.

Darren Woolley: I’d like to start if you don’t mind by asking how you define corporate or strategic communications versus brand and marketing.

Vanessa Liell: That’s a really good question, and starting with those definitions is fundamental to this conversation. I am a public relations and strategic communications professional who has been practising for nearly 30 years. In my world, the definition of public relations hasn’t changed: it’s about building a relationship between an organisation and its stakeholders. Regardless of global disruption, building that relationship remains foundational.

In contrast, marketing is about connecting products and services to customers to drive growth. It focuses on reach, conversion, preference, and commercial outcomes. Typically, these two functions have run separate, side-by-side operations with different mandates and disciplines, intersecting only at sequential points.

The Blurring Lines of Media Channels

Darren Woolley: It would be fair to say that technology has significantly changed the channels both functions use. Traditionally, media relations meant corporate communications focused on journalists as primary stakeholders to get a story reported. Now, technology has expanded that landscape, allowing consumer journalists to emerge and widening the audience. Agencies are now actively using influencers, and even governments invite these influencers into budget lockups ahead of time. From my perspective, those traditional lines are clearly blurring.

Vanessa Liell: Yes, that’s exactly right. This changing environment has fundamentally affected how both marketing and corporate affairs practice. The real issue we face isn’t merely a marketing and communication challenge; it is a structured systems and leadership challenge. Unfortunately, marketing and communications functions are frequently structured for the way the world used to be, rather than evolving for how the world is today.

Three major environmental factors have shifted over time. First, speed has changed significantly because marketing has always operated at a very fast pace to get campaigns to market, whereas corporate affairs traditionally ran at a much slower pace where there was ample time to analyse corporate risks and evaluate stakeholder positions. Second, there has been a major shift in control over channels because pre-digital media had distinct timelines that allowed corporate affairs time to engage, brief, and control distribution, whereas today we operate with real-time speed, immense transparency, and heightened scrutiny. Finally, increased regulation impacting communications means that marketing campaigns can very quickly cross the line into becoming a corporate reputational risk.

Where corporate affairs used to act as the final review step at the very end of a timeline, successful organisations and agencies are now baking reputation management right into the beginning of the creative process. This ensures potential issues are thoroughly considered before a campaign launches, leaving everyone prepared for both proactive and reactive scenarios. The days when marketing was immune to reputational fallout, or when corporate affairs acted strictly like the police rather than creators, are completely over.

Shifting from Control to Responsiveness

Darren Woolley: It’s interesting you say that. An old-school corporate communications professional once told me that it wasn’t possible for them to work with marketing because marketing is all about pushing the envelope and creating risk, while corporate affairs is focused on keeping things steady and minimising risk. That reflects the legacy belief that organisations can maintain absolute control. Today, while a degree of control still exists, the primary requirement is knowing how to respond effectively to the marketplace in real time, rather than always assuming you can dictate terms from the front foot strategically.

Vanessa Liell: That’s exactly right. The reality is that sustainability, trust, and reputation now live directly inside marketing channels. For example, if a company makes sustainability claims, those claims will face immediate review and reaction from both regulators and the market. We see plenty of examples where price claims made in tightly regulated markets face instant scrutiny from regulatory bodies and consumer groups.

Historically, these claims could be made with minimal consequences, but today there is intense scrutiny at every level. Organisations frequently operate with marketing driving creative momentum and corporate affairs managing the resulting consequences. The underlying risk is that no single leader is held accountable for the holistic outcome, and legacy structures continue to hold businesses back.

The Risk of “No Comment” and the Information Vacuum

Darren Woolley: I can share an example from our own experience. We are frequently engaged to manage agency tender processes where a high-profile brand is choosing a new partner, which naturally generates significant interest in the marketplace. Our advice to marketers is to always be on the front foot with a pre-agreed position explaining why the change is occurring. However, corporate affairs often steps in and insists on maintaining a strict stance of “no comment” to minimise risk.

Invariably, we see this backfire. By saying nothing, they create an information vacuum that is immediately filled by external opinions across the internet or the wider industry. We continuously advise clients that while they don’t need to shout about the process from the rooftops, they must have a prepared statement ready so that if the media reports on it, they fill that vacuum with their own planned narrative.

Vanessa Liell: You are exactly right, Darren. That situation highlights traditional corporate affairs thinking where leaders assumed they could fully control the message. That is no longer the case; today, everyone is a stakeholder with a voice, a platform, and a channel. It is vital that your message comes directly from you so you can clearly articulate your perspective.

There was a time when corporate affairs was expected to deliver only carefully crafted, definitive statements, and companies would wait until they had every answer finalised. In today’s landscape, no one has all the answers upfront. It is perfectly acceptable to share an interim pathway where you communicate what you currently know, what you don’t know, and what steps you are taking next.

Consumers and stakeholders have very little tolerance for “no comment” or the withholding of information. We live in an information-hungry environment that is plagued by misinformation and disinformation. People want to go straight to the primary, authoritative source. If that source is you, it is entirely in your commercial interest to openly communicate your position and point of view, even if you are still working through the details.

Darren Woolley: Absolutely. When an organisation says “no comment,” the market automatically assumes something sinister has occurred or is being actively covered up. The public has been trained to suspect the worst when a brand is unwilling to share information. Admitting that you don’t know everything yet feels human and carries a powerful sense of authenticity.

Humanising Crisis Management

Vanessa Liell: It is highly reasonable. I frequently counsel companies navigating cyber security challenges and active cyber-attacks. High-profile corporate data breaches are no longer a matter of “if,” but “when”. In my view, targeted brands often just happen to be the brand of that particular day; these sophisticated global security risks are rarely a reflection of a single company’s defence mechanisms failing.

Where companies succeed or fail dramatically is in how they choose to respond. Those that try to withhold information perform poorly, whereas those that show their humanity by letting people know what they know, what they don’t know, and what they are actively working on navigate the crisis well.

What is incredible is that consumers are generally very forgiving if they feel they are being treated respectfully and honestly. While there are always sensitive security parameters that cannot be legally shared, there is always enough data you can say to help people understand your mitigation plan. The public understands that these modern situations are far more complex than a simple yes or no answer.

Information versus Communication

Darren Woolley: To your point about organisational structures, is this old-school behaviour driven by the fact that corporate communications often sits in the C-suite right alongside legal counsel or compliance departments? Lawyers are naturally inclined to view the world through highly defined parameters where control is possible, so their default stance is often to say nothing.

I recall a situation where I was asked for advice, and a room full of lawyers was trying to draft an apology that avoided actually apologising. The resulting statement looked like an obvious cover-up. The issue is that lawyers draft for the courts, completely ignoring how ordinary people consume and perceive communication in the real world.

Vanessa Liell: You’ve raised two distinct issues there: the difference between information and communication, and the leadership and structural challenges that sit at the board and CEO level.

First, let’s define the clear difference between information and communication, which can be difficult for non-experts to distinguish. Information is typically what an organisation wants to say, which usually stems from internal functions like legal counsel or marketing teams. Communication is what the audience actually engages with. I see many organisations focusing entirely on what they feel they need to tell the market, without checking where that message will actually land.

Effective communication requires an audience-first perspective where you must look at exactly who your audiences are, analyse what drives them, identify their barriers, and clarify exactly what action you want them to take, crafting the message to relate directly to those parameters. This is where sophisticated communication leadership is required. It is critical that communicators respect the legal and compliance advice provided by other functions, but they must find a middle ground to ensure that advice is translated into messages that the audience can understand, engage with, and respect.

Overcoming Legacy Structures and Silos

Darren Woolley: This leads directly to the leadership and structural issues embedded at the board and CEO level. Most organisations are still designed for a simpler world, and those legacy structures continue to exist. Functions like marketing, communications, legal, and HR all operate with separate reporting lines, separate budgets, different timeframes, and entirely different scorecards.

Vanessa Liell: This structure drives highly predictable, counterproductive behaviour where marketing moves exceptionally fast to build creative momentum, corporate affairs is brought in far too late, forcing them to manage a purely reactive scenario, and frustration mounts on both sides until true risk and reputation are owned by nobody.

Significant structural shifts must happen if we are going to grow our organisations ambitiously while successfully managing increased risk, reputation management, and public scrutiny. First, CEOs and boards must stop treating marketing and communications as sequential functions and ensure they work together right from the inception of a campaign. Second, leadership must expect challenge early, rather than seeking reassurance late, which means embracing difficult conversations at the very beginning of the creative process regarding the truth of product claims, sustainability parameters, and how the message will land with regulators and diverse audiences. Finally, boards must hold leaders collectively accountable for overarching business outcomes rather than isolated functional performance, because rigid reporting lines and constrained individual budgets discourage people from thinking about the big picture and collaborating across functions.

Navigating Conflicting Corporate Messages

Darren Woolley: A perfect example of this functional conflict is playing out in the market right now. In an environment where the cost of living is high, marketing teams focus heavily on great service and heavily discounted pricing to drive consumer impact. At the exact same time, corporate leaders are announcing major staff layoffs on the basis of AI and technology adoption, while talking up record corporate profits to satisfy shareholders. These two corporate messages feel entirely uncoordinated and in direct conflict with one another.

Vanessa Liell: Absolutely. This highlights the shift in our environment, because there was a day when corporations could tightly control the flow of information. No one easily knew what a CEO was paid, and the public didn’t have real-time visibility into internal downsizing. If a company didn’t explicitly announce layoffs, employees weren’t all over mainstream media explaining that they had lost their jobs.

Today, we live in a completely transparent environment where corporate downsizing is visible instantly on platforms like LinkedIn and Reddit, highlighting the human impact in real time. Therefore, navigating structural change without communicating holistically to all stakeholders is a major risk, and it is exactly where marketing and communications must work hand in hand.

Corporate affairs must communicate business strategy to the market, and businesses legitimately exist to deliver long-term profit to their shareholders. However, the impact a company has on its employees, its customers, and the community must be part of that strategic consideration. If marketing is preparing to launch a national value campaign addressing the cost-of-living crisis, it must be carefully contextualised within the broader public perception of how that organisation is operating as a whole. If you choose not to openly discuss what your company is doing, the internet will happily fill that communication gap for you. The good, the bad, and the honesty of your operations will be judged in real time by consumers, and “no comment” is never an acceptable answer.

Darren Woolley: This dynamic underpins a broader trend we’ve observed for a number of years: the widespread loss of public trust in traditional institutions like the political system, religious organisations, and big business. This loss of trust makes it more critical than ever for businesses to open up and remain transparent within legal boundaries.

Vanessa Liell: That’s correct, because trust is built through long-term relationships, and you cannot successfully build a relationship during a crisis when you suddenly need it. We often say that trust takes decades to build and can be lost in a single moment; today, that cycle has accelerated dramatically. The speed at which an organisation can gain or lose trust is shorter than ever, meaning businesses must continuously think about how they are actively building relationships with all stakeholders on an ongoing basis. You build those bonds by taking a genuine interest in your customers, your investors, and the media, and by communicating openly, honestly, and humanly.

Interestingly, while people have lost trust in macro institutions, they are increasingly seeking out traditional reference points for verified facts. We see an ongoing reliance on mainstream editorial media, government portals, and authoritative corporate voices to cut through the noise of misinformation. This makes it more critical than ever for corporate institutions to be proactive and transparent.

