Creative Self-Care Makes Agency Brands as Memorable as Consumer Brands

Providing consistency of message and clear points of differentiation

Most agencies are known for the campaigns they create, yet not one creative asset leaves the door until the brand’s unique point of view is rigorously defined. Industry consensus: the best brands are distinct, memorable, and speak to unmet needs for their audience.

While agencies hold their clients to this standard for brand growth, do they hold their own brands to the same standard?

I collaborate with other communications professionals who help agencies market themselves, and we all agree that standing out is increasingly difficult. This stems from the same landscape shifts perplexing mass marketers: every brand must prove conversion while doing more with less, contending with economic concerns, AI, talent dynamics and other factors.

Many channels that agencies use to communicate their stories—websites, social, business/trade press, experiential—are undergoing massive shifts. B2B agency brands face the same challenge as B2C: If you can find your consumer and capture a minute of their attention, how do you turn that into a memorable experience that drives conversion? And conversion is high-stakes here—you’re asking the audience to assign you a major project or make you their agency of record.

Yet looking at the landscape, memorable differentiation seems lost. Many agency taglines and descriptions use identical phrasing. Everyone touts the best ideas. They all boast being the most inventive, brand-forward, barrier-breaking, culture-driven creatives. They’re full-service, integrated, 360-degree, tech-enabled, media-agnostic, holistic, insights-driven, data-powered solutions providers applying best-in-class solutions and award-winning talent to elevate world-class brands.

Sound familiar?

The challenge of agency differentiation is real. No one wants to fall short of what competitors offer, which leads to similar claims and language.

When marketing consumer packaged goods, you can tout brand experience and attributes: the freshest taste, smoothest flight, best mileage. That’s difficult when your brand experience leads to meetings and emails. No one wants to claim they create “the best emails.” Many agencies end up leaning on leadership profiles, their last great campaign and proprietary tools to stand out. But what else can they leverage to make their story distinctive?

There’s an untapped wellspring of potential in treating your own brand the way you would treat a client’s brand—so your brand is memorable beyond your last successful campaign. Consider it creative self-care and know that your team has the talent and capability to unlock it.

What are the practices of creative self-care for agency brands? They’re gonna look familiar…

Do you have a brand brief?

From what I’ve seen over the past couple of decades, most agencies have exceptional brand identity—a distinctive look and feel—but rarely a brief for their own brand, completed the way they would for a client. Brand briefs hold authors to a high standard for differentiation, demand a unique value proposition, define audience targets and declare the brand’s ethos in one sentence.

I find that agency leaders hesitate to commit to a brief. As branding experts with experienced teams, they trust their people to understand and apply sound marketing wisdom to their own agency. So, they develop an agency tagline for the website … then change it for their new business pitch … then change it again on their press boilerplate.

There’s no consistency. And there’s no solid point of differentiation.

Consider how an agency “built on the power of simple ideas” would architect a pitch. Simple ideas can be … anything? Now consider instead an agency differentiated by speed. What could that pitch look like? You could customize your website for instant communication, create intentionally fast pitch presentations, set up chemistry checks like speed dating and focus onboarding on effective brevity—all in ways your clients can remember. Creative commitment to a set brief breaks down walls to focused, creative possibility—and we know this from work we deliver for marketers.

Do you have a consumer journey?

No marketer would launch a client campaign without mapping a consumer journey. What does the consumer want—both expressly and secretly? How do they spend time? What’s their budget, population, media consumption—and how does it all drive conversion?

Many agencies lean on common-sense pitch traditions to reach brand decision-makers—but how do you illustrate your consumer’s path for your team? What data can you access or create to understand what marketers really want—beyond what they say on panels and in RFPs? Explore their unexamined needs and find a direct path toward your differentiated value.

Do you have a media plan?

Agencies don’t have the same media budgets as their clients, and their audiences are smaller. Owned/earned channels allow cost-efficient visibility and engagement. Still, media influences messaging, and for a client, you’d map every channel their audience engages to understand each step down the funnel.

Given your typical range of agency communications options—press releases, social handles, website content, brand publishing, op-eds—do you know the role each plays in your audience’s decision-making? Have you sequenced and weighted media to align with the consumer journey?

The urgency of speed-to-market in our exceptionally urgent industry—moving at the pace of consumer trends—compels leaders to think about what they can do today for visibility. But take a moment to breathe and apply the long-term thinking you deliver for clients to your own brand; then unlock the creativity towards business results that make the best brands world-famous.

The urgency of speed-to-market in our exceptionally urgent industry—moving at the pace of consumer trends—compels leaders to think about what they can do today for visibility. But take a moment to breathe and apply the long-term thinking you deliver for clients to your own brand; then unlock the creativity towards business results that make the best brands world-famous.