The Future of Marketing Partnerships & Work

*This is an abridged updated version of an article I published pre-pandemic. You can read the full version on The Articulate Collective blog.

**Although my original views remain unchanged, so much has happened in the world since 2019 to reinforce them, it was worth revisiting the topic and reframing a few points. You can read the original here.

***This is also a great example of the impact of publishing content. An article I published nearly five years ago provided the basis for business development discussions with the crew from The Articulate Collective. Investing in content can pay dividends far down the road 😉 

I have been an in-house CMO, fractional Marketing Director, agency owner and self-employed individual, so I’ve occupied every seat at the table when it comes to ways of working, collaborating and partnering. 

I’m firmly in the camp of being agile and getting work done as efficiently as possible — which in my book is equal parts speed and effectiveness. In my opinion, working with an agency typically runs counter to these philosophies. Traditionally agency partnerships are costly, opaque and time-consuming, resulting in an imbalanced ratio of effort to output.

To best understand how to best achieve marketing results in 2024 and beyond, we must zoom out and look at the macro trends at play. 

We’re standing at a crossroads, not just for marketing and communications, but our very societal structure and relationship with work will be challenged. 

I believe this new iteration of marketing and agency partnerships lies at the intersection of media, commerce, and work.

The History of Work

It’s always best to start right at the heart of the matter. And for this discussion — whether agency-side or client-side — the beating heart is work itself.

You cannot discuss partnerships, frameworks or the like, without considering how we as professionals do our jobs.

And this is a paradigm that will change significantly in the coming decades, with clear signs already appearing now (thanks to the Pandemic). And quite honestly cannot happen soon enough.

How’s this for a kicker? According to the Harvard Business Review, “the eight-hour workday harkens to 19th-century socialism.

When there was no upper limit to the hours that organizations could demand of factory workers, and the Industrial Revolution saw children as young as six years old working the coal mines, American labor unions fought hard to instill a 40-hour workweek, eventually ratifying it as part of the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938.”

That’s right! We’re structuring our work around a concept implemented during Henry Ford and the Assembly Line!!!!! This is insane.

Even before Covid, strides were taken in the realms of distributed companies, remote work and rising levels of freelancers. Our traditional sense of what we know as work — commuting to the office every day to work a 9 to 5 for one employer — will be challenged in the coming decades.

The Working Landscape is Changing

We’re trending toward what’s known as the Open Talent Economy, a collaborative, technology-driven, rapid-cycle way of doing business made up of a mixture of contractors, full-time workers, and freelancers.  

Pre-Covid projections had in about a decade, approximately half of the U.S. population freelancing, a 115 percent increase in several remote jobs being offered, and several distributed companies popping up including InVision, Buffer, GitHub, Stack and Product Hunt.

During Covid, many companies pivoted to a remote workforce out of necessity. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, remote work was scarce.

Approximately five percent of work days were fully remote in 2018, but that ballooned to 60% by May 2020, and since 2021, the share of remote work remains at about 30%.

“The transition to remote work was surprisingly easy for most people. Office workers already did most of their work on the computer anyway, and laptops made it easy to do that work anywhere with a wireless signal, writes Scott Fulford.  

“The only part missing was how to collaborate. But over the previous twenty years, the technology to work remotely had evolved, even if most workplaces hadn’t caught up yet.

The emergence of Zoom, Slack, Teams, and the ability to co-edit documents meant that sitting next to someone was no longer necessary to collaborate. Pandemic surveys regularly showed that a large majority of the new remote workers had the equipment they needed and had adequate workspace.”

Although the new blueprint for work was forged, several companies have backtracked on remote work since it’s no longer self-serving, no matter how counterintuitive this is to build a company. 

The Future of Company Composition

Long before pandemic-induced remote work, the biggest thought leader in distributed work was Matt Mullenweg, the founder of Automattic (parent company of WordPress). His company is made up of 850-plus employees who are scattered in 69 countries around the globe.

“Why should we constrain ourselves to only hire people that either live in or can commute within a 70-mile distance of the headquarters. That’s silly,” says Mulenweg.

“That is a geographic filter which takes out the vast majority of the talent and intelligence in the world. We can do better.”

With this point, Mullenweg hits the nail squarely on its head, especially for an agency. It used to be if you were involved with media and/or advertising you had to be in London, New York or more recently the Bay Area.

However as big brands and big media loosen their grip on our mindshare, so does the need to be attached to a particular epicenter.

So why not hire the best strategic and creative talent you can instead of confining your business to a specific geographic location?

When I ran my agency, the nucleus of our team was in The Netherlands, but we had parts of our team distributed globally, including, a developer based in Minnesota and an intern based in Moscow. Our team serviced clients across the globe from California to New Zealand. 

And even for those of us based in Amsterdam, we leveraged our remote working nature to commute less, work from a different location or simply work flexible non-traditional hours, so we could plan our work around our lives instead of our lives around our work. 

Our agile workflow facilitated how we ran our business and prepared us for the tidal wave that was the pandemic.

While it was a challenging time, especially for marketing service businesses like ours, we had the skills and processes to navigate the choppy waters.

Increased Efficiency & Performance

A study carried out by C-Trip and Stanford University divided 503 call center employees in half: one group worked from home four days out of five per week, and the other half worked full-time at the office.

After nine months, the remote working group saw an increase of 13% in performance and 9% in their overall work calling time compared to the office group.

Why do we still deem it necessary (generally speaking) to work eight (or more) hours a week for five days a week? What if the idea of full-time work was something considerably less time-intensive, but more fulfilling?

Rather than one homogeneous in-house workforce, a team as we will come to know, will be several extensions tethered together to achieve a common cause.

The concept of a team will encompass employees, technologies, consultants, freelancers, agencies and the like. This will undoubtedly challenge how we define efficiency, collaboration, and partnerships.

This will also shape what an agency is and its positioning with its clients. The future agency is a collective of distributed strategists, creatives, doers and makers who stretch the globe to provide an unheralded degree and depth of specialized talent. 

The focus will shift from offices on Madison Avenue and yachts at Cannes to inclusion and breaking down borders so agencies can source the best global talent and provide the best work for their clients.

The result will be an overall better relationship between agency and client. Distributed work will make agencies better at servicing clients and clients better at managing remote agency partnerships.