Darren Woolley: The scope of issues has also expanded beyond simple financial performance into complex areas like sustainability, environmental impact, and Indigenous rights. Managing and tracking these issues is incredibly complex because you are dealing with a broad spectrum of highly passionate stakeholder groups across social media.

Vanessa Liell: It is, and it points to a fundamental shift in how modern businesses must operate. Historically, companies could deliver short-term profit for shareholders with very few resource limitations or societal obligations. Today, true sustainability means evaluating how an organisation can deliver profit not just in the next quarter, but far into the future.

In previous generations, companies relied on tactical initiatives like launching a corporate foundation, donating to charity, or sponsoring a local sports team to build community trust. Today, they must think long-term about their direct systemic impact on their workforce, society, and the environment. If a business fails to contribute positively, it will be judged harshly by consumers and investors alike, directly impacting sales and viability. Forward-thinking organisations cannot just look at quarterly bottom lines; they must embed long-term societal contribution right into their core strategies and daily operations.

The Horizontis Model: Breaking Agency P&L Barriers

Darren Woolley: Looking at PR agencies in the current marketplace, we see immense fragmentation in how public relations is applied. Some agencies focus strictly on events, others look exclusively at managing social media influencers and content creators, and another tier specialises purely in crisis management. Horizontis was set up with a fundamentally different operating model to solve these challenges, wasn’t it? Can you explain the strategic thinking behind it?

Vanessa Liell: Yes, we constructed Horizontis to directly solve the operational silos we observed in both client organisations and traditional agencies. Horizontis was founded to work directly with boards and CEOs on climate, political, and reputational risk. Our services deliberately span issues and crisis management, corporate affairs, public relations, and high-level advisory on government relations, policy, and regulatory affairs. Recognising the critical role that creative execution plays in shifting public reputation and influencing regulatory outcomes in a cluttered market, we also launched an internal creative agency within our group called “Rethink Everything”.

What makes our model unique is the composition of our round table. My business partners include a former politician and a former political advisor who bring bipartisan expertise from both sides of politics. They sit alongside myself as a corporate affairs and strategic communications expert, and our Chief Creative Officer, Mike Spakowski. From the very beginning of any client brief, all of those distinct heads sit around the table together.

This fixes the systemic problems seen in traditional holding groups, where these essential disciplines are separated by rigid P&L structures, separate client scopes, and conflicting financial incentives. In the old model, if corporate affairs and creative teams worked together at all, it was strictly at the very beginning or the tail end of a project—never step-by-step and side-by-side.

Darren Woolley: So the exact operational gap that exists inside most corporate businesses is what you’ve integrated within your own advisory and consultancy to ensure complete strategic alignment.

Driving Behavioural Change Across Disciplines

Vanessa Liell: We have, but achieving this required us to deeply challenge our own behavioural habits and rethink how integrated campaigns are executed. First, it required our creative team to stop viewing corporate affairs as a “brake” that slows down momentum or complicates ideas. They have had to learn to involve us early whenever product claims, corporate purpose, or social content matter.

As communication professionals, we are experts in messaging, but we are not experts in everything else. The real benefit of our model is that I work day-to-day with technical experts in policy, regulation, climate change, and sustainability. That provides incredible confidence as a communicator, knowing our campaigns are built on a sound, verifiable footing. It genuinely concerns me when I see branding or marketing professionals posturing as sustainability experts without any deep technical backing or respect for academics, scientists, and policy parameters.

Our creative team now understands that speed without credibility creates immense commercial risk. There is distinct value in being thorough and taking the necessary time upfront. On the flip side, I’ve had to adapt my behaviour as a corporate affairs leader. I must engage early with the commercial and creative ambition by listening first, understanding what we are trying to achieve, and figuring out how to contribute constructively without blockading the idea. My role is to help build the strategy at the inception phase, rather than merely shaping the perimeter as a late reviewer or acting as a clean-up crew at the end of a botched campaign.

It requires a lot of hard work, continuous learning, and deep respect for each other’s disciplines. I’ll be honest, Darren, it was initially awkward because I had never worked hand-in-hand with a Chief Creative Officer or embedded policy specialists directly into a creative team like this before.

The Power of Inclusivity at the Round Table

Darren Woolley: You’ve created an authentic round table where everyone sits as an equal partner. Part of driving true collaboration is being inclusive and open to multiple distinct perspectives from the start. How do senior leaders and external experts respond to this setup, and what do you need to focus on to make it work?

Vanessa Liell: Making it work is entirely a matter of leadership and structural economics. The immediate issue within traditional agencies is that separate P&Ls and isolated scopes incentivise siloed behaviour. To fix this, you must build a structure that creates an open space for senior leaders from different disciplines to collaborate without immediate output pressure. We are living in a time of tumultuous change, and if we want to address it ambitiously, the commercial incentives must reward collaboration.

The other side of the equation is purely human leadership. It requires stepping back, changing behaviours, and recognising that we all have a lot to learn from other disciplines. We established Horizontis on that exact premise, ensuring all necessary skills are in the room at every single stage of a campaign. It certainly comes with hiccups, challenges, and occasional conflicts, but it has been entirely worth the investment. The speed, quality, and overall cost-effectiveness of the campaigns we deliver as an integrated group are incredibly exciting.

Case Study: Achieving Regulatory Reform through Creative Campaigns

Darren Woolley: I’d love it if you could share a practical example of how this integrated model has delivered results for a client.

Vanessa Liell: I can share a case study from this past year where we worked extensively with a major peak body and industry association seeking regulatory policy alignment between state and federal governments regarding sustainability.

Due to a highly fragmented policy environment, existing regulations were actively conflicting with their intended goals. Subsidies and structural incentives were working directly against the government’s own stated agendas of localised manufacturing and reducing residential carbon footprints. It wasn’t an explosive or highly visible crisis; it was simply a low-priority issue on a packed political schedule. Traditional lobbying and standard government relations pathways had been entirely exhausted over a long period without any effect. The client needed to significantly amplify the impact of their message, and that is where our integrated round table stepped in.

My political business partners and I thoroughly diagnosed the regulatory landscape and briefed our creative team on the exact barriers, stakeholder mindsets, and policy nuances. This insight allowed the creative team to distill a highly complex technical issue into an exceptionally simple, impactful national campaign.

We executed a fast, highly targeted eight-week campaign that integrated several key elements. We ran national integrated advertising alongside hyper-targeted digital and social media campaigns aimed specifically at key electorates. We complemented the paid media by placing authoritative opinion pieces in tier-one mainstream editorial media, and we deployed comprehensive stakeholder relations information packs directly to key decision-makers.

By simplifying the narrative and actively engaging consumers to show a clear shift in voter sentiment, the campaign successfully established a political imperative. We achieved the desired regulatory and policy changes at both the state and federal levels in just eight weeks.

Darren Woolley: What I love about that example is that it highlights how government policies are often drafted without fully understanding the unintended consequences on the ground. Because a government’s legislative schedule is always packed, going back to fix a legacy error remains a very low priority unless you build an undeniable imperative to act.

Your campaign successfully drove that imperative and forced the issue higher up the political agenda. It is a fascinating demonstration of using an advertising campaign to achieve regulatory change, which simply could not happen without both sides of the fence working together. On one hand, you had a deep understanding of the political agenda, and on the other, you used marketing communications to show how shifting voter sentiment makes fixing the policy a worthwhile win for the government.

Treating Politicians as a Consumer Audience

Vanessa Liell: Exactly. The modern environment is far more politicised, regulated, and scrutinised than ever before. A factor that agencies often overlook is that politicians have an immense volume of competing issues to manage. When you want to drive change for a single issue, you have to treat Members of Parliament almost like a consumer audience. You cannot automatically assume they understand the technical nuances or the long-term significance of your specific sector’s problem.

That is where the beauty of combining creativity and communication comes in: distilling information into simple, highly impactful messaging is just as critical for political audiences as it is for everyday consumers. In this case study, the client had previously relied entirely on traditional, isolated corporate affairs and government relations pathways, which kept them stuck.

Conversely, if a creative agency tries to launch a commercial or sustainability campaign without embedding regulatory and corporate affairs expertise at the absolute beginning of the strategy, they take on massive risks. Our model allows us to shape ideas and identify pitfalls early in a collaborative, constructive way. It ensures the creative output is right on the money commercially, while completely mitigating regulatory scrutiny or public backlash before it happens. Running a campaign that triggers a negative regulatory reaction after the fact is an incredibly expensive mistake for a brand.

Darren Woolley: I can imagine that working on these complex briefs is incredibly motivating for your creative teams and creative leadership. Creative professionals love nothing more than sinking their teeth into solving massive, multi-layered problems. Distilling commercial, political, and industrial complexity into a single, elegant piece of creative that shifts national policy is an extraordinary achievement.

Investing in Technical Capability within Agencies

Vanessa Liell: It is a fantastic learning experience for all of us, and that is the real challenge for our industry moving forward: throwing open the doors to what we can learn by actively working together. When you bring together capable people with deep expertise, things can move exceptionally fast. Our creative team feels this setup has significantly benefited their output. It adds a few more steps and a lot more reading to their process, but it gives them immense confidence because they can test their creative directions against real-time feedback from our internal policy experts before the work ever reaches the client.

What I would really like to see moving forward is a serious, proper investment in true technical capability within creative and communication agencies. Modern corporations already do this well; their internal communication and marketing teams work daily side-by-side with sustainability and technical experts. Agencies need to increase their seriousness about the level of technical expertise they hold or can readily access, particularly around critical macro areas like the energy transition, consumer rights, and First Nations affairs.

While an agency obviously cannot employ a hundred different technical specialists full-time, a total lack of structured access to academics, scientists, and industry experts will hold us back in a complex environment. This comes back to a fundamental respect for discipline. In the sustainability space, for example, it genuinely concerns me when marketing and branding professionals position themselves as sustainability experts without any deep technical background. We cannot responsibly advise clients in this modern landscape without constructing our teams to ensure technical accuracy is embedded at the very beginning of our campaigns.

Darren Woolley: I completely agree with you. Thank you so much, Vanessa, for coming in. This conversation has been fabulous, fascinating, and highly illuminating, and I want to thank you for taking the time and joining us on Managing Marketing.

Vanessa Liell: It’s been great to be here. Thanks so much, Darren.

Darren Woolley: Just one question before you go: what would you say, looking back on the work that you’re doing now, would be the one thing that’s given you the greatest sense of achievement?

The post Managing Marketing: How Marketing And Corporate Comms Must Collaborate In A Digital Age appeared first on TrinityP3 Global Marketing Management Consultants.

We often discuss how the agency pitch process is, in many ways, where strategy goes to die. Too often, the process is reduced to a “beauty parade” or a race to the bottom on price, leaving little room for the deep, evidence-based strategic thinking that actually drives business growth. 

But what if the pitch could be the place where strategy is actually born? By integrating real-time, longitudinal brand tracking into the process, we can move away from subjective debates and toward a shared understanding of market reality. 

You can listen to the podcast here:

Follow Managing Marketing on Soundcloud, Podbean, TuneIn, Stitcher, Spotify, Apple Podcast and Amazon Podcasts.

What gets measured gets managed. You know, it’s become almost a cliche.
But the more important part of that is measuring the right things.

