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‘Partnership is without a doubt, no matter how big you are, key to success,’ says OgilvyOne MD Jo Coombs

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By Natalie Mortimer, N/A

May 15, 2014 | 4 min read

Forging partnerships with other agencies is an essential practice and the “key to success” when it comes to behaving like a specialist agency, according to OgilvyOne MD Jo Coombs.

Image copyright Bronac McNeill

Speaking at The Drum’s Agency Acceleration Day on a panel discussing smaller versus larger agencies, Coombs said that despite its high number of employees, OgilvyOne doesn’t consider itself to be a generalist, but rather “multiple specialists”, and that partnering with experts is absolutely essential.

“There was a day certainly when the big agencies said, ‘you don’t need specialists, just put it all with us, we can do everything’. Certainly we would not be that arrogant at OgilvyOne, partnering is the key to success and it’s about picking your partners really well.”

Coombs continued: “It's potentially quite easier when you’re working with similar size agencies but a lot of the time we’re working with much smaller specialists to compliment our skills and then you do get challenges with making that partnership work.

“You need to look for partners with similar values and culture to you. Partnership is, without a doubt no matter how big you are, key to success.”

Coombs also shared the view that smaller agencies tend to be more creative with their commercial proposals than a networked agency which has less flexibility, and that OgilvyOne is looking to combat the situation.

“We are piloting different types of models, licensing models and other ways of getting paid for what we do. That is one of the challenges actually of a big agency is that you have clients in big organisations and they say, ‘this is how we pay, and these are the rates that we are prepared to pay and this is the structure’.”

“It is quite difficult to be innovative in the way that we price our services and it’s the biggest bugbear. It’s the type of thing that big agencies need to club together on to break the model as is today to help everyone, because otherwise the clients say, ‘my procurement are involved, they’re buying it and negotiating it and that’s that’. So we are very envious of the companies who can be more innovative and those are the instances when we say we can’t compete and it’s rare for us to say that.”

Also speaking at the central London event was Peter Dolukhanov, managing director, Nice Agency who said that the biggest challenges he faced when growing his agency from two people to 50 people, which he did in just four years, were culture and process.

“It’s hard to scale a culture model… We have a mantra that we will not hire a person if they don’t fit in from a talent and culture perspective and that’s something important to maintain," Dolukhanov said.

“The other thing with process is that it’s much easier to operate a smaller agency with less than perfect processes – you can operate on instinct, whereas when you’ve grown past that size you really need to have those operational processes in place.”

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