Transcription (Edited):

Darren Woolley: Hi, I’m Darren Woolley, founder and CEO of Trinity P3 Marketing Management Consultancy, and welcome to Managing Marketing, a weekly podcast where we discuss the issues and opportunities facing marketing, media, and advertising with industry thought leaders and practitioners. If you’re enjoying the Managing Marketing podcast, please like, review, or share this episode to help spread the wisdom from our guests each week.

We often discuss how the agency pitch process is, in many ways, where strategy goes to die. Too often, the process is reduced to a beauty parade or a race to the bottom on price, leaving little room for the deep, evidence-based strategic thinking that actually drives business growth. When agencies are forced to guess at brand health or rely on an outdated snapshot of consumer sentiment, the resulting strategy is often little more than a creative leap of faith.

But what if the pitch could be the place where strategy is actually born? By integrating real-time, longitudinal brand tracking into the process, we can move away from subjective debates and towards a shared understanding of market reality. Today, we’re exploring how consistent brand tracking research doesn’t just measure the past; it enables and empowers agencies to build strategies that are anchored in truth, allowing for smarter experimentation and a much clearer path to providing ROI. To help us understand the role of brand health data in the agency-client relationship, please welcome to the podcast the strategic agency lead at brand tracking company Tracksuit, Joe Carter. Welcome, Joe.

Joe Carter: Hi Darren. Great to be here. How’s things?

Darren Woolley: Very good. Now look, let’s get this out of the way. When we talk about Tracksuit, we’re not talking Adidas and Nike here, are we? Tracksuit is a brand tracking company, but what does that actually mean for marketers and their agencies?

Joe Carter: Yeah, good question. We do have an array of beautiful retro tracksuits as well, but that is purely merch. Tracksuit is always-on, radically affordable, and beautiful brand tracking for marketers and agencies to demonstrate the impact of brand investment over time. Typically, market research has been done at a point in time, delivered in a PDF report, and accessible only to the Unilevers and the P&Gs of the world. We wanted to lower the barrier to standardise it and make it accessible to everyone, deliver it in a dashboard so that everyone can access it at a price point and in an always-on fashion that makes sense for everyone. The company’s been going for about five years, I’ve been here for about a year and a half, and I love nerding out on all things brand every day.

Democratising Access to Shared Truth

Darren Woolley: What I was really interested in is the fact that often when you talk about brand tracking, you then immediately go to the marketer side. That’s where the brand manager and the brand reside. But of course, agencies have an important role in this, and I love that Tracksuit is very proactive in helping to make that accessible to both the agency and the marketer.

We run a lot of pitches, and when we run them, clients will always say to us that strategic thinking is so important, and yet so little time is often spent testing it or looking at strategy. When it is done, it’s often in quite a haphazard way because of this lack of shared knowledge or shared truth. That’s why I felt like pitching is where strategy goes to die. What’s your experience talking to agencies? What do they see as the empowerment that having access to this brand tracking data gives them?

Joe Carter: It’s been super interesting over the last 18 months. We’ve gone from a team of three or four in our agency partnerships team to a team of 12, which gives you an indication of how rapidly agencies are adopting Tracksuit and always-on brand tracking. We’ve been involved in the last 18 months—across the US, the UK, New Zealand, and Australia—in around seven or eight hundred pitches where we’ve delivered funnel metrics and brand perception.

Essentially, we just create a bit of a baseline and level the playing field for any strategist in the room to either create or evidence a narrative, or to approve or disprove a hypothesis. Ultimately, the premium that we’re paying for is the strategy; it is the very humanness behind the pitch. It’s been really enjoyable creating that more accessible layer of data because it shines a light on the strategist responding. I’ve experienced this on every side of the fence previously—client side, agency side, and publisher side—so it’s interesting being at a technology company that partners with media, comms, and digital strategists to inform their work.

Darren Woolley: Back in 2007, I went overseas after running Trinity P3 for seven years. I kept thinking that almost every pitch we were running was either creatively or media driven, and strategy was almost like the bit done in the background to present the work. In Amsterdam, I met a pitch consultant who said strategy workshops are much more valuable because you get the marketing team and agencies together to actually talk about strategy.

There’s not necessarily a “right” strategy; there’s good strategy and bad strategy, but there’s not “right” strategy. It’s solving a problem that doesn’t necessarily have only one solution. With creative or media recommendations, it very quickly becomes right or wrong based on subjective opinion—”I like that idea, so I like the agency that came up with it”. That’s incredibly subjective and doesn’t really go to the heart of a long-term relationship.

Joe Carter: Totally. It’s definitely not binary when it comes to strategy. I’ve always seen actual strategy as reducing things to their most simple. That’s why strategists are CMO whisperers; they take what’s often complex or fueled by bias and turn it into something rational and simple for the rest of the team to collaborate on.

I still think strategy is treated as expendable. WARC confirmed that towards the end of last year with their future strategy report, saying that 62% of strategists feel it’s expendable or baked in as a “gift with purchase”. My question is why? If that’s where the value is, why is that the case? Far too often we’re chasing outputs rather than outcomes, which is where strategy becomes a commodity because it’s a billable hour. We place such high value on clear strategic guidance, but we decide to whack it in as a line item.

Strategy and the “Black Box” Problem

Darren Woolley: It’s interesting because a long time ago, I did an analysis of agency fees and found that less than 1% of a marketer’s overall expenditure actually went to creativity and strategy. Agencies are comfortable charging on an hourly basis because it was something measurable. But while the technique for producing ideas can look linear, the actual execution of strategy and creativity is never linear.

Joe Carter: No, absolutely not. The solution becomes obvious once we’ve designed the right problem. I was reading about “Enshittification”—the decay of online platforms—and I wonder if that race to sameness could be said for strategy too. I don’t want to lose the craft of it. When you think about the tools we use today to shape strategy, does that lead to an over-reliance versus leaning into what makes great strategies great?

Darren Woolley: People struggle with strategy; some get strategy and planning mixed up. I asked a client once what their strategy was, and they said, “To be number one in category”. I had to explain that’s the objective; strategy is the way you’re going to get there. The strategic process allows you to work out what you’re going to do and what you’re not going to do.

I love the fact that you’ve made Tracksuit available to agencies. We ran a tender last year where the client set a strategic brief. Two of the agencies presented terrific insights, and it wasn’t until afterward I realised they had both accessed Tracksuit data for that category. One problem for a marketer judging strategic capability is that agencies often sell it as a “black box”. Large network agencies have these proprietary solutions that exist in a box, and you’re not sure what data went in or how they got to the solution.

Joe Carter: I’m always curious about what’s in the black box. In school, my teachers would not let me mark my own homework, but we do it all the time in this industry. We define what success looks like and use in-platform reporting from the media platforms eating our lunch to say, “Here’s what these guys are saying”.

Democratising access to ingredients like brand health data levels the playing field. It places a premium on actual insights. Some of the smartest agencies and brand marketers are using brand tracking in diagnosis—to inform segmentation and positioning—rather than just as an evaluation tool to retrofit success afterward. Traditionally, it’s been used so far downstream that the pitch becomes all about comms. We use brand trackers as campaign trackers to justify impact, but the brand is influenced by a lot more than just campaigns.

Always-On Metrics and CFO Alignment

Darren Woolley: So much measurement in marketing is “rear-view mirror,” which is fine for justifying the past, but the real value is in projecting towards the future.

Joe Carter: Totally. I’m seeing the two most hired roles within agencies at the moment are “Head of Product” and “Head of Intelligence”. One to build the infrastructure and make sense of it, and the other to take disparate data points and turn them into something useful for the client. Agencies need to evolve, and the service offering is changing.

Darren Woolley: 15 years ago, brand tracking was only for the biggest companies and they paid a fortune. Now, challenger brands and startups can access that same technology, which helps them be more competitive. It also means indies can access the same data, which helps diversification of thinking.

Joe Carter: Democratising it means it isn’t gate-kept. Having that shared language for what success looks like from day dot is super useful. It allows brands to not just measure the things that are easy to measure.

Darren Woolley: There was always a gap inside organisations between marketers’ metrics and the business’s metrics. But on the financial side, there’s a growing recognition that there are correlations between brand equity and growth.

Joe Carter: “What gets measured gets managed”. For too long, we’ve easily been able to measure clicks, impressions, and ROAS—short-term indicators that are addictive. But does that excite a CFO? Probably not. We want to prove that great brands build great businesses. Every year for 20 years, Kantar’s BrandZ global brands have consistently outperformed the S&P 500. Brand outcomes translate into commercial outcomes.

We need a common language for growth. Are we talking profit margins? A decrease in customer acquisition costs? Marketers need that seat at the board table, and common language gives them a much louder voice.

Darren Woolley: Most brand tracking was traditionally done six-monthly or quarterly. But the idea of “always-on” data is important, because a CFO would struggle with having only one data point a year for the brand.

Joe Carter: Can you imagine having one commercial data point a year? You’d find out just before the end of the financial year how much money you made, but during the year—nothing. We have always-on indicators for everything else; we’ve just never really had it for brand. The market moves faster than that.

I’m working on a pitch in Australia right now where the category data is from 2023. Would you use sales data from three years ago to brief a sizable pitch? Always-on data just makes more sense.

Skin in the Game and Long-Term Investment

Darren Woolley: For years, agencies went from commission to hourly rates, and we’ve been advocates of performance or output-based pricing. But performance was often measured once a year. If you have a continuum of brand tracking data, you can do incremental performance payments.

Joe Carter: Some of the best agencies I work with make strategy hours “over the top” with brand tracking as a service. Success is being measured on outcomes rather than outputs. I’d love to see more agencies putting skin in the game. One indie partner said Tracksuit gives them the opportunity to pitch performance-based incentives based on awareness growth or shifts in perception. You’re putting income on the line to back the work and validating it through a platform.

Darren Woolley: The trouble is many deals were set up based on immediate revenue, which drives short-termism. Brand growth today impacts revenue in six months or even three years in some categories. Having something you can measure as regularly as sales makes it easier to build a financial model that rewards agencies for the value they contribute.

Joe Carter: The first thing you’re going to see is a movement in brand health; sales come off the back of growing brand. For those that don’t adopt this, it’s still a race to the bottom. The dollars we invest in brand actually enhance performance too—it makes conversion more effective.

Darren Woolley: The Bellwether report in the UK recently showed that despite a tightening economy, marketers are predicting budget growth next year. Finally, the message may have got through that investing when everything else is tightening pays off big when the market returns.

Joe Carter: Invest more in brand and you’ll gain more extra share of voice.

Darren Woolley: But you have to measure the right things. Vanity metrics don’t stack up at the board level. You need trend lines showing the relationship between revenue and investment. Short-termism often looks at revenue but ignores profit because the campaign often involves discounting. Growth can also be making more money out of every dollar earned.

Joe Carter: We are too far up the P&L often. Look at Ferrari; it took Enzo Ferrari 40 years to sell a car to Everyday Joes. He just made supercars for racing. That is the strategy of sacrifice. Today they sell 14,000 cars a year and 80% are repeat buyers.

Darren Woolley: Ferrari’s strategy was clear: perform well in Formula One, reinforce the mythology of hand-built cars, and drive margin. Clarity of strategic focus is often missing in marketing, comms, or media strategies.

Joe Carter: An agency needs to be oriented around creating a return on investment. In today’s world, that looks like senior advisory consultancy and good judgment. Executional elements might be automated, but the role of a strategist is innately human. We looked at every statement driver across 1,000 categories in Tracksuit, and the top driver for moving people from awareness to consideration was the statement: “It’s for people like me”. That is so human.

Darren Woolley: AI tools are fine for productivity. But making things faster and cheaper without making them more effective is still a race to the bottom.

Joe Carter, thank you so much for taking the time to having this chat today. I’ve really enjoyed it.

I do have a question for you before we finish up, and that is, you know, what’s your favourite brand, and do you regularly check out how it’s performing on Tracksuit?

The post Managing Marketing: Bringing Strategy Back Into Agency Pitches appeared first on TrinityP3 Global Marketing Management Consultants.

While many brands still treat creator marketing as an experimental line item or a subset of social media, the reality is that the creator economy has outgrown the traditional organisational silos of brand, PR, and media. We are moving away from a campaign-by-campaign mindset toward a world where creator-led activity functions as critical business infrastructure – combining production, media, and distribution into a single, unified force. 

However, as this discipline scales, so does the potential for “organisational chaos.” Marketers often find themselves buried in fragmented workflows and vanity metrics, struggling to prove true business value while navigating the minefields of brand safety and governance. 

You can listen to the podcast here:

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They love it. But 99 % of our clients don’t have the internal resources to manage it.

Transcription (Edited):

Darren Woolley: Hi, I’m Darren Woolley, founder and CEO of Trinity P3 Marketing Management Consultancy. Welcome to Managing Marketing, a weekly podcast where we discuss the issues and opportunities facing marketing, media, and advertising with industry thought leaders and practitioners. While many brands still treat creator marketing as an experimental line item or a subset of social media, the reality is that the creator economy has outgrown the traditional organisational silos of brand, PR, and media.

We’re moving away from a campaign-by-campaign mindset towards a world where creator-led activity functions as critical business infrastructure—combining production, media, and distribution into a single unified force. However, as this discipline scales, so does the potential for organisational chaos. Marketers often find themselves buried in fragmented workflows and vanity metrics, struggling to prove true business value while navigating the minefields of brand safety and governance.

To help us understand how to scale creator marketing without scaling the chaos, please welcome a co-founder of Fabulate, Ben Gunn, and Director of Client Partnerships, Eliza Lewis.

Ben Gunn: Thanks, Darren. Great to be on the podcast. Excited to be here.

Eliza Lewis: Thanks so much, Darren. Happy to be here.

Darren Woolley: It’s interesting from my perspective because we have seen a real shift. Traditionally, marketers would come to us needing a social media agency. Yet, many of those agencies feel like an extension of the traditional creative agency, where they think of social media simply as creating content to fill up channels. There is a real shift towards asking a bigger question: how do we go beyond that? How do we move into a world where the creators themselves are part of the story and the message? Ben, I imagine the whole idea for starting Fabulate was seeing this shift a long time ago.

Ben Gunn: Yeah, absolutely. That is the part that makes these social platforms so exciting for us and for the brands we work with. My background is in traditional media, but we saw the writing on the wall in terms of just how effective it is when creators talk about your brands. It just made sense to help brands do this in a way that can be scalable and drive results that you just don’t see with your standard brand ads.

Creators as the New Content and Distribution Engine

Darren Woolley: Eliza Lewis, you must also see marketers struggle with this. When they come to us, they’re talking about choosing a supplier, a vendor, or an agency, but you must see that struggle even before they get to that point.

Eliza Lewis: Yeah, absolutely. We’re seeing more and more marketers talk about the creator being their content engine, but also their media and distribution engine as well. Traditionally, creator work was always social media first, and it still is, but we’re seeing creators now across digital content marketing, email marketing, events, traditional podcasts, audio, and affiliate marketing. They are becoming that revenue-generating engine. A lot more of those conversations are now creator-led, focusing on how to use them in best practice across all these different channels to get the best revenue outcomes.

Darren Woolley: And that must create conflict internally because many of those things are often outside of the marketing department. Although marketing has a broad remit, many departments are more about internal promotion rather than areas like sales.

Eliza Lewis: It’s definitely changed. Even a couple of years ago, we were just talking to the brand teams. Then it became the brand paid, earned, and owned teams. Now, e-commerce teams are joining the conversation.

Ben Gunn: It’s the events teams, the PR teams, and even technology teams in terms of how you track it all. It feels like it’s outgrown the org chart. It isn’t a single person’s responsibility anymore; it touches multiple parts of a business that need to have some type of feedback regarding what they should be doing with creators.

Navigating Organisational Chaos and Silos

Darren Woolley: But how do you recognise or solve that problem? Organisations, particularly the larger they are, are built in silos. Suddenly you’re asking them to unify when they start to work with creators.

Eliza Lewis: It’s so funny. Sometimes I talk to big enterprise clients in Australia and I’ve literally talked to seven parts of their business, and they don’t know that they’re all talking different aspects of the same language. I’m like, “Okay, we need to all get into a room and talk about this.” We’re definitely talking about the creator operating model more and more and bringing the right stakeholders in on that, typically CMOs and Sales.

Ben Gunn: It starts with having a central place where all of these communications and all of this reporting can sit. I’m still surprised how many are using spreadsheets and emails. One department goes off and does one thing, then another department contracts the same creator a week later and pays five times the price because they didn’t have a central place where they could see that they’ve already worked with this creator. There has to be a willingness at the top and a recognition across all different departments of the role creators play in the marketing ecosystem.

Darren Woolley: So Ben Gunn, are you recommending that they actually rethink the structure, or at least the reporting lines, so there is a central point of coordination?

Ben Gunn: Well, I think it’s first acknowledging the varied ways in which creators are now being used across the marketing ecosystem. Then, the next step is ensuring the work we’re doing across these areas is consistent and repeatable. Everyone is looking for cost efficiencies and ways of streamlining. If you get bought in on that, the next question is: what systems do we need to embed into our business to scale this properly?

The reality is, it’s not going to sit across just one department. We’ve seen brands appoint a Chief Creator Officer, which is great practice because they think across the business. They are the subject matter expert who can bed in these systems and ensure each division working with creators is doing it in what is considered best practice.

Eliza Lewis: Best practice is when you have the assets to be a big enough business to have a Chief Creator Officer. Other examples I’ve seen are roles like a Performance and Creator Marketing Lead. Those roles are starting to pop up more, and they own the operating system and understand the performance metrics.

Moving from Cost Centres to Revenue Functions

Darren Woolley: My worry is the natural inclination within organisations to build silos within silos—like we saw with digital technology teams and social media teams.

Ben Gunn: I don’t think there are many businesses today that aren’t using some type of matrix structure. That’s the reality of how complicated businesses are. You still need your subject matter expert to have 10 out of 10 knowledge about creators. Their job is to ensure the different business units that touch creator have seven out of 10 knowledge, and know when to pull in the experts for specific parts of the job.

Darren Woolley: Eliza Lewis, as a pitch consultant, I see that marketing departments often come to us about appointing an agency because it’s seen as a marketing function. But what you are suggesting is that you need a cross-functional team in choosing and setting up that relationship.

Eliza Lewis: Yeah, absolutely. Bridging the gap from being a cost marketing function to a revenue-driving operation is where we’re seeing the best results. We’re building these creator operating systems where once you tie the talent into business outcomes and measure them with fast results and quick feedback, we’re able to deliver that as a revenue growth function. That’s the kind of pitch we’re responding to at the moment.

Expanding Categories and the Power of Micros

Darren Woolley: There are some categories that are well advanced—fashion, makeup, food, and travel seem well established. But where are the other opportunities?

Ben Gunn: Even those advanced categories are changing constantly because technology is moving at warp speed. In the past, they were hamstrung by data or measurement from the platforms, based on social metrics like likes and shares. It hasn’t easily been able to tie back to search volume, brand awareness, or product purchases. What’s exciting now is the ability to tie those activities not just to a creator, but down to the specific piece of content.

Eliza Lewis: I’m seeing it work best now for anything with a subscription model, entertainment clients, and tech SaaS. Those results are huge. Anything B2B is also interesting—people are still watching the same platforms and are influenced by the same people. Another one I love is health insurance, because you can really speak to pain points from a creator’s perspective that are true, and that parasocial relationship is strong.

Darren Woolley: When I hear about the creator economy, people often first reference the top echelon, like Mr. Beast or the Kardashians. But they aren’t typical creators anymore; they’ve become celebrities.

Eliza Lewis: We did a campaign last year where Kendall Jenner was the ambassador, and we added 50 micros to the mix. On every metric—brand, conversion, business outcomes—those micro-influencers outperformed her. It’s wild considering how much they would have paid to have Kendall Jenner front the campaign.

Ben Gunn: It’s like Salesforce for the creator economy. Most successful businesses using Salesforce capture thousands of records to make informed decisions. We’re doing the same for creators. In a Fabulate operating system, you have all the details: who the creator is, who their audience is, what brands they’ve worked with, and what categories they and their audiences are interested in.

Eliza Lewis: It goes beyond individual data. We have tools where you can put in a bunch of micros and compare them to having two ambassadors to see what the unduplicated reach is. We’re now at the point of predictive analysis and benchmarking based on a group of creators.

Managing the “Messy Middle” and Brand Safety

Ben Gunn: The best brands have an “always-on” approach. They have creators constantly talking about the brand. Our system has real-time data feeding in; if creators fall below benchmarks, they fall out of the always-on strategy and you fill the funnel with new creators. It’s a constant feedback loop where performance is always improving.

Eliza Lewis: While we have all the fancy tools, we also take care of the really boring stuff—contracts, outreach, having contact details in one place, and having a transparent model where there aren’t hidden fees everywhere.

Ben Gunn: Marketers shouldn’t be expected to have the same level of knowledge as a specialist who lives and breathes creator marketing. Most of our clients don’t have the internal resources to manage the technology day-to-day. They want to approve the creator list and content and know it’s working, but the “messy middle” is what our system and managed service solve for.

Darren Woolley: What about the risks? Brand safety and compliance are big concerns, especially in regulated industries like health insurance.

Eliza Lewis: Brand safety is my favourite part. Our platform reviews content audio, visual captions, and comments in over 150 languages and dialects. It ensures the talent is brand safe. Because we have boots on the ground in 14 markets, we found out things like how the watermelon emoticon can be offensive in Malaysia.

For compliance, like with a pharma client, we feed the market regulations, brand dos and don’ts, and the red thread into the tech. Every piece of content filters through those before a manager even reviews it. It takes away the worry of things like a shot of alcohol in the background or a child’s seatbelt being on incorrectly in an auto ad.

Ben Gunn: Governments still think through a geographical lens, so our job is to give them reassurance that the creators they are choosing fit the brand safety and compliance guidelines for that specific market. What is compliant in Australia—like swimwear for a sun cancer program—might be offensive in more modest countries. We’ve trained the AI to think through the lens of the specific brand and market.

Eliza Lewis: It’s a mistake to think of Southeast Asia as one thing. You have to think of each market individually. They are socially minded and do so much commerce through creators, so getting it right in each market is important.

Beyond Vanity Metrics to Real Engagement

Darren Woolley: People look at follower counts, but you need to go beyond that to who they are engaging with and the level of engagement.

Ben Gunn: Platforms now prioritise content that is engaging, irrespective of follower count. TikTok pioneered it. Stephen Bartlett, a very sophisticated creator, talked about how the quality of the show has a greater influence over video views than his actual follower count.

Eliza Lewis: We obsess over metrics like video through rate and six-second video through rate, because only 10% of TikTok videos get to six seconds. The longer someone watches, the more influence you have.

Darren Woolley: I’ve seen content creators share their frustration with algorithms. They hit a million followers and then plateau because they start creating for the algorithm and not the consumer.

Eliza Lewis: You’ve got to get the algorithm to like the content and the consumer. If you don’t get the algorithm to like it, you don’t get the advantage. But the relationship with the audience is based on authenticity; if you ruin that, you’re screwed too.

Ben Gunn: Likes, shares, and saves feed the algorithm. These days, sharing content in DMs is something the algorithm really feeds off. But creators also need a dialogue with their audience to understand what’s really resonating.

Best Practice for Brands and Agencies

Darren Woolley: How do agencies and in-house teams need to change to understand how to work with creators? I’ve heard of creative directors trying to give direction to creators, and it doesn’t end well.

Ben Gunn: There’s a role for them as brand custodians, but they have to let the creator deliver the core message in their own words. Nothing looks worse than trying to shove a line into a video that doesn’t belong. Creative directors should create the guardrails, then let the creator be creative. Think of it like the old magazine editor; you wouldn’t tell the editor at Vogue exactly how to talk about your brand in a spread.

If brands are uncomfortable with brand control, we suggest starting with UGC (User Generated Content). We can script and storyboard that so it is signed off before it goes live. But as you move up into higher follower counts, it is very hard to dictate what is said.

Eliza Lewis: Good creators say no to 70% of offers because they know their power is in the relationship with their audience. If it isn’t authentic, it performs badly.

Ben Gunn: This is why ambassadorships are so effective. One-and-done campaigns don’t work as well because audiences want to know the creator really believes in it. Doing multiple pieces of content over an extended period is more effective for everyone.

Darren Woolley: If a marketer is sitting there going, “We’re wasting our time,” what do they need to be clear about before starting this conversation?

Ben Gunn: We generally engage with clients who are doing decent volume but lack the system to do it at scale. If you want to book your first creator, you can just reach out on Instagram. But when CFOs start asking questions because this line item is growing into the millions and needs to deliver an ROI, that’s where Fabulate fits.

Eliza Lewis: Understand your KPIs and objectives. Is it conversion? That’s a different ball game. And please don’t just come to me for an organic campaign. If you don’t put paid behind it, it’s like creating a TVC and not putting it anywhere. What’s the point?

Darren Woolley: Ben Gunn and Eliza Lewis, thank you for sharing the state of play for creator marketing.

And look, a question for both of you, I’m wondering, when you’re doom-scrolling late at night, which platforms do you go to?

The post Managing Marketing: Maximising Creator Marketing Impact appeared first on TrinityP3 Global Marketing Management Consultants.

Creator marketing has officially grown up. What was once an ad-hoc tactical experiment has matured into a multi-million-dollar media channel. Brands are pouring massive investments into influencer and creator strategies, expecting the same commercial governance, procurement rigor, and ROI transparency they demand from traditional media.

However, as creator budgets have scaled, a familiar holding company playbook has re-emerged.

If you feel like your creator marketing dollars aren’t delivering the scale or creative output they used to, you aren’t imagining it. You’re likely paying an invisible middleman tax.

History Repeats: The Agency Toll Booth

Over successive marketing innovations—from media commissions and digital production to programmatic trading desks—holding companies have perfected the art of inserting themselves as a mandatory toll booth between marketers and service providers.

Creator marketing is simply the latest frontier for this strategy.

Instead of briefs going into the open market to find the best talent and specialist partners, briefs are increasingly aggregated and routed into internal creator divisions within agency holding companies.

These internal creator businesses operate as profit centers designed to maximize internal margins and group utilization. The issue isn’t that agency services lack value; it’s that non-transparent, bundled billing obscures where your money is actually going.

The $100,000 Budget Breakdown: 35% vs. 60% Working Spend

When agencies present creator costs as a single bundled line item—merging talent fees, technology gateways, compliance, analytics, and management—marketers lose all visibility.

When we analyze how a $100,000 creator investment flows through different billing models, the results are startling:

• In an Aggregated (Non-Transparent) Model: As little as $35,000 (35%) actually reaches the creators. Up to 65% of the budget is absorbed by strategy fees, internal agency service margins, technology markups, and unitemized fees.
• In a Transparent (Itemized) Model: Up to $60,000 (60%) directly funds creator output and superannuation, effectively nearly doubling your working budget without increasing your total spend.

Why Working Spend Matters: Higher working budget means more creators, higher-tier talent, greater creative diversity, localized content variants, and significantly better campaign performance.

Take Back Control of Your Creator Spend

Performance guarantees and commercial visibility can and must coexist. You don’t have to accept bundled, opaque line items as the price of doing business in creator marketing.

TrinityP3 has published an exclusive Industry Bulletin: Unmasking the Invisible Margin in Creator Marketing. Designed specifically for CMOs, Heads of Media, and Procurement leaders, this guide provides the exact contractual guardrails and audit frameworks required to eliminate hidden margins.

Download the Industry Bulletin

Unmasking the Invisible Margin in Creator Marketing

Get instant access to our practical guide, complete with budget breakdown benchmarks, contractual unbundling clauses, and our 7-point procurement checklist.

Inside the Bulletin:

• The $100k Benchmark Table: Complete breakdown of non-transparent vs. transparent fee structures.
• Contractual Guardrails: 4 mandatory principles to protect your working spend.
• The Monday Morning Checklist: 7 direct questions every marketer must ask their agency.

What Should You Do Next?

If your agency tells you that creator costs “cannot be unbundled” or that technology efficiencies belong to the agency rather than the campaign, it’s time to re-evaluate your commercial terms.

Download the bulletin, run your current creator campaigns through our 7-point checklist, and start ensuring that every dollar of your marketing budget is working as hard as it possibly can.

If your agency tells you that creator costs “cannot be unbundled” or that technology efficiencies belong to the agency rather than the campaign, it’s time to re-evaluate your commercial terms.

Read more on how we can assist you managing your agency commercial arrangements and contractural terms or contact us to confidentially discuss your specific situation and requirements.

Download the bulletin above, run your current creator campaigns through our 7-point checklist, and start ensuring that every dollar of your marketing budget is working as hard as it possibly can.

Fill out the form below to download your complimentary copy:

The post Where Does Your $100,000 Creator Budget Really Go? appeared first on TrinityP3 Global Marketing Management Consultants.

They explore why AI acts as a “stochastic parrot,” predicting patterns based on past human content and biases, which ultimately regresses output toward the average rather than generating true ideas. 

The conversation delves into the cognitive science behind this phenomenon, referencing Wharton’s System Three model and the dangerous rise of “cognitive surrender,” where high trust in AI leads creatives to adopt faulty outputs with minimal scrutiny. To combat this, they discuss how the best use of AI requires systems thinking, taste, and introducing deliberate productive friction instead of simply offloading the effort of thinking.

Finally, they offer an optimistic reframing of creativity as a wild, divergent problem-solving practice. Instead of asking how to make campaigns slightly faster and cheaper, Cat urges the industry to ask what problems can now be solved that couldn’t before.

You can listen to the podcast here:

Follow Managing Marketing on Soundcloud, Podbean, TuneIn, Stitcher, Spotify, Apple Podcast and Amazon Podcasts.

I feel like LinkedIn has become for me just a place to go and slightly despair about humanity.

Transcription (Edited):

Darren Woolley:

Hi, I’m Darren Woolley, founder and CEO of Trinity P3 Marketing Management Consultancy. Welcome to Managing Marketing, a weekly podcast where we discuss the issues and opportunities facing marketing, media, and advertising with industry thought leaders and practitioners.

While artificial intelligence promises creative abundance, it is in truth delivering creative convergence. This slide towards homogeneity happens because AI acts as a “stochastic parrot,” predicting patterns based on past human content and regressing output towards an average.

Today, we’re exploring structural problems with how the advertising industry is using AI and discussing the rise of “cognitive surrender,” where high trust in AI leads to adopting faulty outputs with minimal scrutiny. Please welcome the founder of Liminal & Co and industry commentator, Cat McGinn. Welcome, Cat.

Cat McGinn:

Thank you very much; it’s good to be here.

Observations on Creative Disruption

Darren Woolley:

You are in a position to provide informed commentary on this topic because you have been observing it for a number of years. From very early on, I remember you bringing a specific perspective to the issue of AI in the creative industries. What captured your interest and motivated you to take that role? You brought a balanced view that was both positive and wary.

Cat McGinn:

I’ve always been interested in technology and how it shapes culture, society, and behaviour. Watching even nascent forms of generative AI back in 2022, it seemed clear it would pose both a real threat and a massive opportunity for the creative industries. I am inherently an optimist, but I think we need to be wary and enter this huge disruption with our eyes open.

Darren Woolley:

On one side, we have technology companies investing billions—maybe even trillions—in the promise of this technology changing society. They are clearly going to over-promise to sell it. On the other side, some have taken a victim-like perspective, fearing the death of careers. It’s playing into the dichotomies we see in the post-social media world, where two sides are battling it out.

Cat McGinn:

That is always the case with new technology; it shines a bright light on cracks that already existed. These issues have come to the fore because the pressure is on. It is revealing structural problems in how we deliver marketing campaigns, how we pay for professional services, and how we interact with one another. All of it falls under scrutiny with this new technology.

The Paradox of Abundance: Quantity vs. Ideas

Darren Woolley:

Someone said to me recently that technology succeeds when it either takes over work you don’t like doing or allows you to do something you could never do before. Does AI fulfil both of those?

Cat McGinn:

Yes and no; it’s a real paradox. The industry has focused for years on wanting to “do more with less,” and AI offers that promise. However, an abundance of output is not the same as an abundance of ideas. That is a tension point we must be cognisant of. I call this “McGinn’s Law”: technology doesn’t necessarily drive us forward. In truth, a new technology often solves a problem directly created by the previous technology.

Darren Woolley:

It’s interesting that you talk about “doing more with less” because when we struggle to measure performance, we default to measurable things like quantity. It’s as if we think, “I’m not sure if this makes a difference, but surely doing more of it will help”.

Cat McGinn:

We get seduced by the speed of output and fail to engage our full critical faculties. We are mistaking quantity for effectiveness, cut-through, and creative originality.

The Risks of Rapid Adoption and “Cognitive Surrender”

Darren Woolley:

This category is evolving quickly; it feels like there is a new breakthrough every week. Where are we currently on the adoption curve?

Cat McGinn:

Twelve months ago, OpenAI was the unquestioned leader, and now we see the rise of Anthropic. Who knows what the world will look like in another year? This level of upheaval is unprecedented. What concerns me is that we are adopting AI wholesale without thinking through the implications, guardrails, regulation, or ethics.

Darren Woolley:

One of my disappointments is how quickly OpenAI turned to advertising as a revenue source. If you position AI as an adviser, having paid advertising corrupts that trust because it may advise based on whoever pays the most.

Cat McGinn:

Trust is a critical problem. We are blindly trusting machines that are riddled with hallucinations. Large Language Models (LLMs) are probabilistic systems; they give the statistically likely next outcome to a prompt. Sometimes they just make things up with such confidence that we forget to check.

Darren Woolley:

Human beings are cognitively lazy. If a tool seems efficient at advising us, it’s easy to just go with it. This is why AI recommendations have surpassed traditional search; it provides one solution, so you don’t have to read through links and make up your own mind.

Cat McGinn:

It was advertising that “poisoned the well” of search, truthfully. Search became unmanageable because the ecosystem was destroyed by SEO and paid outcomes. Now, we see people outsourcing their thinking, taste, and judgement to AI. The risk is a deluge of “slop” and homogenous outputs.

Originality vs. Statistical Convergence

Darren Woolley:

Some argue AI has democratised content creation, but that isn’t necessarily good if people stop judging the outputs. It is just copying patterns from the past.

Cat McGinn:

A large language model is structurally biased towards what is familiar and culturally dominant. Originality doesn’t live in the mean; it lives at the edges, in nuance and cultural specificity. Using them for creativity is where we start to fall down.

Darren Woolley:

We expect it to come up with something new, but human creativity isn’t created in a vacuum either. It is built on past experiences, but humans have the ability to make a “quantum leap”. I find very few marketers have a working model of what human creativity actually is.

Cat McGinn:

When we trust creative outputs to a model that drives us towards statistical convergence, how do you differentiate your brand? Every agency and marketing team has access to the same tools and thinking. How can we connect with customers in a unique way?

Advertising at its best is more than just executing communication in a “professional” way. Outstanding pieces of effective creative have always involved “zigging while others zag”. We can use AI to get to interesting places, but there is a greater need for discernment and craft. There is also a pipeline crisis:

if junior staff aren’t doing the work, where are the future tastemakers going to be trained?

Systems Thinking and Efficiency

Darren Woolley:

Generative AI allows a single human to be more productive if they use it as a researcher to provide options, rather than as a problem solver.

Cat McGinn:

We will see the rise of “systems thinkers” who understand how to hold the whole ecosystem in their head and create constraint and direction. This might be a massive opportunity for neurodivergent people who naturally think in systems and connections.

Currently, agencies are using AI primarily to “do more with less”. Some claim they can do work for 70% less. This focuses on productivity rather than performance.

Darren Woolley:

It’s hard to measure the value or performance being created, so we go for more “widgets”.

Cat McGinn:

We are falling into the trap of efficiency over effectiveness. This isn’t a new challenge; it highlights structural fissures in the industry. We haven’t been paying for great thinking; we’ve been paying for volume. If our only connection with customers is spamming them at volume, it just comes down to media budget size and how much you can interrupt people. I believe there is still value in creating experiences that change how people think and feel about a brand.

Darren Woolley:

Flooding social media with messaging clearly isn’t working. The key is to stand out and get attention. The Campaign Palace used to say on their letterhead:

“No one buys anything while they’re asleep”. Their philosophy was that advertising must wake people up. Now, platforms like LinkedIn are full of programmatically generated “slop”. If you’re struggling to articulate a point of view, maybe don’t make a post if you need an AI to do it for you.

The Danger of Outsourcing Thought

Cat McGinn:

A new research paper from the Wharton School, Thinking Fast, Slow and Artificial, identifies a third mode of thinking. When you outsource your thinking to AI, you stop being able to distinguish whether it was your idea or the machine’s. We start trusting the AI for the perfect outcome and surrender that “sparky” imaginative process.

The study found that the higher the time pressure and stress, the more likely people are to outsource their brains to AI. This leads to significant mistakes in reasoning and analysis and erodes our ability to think.

Darren Woolley:

It reminds me of the Honda “Cog” ad. The agency took months to develop the idea. They finally turned up at the client’s office with the game Mousetrap to explain the concept of engineering excellence through a chain reaction. You can have an idea in an instant, but is it the best idea for a million-dollar investment? AI comes up with the most likely conclusion, whereas creativity uses cognitive load to create fresh, unexpected views.

Cat McGinn:

Like all great ideas, as soon as you hear them, you wonder why they haven’t always existed. We no longer have the time to “mull and process” thoughts because of constant pressure. The promise of automation should be that we outsource the boring stuff—like timesheets—and claw back time for wild, divergent ideas.

AGI and the Future of Human Agency

Darren Woolley:

Companies are researching Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) and super-intelligence. Will that be a game-changer where human beings are taken out of the loop?

Cat McGinn:

I have a degree of scepticism about AGI. It’s interesting that AI companies claim world-ending technology is within grasp just as they go for an IPO. The founder of Anthropic predicted AGI by 2027, yet until recently, ChatGPT couldn’t spell “strawberry” accurately.

This is the moment for us to focus on human agency. What world do we want to live in? Do we want to just feed the machine, or should the machine serve humanity? These conversations are urgent and necessary.

Darren Woolley:

When the creator no longer has a say over the creation, we have lost control and relevance. However, there are great opportunities. In Hollywood, they are shooting in studios and using AI for backdrops, similar to how Gone with the Wind used hand-painted glass, but still using human actors. People rebel against fully AI-generated performances because they don’t feel human. Using it for backdrops can reduce the cost of a high-quality film by two-thirds, which could expand the amount of work available.

The Need for Authentic Connection

Cat McGinn:

The craft of storytelling and human connection will become more vital than ever. This is a crossroads: do we lean into “more of the same for less,” or do we look for horizon-expanding possibilities?

Darren Woolley:

Technology in the 21st century seems to be having a negative impact on connection. Teenagers feel more alone than previous generations. Social media is not fulfilling the need for human connection.

Cat McGinn:

The rise of AI companions shows a human desire for connection, but people don’t know how to make those connections in the real world. However, I see a movement among Gen Z and Gen Alpha to go outside, “touch grass,” and seek messy, real-world experiences rather than social media perfection.

Darren Woolley:

If tools work against the human condition, there will be a rebellion. Sales emails that are clearly AI-generated feel “stalkerish” and lack authenticity.

Cat McGinn:

This makes the need to be face-to-face all the more important; it becomes the only reliable way to interact. Real-life connection in “meat space” is a positive trajectory to be on.

Advice for Staying Curious

Darren Woolley:

Optimistically, where do you see the opportunities for the industry?

Cat McGinn:

If we stop trying to do what we’ve already done but faster and start using AI to deliver visions we haven’t been able to execute, it takes away constraint. It gives us an incredible chance to do new, innovative things that move the needle. Let’s stop doing 10,000 Facebook updates for the same price and find ways to be creatively distinct.

Darren Woolley:

If you were giving advice, what sources of information would you recommend to avoid feeling deluged?

Cat McGinn:

I love several writers on Substack. Empire of AI by Karen Hao should be required reading. Stay curious and look at creators like Phantom X who are building film and TV work using AI. Try to step out of the anxiety of staying on top of every update. Come back to what is irreducibly human: what makes you feel something and what makes you connect?

Darren Woolley:

Cat McGinn, it’s been great catching up. I’m looking forward to the project you’re working on. Thank you for sharing your perspective.

Cat McGinn:

Thank you so much for having me; it’s been great to talk.

The post Managing Marketing: The Paradox Of AI And The Slide Toward Creative Homogeneity appeared first on TrinityP3 Global Marketing Management Consultants.

The traditional response to underperformance is usually a structural “pivot”: we pitch the agency, we restructure the department, or we hire a new CMO. But these are often cosmetic fixes for a systemic disease.

At TrinityP3, we have identified that true marketing excellence—whether delivered by an external agency or an internal resource—is built on three interdependent pillars: The Operational Review (The Diagnostic), The Engagement Agreement (The Framework), and Evalu8ing (The Measurement).

When balanced correctly, this trinity eliminates the “friction costs” that drain up to 20% of marketing productivity and replaces them with a culture of mutual accountability.

1. The Operational Review: Auditing the “Why” and the “How”

The first pillar is the Agency Operational Review. This is the deep-dive diagnostic designed to uncover the structural truths of the relationship. Most organizations wait until a relationship is in crisis to perform a review, but high-performing teams use them as a proactive “health check.”

Beyond the Output

Traditional audits look at the “What”—the quality of the TVC or the ROI of the media spend. An Operational Review looks at the “How.” We examine the mechanics of the collaboration:

• The Briefing Flow: Is work starting with a clear strategy, or is the agency “briefing themselves” through trial and error?

• Approval Hierarchies: How many layers of “Maybe” must a project pass through before it reaches a “Yes”?

• Resource Mapping: Are the right seniority levels being applied to the right tasks?

The In-House Parallel

For in-house agencies, the Operational Review is often a wake-up call. Internal clients often treat in-house resources as “free” or “unlimited,” leading to a chaotic intake process that prioritises urgency over importance. The review identifies these systemic leaks, providing the data needed to move from a “production shop” to a “strategic hub.”

2. The Engagement Agreement: Defining the “Ways of Working” (WoW)

If the Operational Review identifies the gaps, the Engagement Agreement (EA) is the bridge built to close them.

For too long, the industry has relied on the Service Level Agreement (SLA). The problem with an SLA is that it is a legal document designed for “compliance.” It tells the agency what happens if they fail. An Engagement Agreement, conversely, is an operational document designed for “success.” It tells both parties how to win.

The Multi-Directional Contract

The EA is built on the realisation that the client’s behaviour directly impacts the agency’s performance. It formalises the “Ways of Working” (WoW) for both external partners and internal teams:

• Mutual Commitments: The agency commits to strategic leadership; the client commits to consolidated, actionable feedback within 48 hours.

• Process Standardisation: Explicitly defining the “Definition of Ready”, the minimum information required for a brief to be accepted.

• Conflict Resolution: Setting the protocols for “respectful challenge,” ensuring that creative friction leads to better ideas rather than fractured relationships.

For an in-house team, the EA acts as an Internal Charter. It gives the internal agency the mandate to push back on poor briefs and establishes a “contractual” relationship with business units, ensuring the internal team is respected as a professional partner.

3. Evalu8ing: The Measurement of Collaborative Health

The final pillar is Evalu8ing, TrinityP3’s proprietary relationship diagnostic platform. Without measurement, the Engagement Agreement is merely a “wish list.” Evalu8ing turns the “soft skills” of collaboration into hard data.

Measuring the “White Space”

Evalu8ing moves beyond the one-way “report card” where a client marks their agency. It is a 360-degree, multi-directional assessment.

• Agency-to-Client: Allows the agency to provide honest, anonymous feedback on the quality of the client’s briefing and leadership.

• Agency-to-Agency: In a multi-agency roster, it measures how well the Creative, Media, and Digital partners are collaborating.

• Internal Stakeholder Alignment: Measures how well different internal divisions (Marketing vs. Sales vs. IT) are aligned on the brand’s goals.

Continuous Improvement

By running Evalu8ing as a quarterly pulse check, organizations can see if the “Ways of Working” established in the Engagement Agreement are actually being followed. It identifies “micro-frictions” before they turn into relationship-ending crises. It provides the C-suite with a “Health Score” for their marketing investments, proving that the team is becoming more efficient over time.

The Velocity Dividend: Balancing the Trinity

Why does this balance matter? Because speed requires structure. When you undertake an Operational Review, you identify where you are losing time. When you implement an Engagement Agreement, you set the rules that recover that time. When you use Evalu8ing, you ensure that those rules are being respected.

The result is what we call the Velocity Dividend.

1. Externally: You stop the “Pitch Cycle.” You fix the relationship you have, saving the massive cost and disruption of going to market.

2. Internally: You empower your in-house teams. You give them the structure they need to produce high-quality work without the burnout.

3. Commercially: You ensure that every dollar of fee—whether paid to a global network or an internal headcount, is focused on outputs and outcomes, not on navigating internal bureaucracy.

Engineering the “Dream Team”

High-performing teams are not an accident of chemistry; they are an achievement of architecture.

By balancing these three elements, you move your marketing department from a state of “reactive chaos” to “proactive excellence.” You stop policing your partners and start enabling them. Whether you are managing a roster of ten global agencies or an internal team of fifty, the path to performance is the same: Audit the process, Agree on the behaviour, and Measure the collaboration.

Is your marketing ecosystem suffering from the “Friction Tax”? Contact us today to discuss how our Operational Reviews, Engagement Agreements, and Evalu8ing platform can reset your team for high performance.

The post The High-Performance Trinity: How Operational Reviews, Engagement Agreements, and Evalu8ing Reset Marketing Excellence appeared first on TrinityP3 Global Marketing Management Consultants.

They explore the fundamental shift from cost-based to value-based remuneration systems, a transition accelerated by the rise of generative AI. The conversation delves into the “crisis of the hourly rate,” the hidden financial risks of in-housing, and the necessity of differentiating between low-value commoditised tasks and high-value strategic work. They also examine how marketers can align their activities with business outcomes to transition from a “spending” mindset to an “investment” portfolio approach that satisfies C-suite scrutiny.

For a sector where marketing is often the second-largest line item on a P&L, trailing only behind payroll, understanding how to articulate and measure commercial impact is critical. As AI decouples production time from output value, making the traditional “head-hour” model a race to the bottom, this is an essential conversation to eavesdrop on for anyone looking to future-proof their agency fee structures and marketing investments.

You can listen to the podcast here:

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That old adage, “what gets measured gets managed” doesn’t often start from a position of what actually matters to the business. It starts from what’s easiest to measure.

Transcription (Edited):

Darren Woolley:

Hi, I’m Darren Woolley, founder and CEO of Trinity P3 Marketing Management Consultancy. Welcome to Managing Marketing, a weekly podcast where we discuss the issues and opportunities facing marketing, media, and advertising with industry thought leaders and practitioners.

The concept of value, particularly when it comes to agency fees for service, is a conversation that’s gained additional momentum with the application of generative AI to automate and streamline much of the agency’s services process. Helping us to define what agency value could look like, please welcome the commercially savvy CFO and senior finance consultant at Trinity P3, Nick Hand. Welcome, Nick.

Nick Hand:

Hi Darren, thank you very much. Thanks for having me back.

Darren Woolley:

Look, we’re living in interesting times, as they say. I think it’s meant to be a blessing and a curse. One of the topics that we’ve talked about for years is the need to move away from a cost-based system to a value-based system. This has suddenly reared up with AI and the promise of being able to do more for less. Agencies are suddenly realising that charging by the head-hour is no longer a valued way of making money. In fact, it’s a race to the bottom if the machines are taking over the work. But there’s a lot of talk about value, and yet not a lot of talk about what value is, other than either paying for what’s produced or paying for the outcome that those outputs produce.

Nick Hand:

Agencies struggle with it because they’ve never really considered it before. They were being paid on inputs and cost-recovery models. Now, all of a sudden, that discussion has flipped on its head and they are scrambling to try and figure out how they can get paid away from cost inputs. The struggle also stems from the fact that a lot of marketers within organisations don’t know what value looks like either. You’ve got the agency off doing one thing, the marketer thinking value is something completely different, and the C-suite looking at a third stream. Everyone is going in a different direction, so you never get this pull-back to the things that actually matter to the business. What does success look like? Both agencies and marketers are struggling with that.

The Consumer Perspective on Agency Value

Darren Woolley:

It varies depending on who you’re talking to. If you’re talking to a marketer who has a defined budget, they are looking to maximise what they get for that. If you’re talking to a marketer who’s got a growth agenda, they’re probably looking for how they engage an agency to help grow that. One of the things I find is that agencies always think of value from their revenue perspective and not from the consumer’s perspective—the client and the organisation. Ultimately, that is where value resides: in the mind of the person buying the service.

Nick Hand:

Absolutely. It is helpful for businesses to take a step back and imagine they are consumers. In our personal lives, we make value decisions every single time we purchase something. We assess whether the benefit we derive outweighs the cost. But a lot of businesses think insularly about how an agency can maximise revenue from a particular client, rather than what is underneath the brief. Potentially, the goal is to grow brand awareness. What does that look like commercially for the client? Perhaps the client isn’t quite sure. It’s the agency’s job to get under the bonnet of that and not just take the brief at face value. They should always look for the primary commercial objective.

Darren Woolley:

But Nick, we’ve seen that marketers are very much driven by wanting to get more for less, or more for the same amount. They believe that if they do more, the business will get better results, or they want to prove they got a “value deal” by getting more from the agency for the same money. Many marketers default back to an input model, the traditional head-hour rate, because they actually put value around the people they’re getting. Particularly if someone at the agency is highly regarded, they like a retainer model where they can dictate getting those people on their business. The struggle to get to a value-based proposition exists because from the buyer’s perspective, a person is tangible, whereas everything else is less so.

Nick Hand:

That makes sense, and it worked when budgets were higher and channels were fewer. Marketers are trying to do more with less, but the proliferation of online channels and the amount of “content” needed to feed that machine has led them down a path where they have a set budget and just need to do more with it. They aren’t stopping to think about what they are trying to achieve. Am I just trying to get eyeballs, or do I want those eyeballs attached to a human being who will do something in response to the message? Many relationships are bought on cost but expected to deliver value. More C-suite executives are looking at what marketing actually delivers to the bottom line. Marketers simply don’t know how to articulate value in finance or CEO language. They might know the business objectives, but they don’t have the vocabulary to articulate them clearly in a brief. That’s where the disconnect comes from.

Investing vs. Spending: The CFO’s View

Darren Woolley:

There’s a big difference between a marketer given a budget to spend and a marketer who pitches the CFO for a budget to invest. A spend budget focuses on the volume of work produced without correlation to business impact. A marketer wanting a budget to invest must have clear, agreed objectives and measures. We often push aside the marketers who just have a budget to spend because they are just buying as much stuff as they can. The marketers who have an investment to make want to align their agencies to likewise have skin in the game.

Nick Hand:

That’s the key. The CFO will give you more money to invest if you can show the commercial return. Being able to attribute the marketing programme back to tangible business results is vital. Marketers will always get more money if they can show their activities are contributing to that. Likewise, if an activity is not working, stopping it and reallocating the money to something that works is essential. If the marketer is just spending money, the conversation about creating value becomes moot because they’re measuring the amount of stuff they get rather than the impact the agency brings to bear.

Darren Woolley:

Let’s explore that. Under the traditional hourly rate or retainer, it was about retaining a number of people, negotiating the lowest possible fee for them, and then throwing as much work at them as possible.

Nick Hand:

And that reframes advertising as a commodity. Price and efficiency become the most important factors rather than business results. Many processes set up by procurement commoditise agency services. Outside of a few key people, they often don’t care who does the work as long as it is done at volume and speed. Marketers need to decide if they want their agency services to be a commodity. That won’t correlate to moving the needle on the business results that a CFO or CEO is looking for.

The Hidden Price of In-Housing

Darren Woolley:

Then consider when you take agency resources in-house. Marketers often think, “That’s no longer my budget,” but they are still a headcount in marketing. While they reduced expenditure with external suppliers, they increased the internal cost of marketing to the business. From a CFO’s perspective, there must be a demand for a return on that investment beyond it just being “cheaper” than an agency.

Nick Hand:

I would be expecting the same or better returns from bringing it in-house. Why take the risk of employing people and the additional costs that brings otherwise? For commoditised services where you want to do things cheaply and efficiently—like basic design or digital production—in-housing may be fine. But if you are looking for strategic or creative guidance, bringing it in-house can limit you because you are stuck with the people you’ve hired. You can’t necessarily go to your roster and pick the specialist skills needed for a specific brief. It creates more pressure on the marketer and reduces the flexibility needed for non-commoditised activity.

Darren Woolley:

Finance looks at overall business expenditure. Does external supplier expenditure stand out more than internal operating costs? Headcount is an operational expense, but they are counted as employees and might not get the same interrogation unless there’s a process of reducing headcount.

Nick Hand:

Advertising and marketing is usually the biggest or second biggest line item on a P&L, but the first is headcount. When business is good, you can get away with more. When times are tougher and cuts are needed, the marketing budget is targeted first, and headcount second. I’d want to know what these people are contributing to the organisation. If it ends up being a lot of administrative busywork without commercial impact, they are equally up for cuts. It makes them a cost and a commodity that could be outsourced anyway.

Darren Woolley:

Although the conversation for in-housing has switched from cost reduction, there is still a rapid justification because it is “cheaper,” without necessarily proving it. It’s assumed to be cheaper because the company provides the real estate, technology, and utilities that are normally built into an agency fee.

Nick Hand:

The rationale is you’re taking away the overhead and the agency’s profit margin. In reality, you’re probably only taking away the profit margin. Unless you have spare office space you can’t offload, you’ll have to find more space. The flip side is the lack of flexibility in being able to pivot quickly. For commoditised work, it’s great, but for strategically intense work, those models can fall down.

Why Performance-Based Fees Rarely Work

Darren Woolley:

Let’s go back to the marketer with an investment budget aligned to KPIs. Those metrics would have to be valued by finance if they are how the marketer is judged for delivering on the investment.

Nick Hand:

They have to be. Otherwise, if the agency, the C-suite, and the marketer are pulling in different directions, that’s not success. The marketing team’s measurements must be in lockstep with business objectives. If the objective is to buy media at the lowest cost per thousand, that’s a primary KPI. If that’s just a mechanism to deliver a larger objective, then it should be measured, but it isn’t the primary judge of whether the communications have been effective.

Darren Woolley:

This is where we hit a roadblock. In the Four Ps, agencies have very little to do with product, pricing, or distribution. They are primarily involved in promotion, which is just one lever for driving sales and profit. How can you align an agency based on the value they’ve created when they only contribute to one of several mechanisms for driving financial value?

Nick Hand:

The conversation is tempered by the amount of influence the agency actually has. The notion of paying agencies for outcomes ignores the problem that you can’t tie the entire agency’s fee to results they don’t fully control. But you can judge the agency on their proportion of influence. Maybe a portion of their fee is tied to that, so they achieve upside when the client does well but share the pain when they don’t. The key is apportioning that influence to the right degree.

Darren Woolley:

I get that, but it leads back to performance-based remuneration (PBR), which often fails. The downside is high risk for the agency, and the upside is rarely enough to justify it. No one can agree on final attribution. I know examples where things went gangbusters and the agency expected a big payday, only to be told they didn’t really contribute that much. Or it goes badly for reasons the agency couldn’t control, like a factory burning down, and they lose out. When I see conversations about value payments based on outcomes, they are essentially asking agencies to push all their chips onto a single hand. Agencies shouldn’t be asked to do that any more than a person would sacrifice their salary for a small potential bonus.

Value-Based Outputs: The Case for Tiered Deliverables

Nick Hand:

It’s not necessarily about payment by results; it’s about the frameworks in place to measure if the relationship is a success and setting the price up front. Why does something cost $100? What is the marketer expecting the agency to contribute that justifies that price?

Darren Woolley:

Are we talking about value-based outputs rather than outcomes? If a service produces something, we negotiate a price based on its contribution. For example, an EDM telling customers about public holidays has very little value compared to an EDM promoting a sale to drive revenue. I wouldn’t pay the same amount for both. One has no value for driving sales, whereas the other has high potential.

Nick Hand:

Exactly. Businesses need to treat these like consumer transactions. Everything is contextual and can be valued differently because one thing is a greater benefit to the business than the other. It’s about setting the price based on the perceived value that will be generated.

Darren Woolley:

In the past, marketers said, “It takes the same amount of time to do both.” But with AI, time has been largely decoupled from production. You want a qualified human to make sure the sale-driving EDM is effective, perhaps doing AB testing. The other is just information. In financial services, they produce huge amounts of regulatory communication compared to home loan promotions that are incredibly profitable. You shouldn’t pay the same for every output.

Nick Hand:

Where that falls down is that many agency scopes aren’t detailed enough to identify those differences. You can’t just have a line in the scope that says “EDM.” It needs to be fleshed out to explain what it is expected to drive in terms of response and sales. That ascribes it a higher value than a closing notice. Generally, there isn’t enough detail to differentiate those levels of requirement.

Darren Woolley:

That happens when the scope is viewed only as a way to lock in a fee for delivery. If you follow it to the logical conclusion of a retail relationship, the agency has a range of services: high-return, medium-return, and low-return. The low-value services would be priced at the discount end, likely done by AI with minimal human intervention. At the other end is the best thinking to maximise the return on investment. You naturally pay more for that. There is a pricing differential, and as a shopper, you pick how many of each you need and pay the bill.

Managing the Brand Portfolio Like an Investment

Nick Hand:

It doesn’t even need to be worked out entirely in advance. For recurring commoditised services, you agree on the price. For higher-value work, it might be bespoke and quoted when the brief is submitted. The marketer knows they are paying a fair price because those lower fees set a frame of reference. Acknowledging these different value levels is the starting point.

Darren Woolley:

Anything spent at that premium end is assumed to contribute to growth. There could be an additional bonus paid on overall growth. The more the client spends in that area, the larger the share of the bonus. It keeps the agency focused on why they are doing the premium work—to drive growth—while the low-cost work is just to get things done efficiently so money can be reinvested into higher-value areas.

Nick Hand:

Paying a bonus on commoditised work doesn’t make sense. Incentivising the agency on the higher-value work is the way to go.

Darren Woolley:

There’s a trap here. Marketers often say they spend 30% on brand building, 30% on promotion, and 40% on retail. But when we look at actual expenditure, it’s often 70% on retail and only 10% on brand. They are inclined to go short to drive immediate sales while giving up on long-term brand building.

Nick Hand:

If you incentivise the agency, that needs to be factored in. Perhaps the agency is bonused on churning out lower-value work efficiently to manage short-term goals. If that means more to the organisation than long-term brand building, then that becomes the higher-value work in practice, even if it’s priced lower.

Darren Woolley:

In one case, a company realised product promotion was actually part of their brand work, so that became the high-premium work. Retail was split because they realised there were different types. Many marketers don’t like to prioritised their work this way because they feel every task is equally important. But from an investment point of view, that isn’t true.

AI, Speed-to-Market, and the Productivity Premium

Nick Hand:

Marketing budgets need to be treated like an investment portfolio. You invest in different areas to spread risk, knowing some have higher returns. Some are long-term propositions. If marketers looked at their investment this way, you’d see more apportioning of value based on what is being achieved.

Darren Woolley:

When we worked with a consumer goods company, budgets for products were aligned to market potential. Small products with big growth got a certain budget compared to dominant but static ones. Some brands couldn’t even be invested in because there was no financial argument for it.

Nick Hand:

Were the agency fees aligned with that approach?

Darren Woolley:

No, and that was the problem. A small brand with a small budget paid the same fee for an equivalent piece of work as a large brand. We designed a pricing model based on brand value, reviewed every year. It meant paying more for more upside and less for less upside. The agency couldn’t get their head around it because they thought it took the same amount of work either way.

Nick Hand:

The agency missed the point. The client expected them to spend the bulk of their time and thinking on the higher-value brands. If you give agencies a flat playing surface, they’ll spend too much time on declining brands and not enough on high-growth ones. That’s on the agency.

Darren Woolley:

It was also on the marketer, because brand managers were fearful that paying less meant the agency wouldn’t spend enough time on them. They had a Walmart budget but wanted a Chanel service. There are many emotional drivers. Agencies want cost recovery, while brand managers see their budget as a sign of their own importance.

The Road to Trust and Transparent Pricing

Nick Hand:

AI is making the go-to-market faster. An agency can now pump out 20 iterations using generative AI. That might cause analysis-paralysis, but it also means a brief can reach digital channels in days rather than weeks. The agency could argue that speed is more valuable to the advertiser and justify a premium. It might actually give agencies a reason to increase prices because they can get the client into market faster.

Darren Woolley:

This highlights how important trust is. Appointing an agency based on “upside” requires high trust. A pricing model allows for agreement up front and adjustment later. Marketers need to think about their scope of work not just as services, but in terms of what they want those services to achieve. You could build a 3×3 framework: what is the purpose, how much do you need, and when do you need it?

Nick Hand:

The proliferation of data has over-complicated measurement in the pursuit of perfection. Having something simpler that is agreed upon by both parties is often more effective. Measurement should start from what actually matters to the business rather than what is easiest to measure. If an agency is measured on something different than what they were asked to do, it won’t be a success.

Darren Woolley:

Nick Hand, thank you for this conversation. I think it is an interesting one about what value actually looks like, and one that will continue.

Nick Hand:

Fantastic. Look forward to it. Thanks Darren.

Darren Woolley:

And for you, what does value look like?

The post Managing Marketing: Redefining Agency Value and Fees in the Age of AI appeared first on TrinityP3 Global Marketing Management Consultants.

The failure of traditional marketing process design lies in its top-down nature. It assumes that marketing is a linear assembly line when, in reality, it is a complex social system of collaboration.

At TrinityP3, we have moved beyond static process mapping. Our Ways of Working (WoW) and Engagement Agreement methodology represents a superior approach because it prioritizes ownership over enforcement. By involving the people managing and delivering the process in its design, we create a living system that survives personnel changes and agency rotations.

1. The Flaw in “Enforced” Process Design

Too often, marketing processes are designed in a vacuum by external operations consultants or procurement leads who are disconnected from the daily creative friction of the brand. This leads to several systemic failures:

• Resistance to Rigidness: When a process is “enforced,” teams find workarounds. If a briefing system is too cumbersome, people start briefing via WhatsApp or over coffee. The “official” process becomes a ghost ship—perfect on paper, but empty of actual activity.

• The “New Broom” Syndrome: One of the biggest threats to marketing efficiency is the arrival of a new CMO or a new agency lead. Each “new broom” brings their own favorite templates and idiosyncratic ways of working. Without a documented and collectively owned framework, the existing process fragments instantly, and the organization loses years of institutional knowledge.

• The Linear Trap: Traditional mapping often assumes a “Waterfall” approach (Step A must lead to Step B). In a modern, multi-channel environment, work is often concurrent and iterative. Static maps can’t handle the messiness of real-time collaboration.

2. The Power of Co-Creation and Ownership

The Engagement Agreement methodology turns process design into a collaborative act. Instead of telling teams how to work, we facilitate a series of workshops where the marketing teams and their agencies design the interaction themselves.

Why Ownership Trumps Compliance

When a Brand Manager and a Creative Director sit in a room and agree on what a “Great Brief” looks like, they are no longer following a rule—they are upholding a promise. Because the people delivering the work helped build the framework, they have skin in the game.

This collaborative approach addresses the “why” before the “how.” When teams understand that a specific approval gate exists to protect them from legal risk or to ensure budget alignment, they stop seeing it as a hurdle and start seeing it as a safety net.

Multi-Directional Design

Unlike traditional mapping, which usually focuses on what the agency must deliver to the client, our methodology is multi-directional. It asks:

• “What does the agency need from the client to be successful?”

• “What are the non-negotiables for the media partner to hit their deadlines?”

• “How does the internal legal team want to be engaged to prevent bottlenecks?”

3. Overcoming the Fragmentation of Change

One of the most powerful benefits of a documented Engagement Agreement is its ability to act as the Organizational Anchor.

Marketing departments are high-churn environments. Agencies come and go; marketing leads rotate every two to three years. In a traditional model, the process departs with the person. With a Ways of Working (WoW) Manual in place, the process belongs to the position, not the person.

Onboarding vs. Re-Inventing

When a new agency is appointed, they aren’t invited to bring their “proprietary process.” Instead, they are onboarded into the brand’s established Engagement Agreement. They are shown: “This is how we brief, this is how we provide feedback, and this is how we measure success here.”

This doesn’t stifle the agency’s creativity; it focuses it. It removes the first six months of “feeling each other out” and replaces it with instant operational alignment. The benefit of an agreed-upon process is no longer fragile—it is foundational.

4. The Methodology: A Living, Breathing System

Traditional process mapping is “set and forget.” An Engagement Agreement is reviewed collectively and regularly improved.

The Feedback Loop

By using tools like Evalu8ing alongside the Engagement Agreement, we create a continuous improvement loop. If the data shows that the “Feedback Cycle” is still a point of friction despite the agreed-upon rules, the team reconvenes to adjust the process.

This creates a dynamic process that evolves as the business grows. If the brand shifts from traditional media to a social-first “Agile” model, the Engagement Agreement is updated by the team to reflect those new requirements.

5. The Superiority of Engagement

The difference between traditional process design and the TrinityP3 Engagement Agreement approach is the difference between a Map and a Compass.

A map tells you exactly where to step, but it becomes useless the moment the terrain changes. A compass gives you a direction and a set of principles that allow you to navigate even when the path is blocked.

By prioritizing ownership, co-creation, and multi-directional accountability, we help marketing organizations build a Collaborative Operating System that:

1. Survives leadership and agency turnover.

2. Reduces the friction and “noise” of daily interactions.

3. Empowers the people doing the work to improve the system they use.

Fix the Interaction, Not Just the Map

Stop enforcing processes on people who didn’t help build them. If you want a high-performing marketing team, you must involve them in the design of their own success.

The Engagement Agreement methodology isn’t just about drawing better boxes and arrows; it’s about building a culture of mutual respect and operational excellence that stands the test of time.

Are you tired of “reinventing the wheel” every time a new agency joins your roster? Contact TrinityP3 today to learn how our Engagement Agreement and Ways of Working methodology can provide your team with a permanent, high-performance foundation.

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