A friend and former senior brand strategist at a big-name agency suggested a topic she hears her clients (in-house people, like me) bring up a lot: How should you work with brand agencies? This is a long one, with a lot to dig into. If you’re reading over email, make sure to pop over to the app so you don’t get cut off! ✂️
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If you’re an in-house brand leader, you’ve probably had the “We should hire an agency” conversation, maybe many times. Whatever your experience level, what usually follows hiring an agency is a complex juggle of competing priorities and differing expectations. And hopefully creative breakthroughs!
Like any relationship where money and reputation are involved, the agency-client dynamic has high stakes. As someone who’s been on both sides (but primarily in-house at companies like Gusto, Notion, Brex, and now Later), I’ve learned that successful outcomes hinge on how well you understand and manage competing motivations. And like any relationship advice, what I’m sharing in this post comes from some...learning experiences. 😗
As I started this piece, I realized the discussion is much richer when it includes the voice of these important partners. So I asked friends and folks I’ve worked with at a few of my favorite agencies—Fuzzco, Instrument, and The New Company—to weigh in with their advice for how clients (like you!) can get the most out of your work with (world-class!) agencies like them. These are the folks behind incredible work like AG1’s brand identity, Notion’s “For Your Life’s Work” campaign,
Fuzzco for Figma; Instrument for PagerDuty; The New Company for Venmo
When to leverage a brand agency
It might not be the ideal time to hire a brand agency when:
Your core brand foundations aren’t established (or if this is the case, make sure that establishing them is a clearly defined part of the scope)
Your budget or timeline is very inflexible—no buffer can set you up for frustration
You need long-term, ongoing production work (hire an FTE!)
You don’t know what you’re hiring them for (it starts with the RFP)
You don’t have internal alignment on strategy
On that last point, it can depend. Sometimes an outside perspective can be what you need to break through an alignment rut. But see how far you can get internally, first. You’re often better off by dedicating one person to own this process (maybe it you) and/or working closely with an expert consultant (it me 🙋🏼♀️) to get as far as possible in-house before you bring yet more new (and not yet trusted) voices into the mix. The types of decisions brand agencies are typically working on are often contentious, subjective, and expensive—so tread with intention.
Agency partnerships and all the flavors they come in can make sense in all kinds of contexts, but in my experience, these are the best times to bring in an agency:
You need specialized expertise your team lacks (like motion design or illustration for a major campaign)
You’re undertaking a major brand initiative (like entering a new market)
Your team lacks bandwidth (you need help executing) but has clear direction
These projects all typically require multi-quarter timelines, executive involvement (which implies inflexible schedules), and making hard decisions that can be distracting from day to day brand or marketing team work. Usually, an agency effort will only involve a subset of the team in order to protect everyone else’s time and focus. If you’re finding that your entire team (or a bunch of surprising characters from across the company) are involved in agency partnership work, that’s a red flag (see more below).
Setting internal expectations
Before you sign that SOW, make sure you have:
Clear stakeholder alignment on what success looks like
Defined the metrics that matter to your business (not just the agency’s portfolio 😇)
Realistic timeline and budget (add 20% buffer to both—trust me)
Internal capacity to actually manage the relationship
The last point is crucial and often overlooked. Agency partnerships aren’t “set it and forget it”—they require active management from your team, usually at least an hour or two per week; typically more if you’re engaged in a major campaign buildout or rebrand. I’ve seen great agencies produce mediocre work because the internal team wasn’t equipped to guide them effectively. Even if you’re flush with funds, you can’t afford to skimp on the time investment.
In this case, you have your internal stakeholders (your founder, execs, and boss; your finance and legal team) and you have the agency stakeholders (the account director, the lead strategist, etc.) to understand. While I have my own views on how to get brand buy-in, I wanted to hear it from the agency side:
KK: What are your tips for building exec buy-in/trust, especially with founders or CEOs who might be skeptical about the process?
Fuzzco:
Not all executives are the same. Some are deeply invested in design decisions and others live at the forest level (though we’re sure they all care about the trees to some extent). The first step is understanding how the executive needs to engage, including getting a sense for how the internal team has been empowered to run the project and make decisions along the way.
As a general rule, include them early and often. Early input increases a sense of ownership and will help execs feel like collaborators in the project, not just approvers. Building trust with them has everything to do with how well they believe you understand their objectives and perspective. Continuing to root your work in that framing will help deepen the trust the execs have in your thinking and the ultimate outcome.
Regardless of how they’d like to be involved in the process, they are often the team members who have the biggest, boldest, most audacious vision for the company. Having access to this perspective is invaluable for creating authentic and unique work.
The New Company:
At the end of the day, they’re all different—yet share a common trait—they sniff out bullshit better than most.
If you’ve got a deck full of work you don’t believe in, they’re going to see it no matter how well you present it. They’re a smart, tough crowd. And it’s typically a non-linear process getting their buy-in.
How you position the agency and work to founders is complex—and there’re a lot of contradictions to it—you should be an expert in your field, but able to adapt to their needs as well. Listening to feedback, but also pushing back and leading in the right places. Making sure the work solves the problems of the company but its also flexible and adaptable to future needs.
Ultimately you just need to do your best... and having a decade or two of experience doesn’t hurt either.
Instrument:
Most misalignments happen before the agency even joins the first call, often because execs aren’t on the same page. Doing this upfront work will save time and headaches later.
Set aside time for one-on-one connections—whether it’s the CEO directly speaking with our creative or strategy leads or a monthly standing check-in. These direct conversations help address ideas or concerns and keep the project moving forward.
A good RFP & an even better brief
Okay, so you’ve aligned on the project scope, goals, and the actual agency partner—right? Now we’re just getting started.
You’ve probably heard the phrase “The work is only as good as the brief.” In this case, the partnership can only be as good as your alignment internally and with the agency about what you’re solving for and what good looks like. And that all starts before the brief, with the RFP (request for proposal). If you have alignment on these things at the RFP stage, your brief will be even better:
Business context (including competitors)
Project objectives tied to business goals
Target audience insights
Key messages and constraints
Success metrics
Timeline and budget
Stakeholders and approval process
Be as granular as possible, and if there are unclear details, be up front and say “We don’t know this yet.” From the Instrument team’s perspective, “It’s fine if the exact outcomes aren’t clear yet, but what’s the problem you need solved? And are all stakeholders aligned on that?”
I’ve seen incredible agencies deliver work they’re very proud of that falls totally flat with the audience…and it’s the brand’s fault for not giving enough background (though the agency should know to push for a better brief before getting to work).
It’s usually pretty obvious when the agency partner “gets it”—they can summarize the objectives, challenges, and company context succinctly on calls and lay out next steps that match what the internal decision makers will want. If your agency partner can’t do this yet, it means you probably haven’t given them enough, or that they aren’t paying close attention, which is also a helpful input.
During the early briefing stage, there are other key considerations to clarify, ideally in writing:
Make sure you understand any termination clauses (learned this one the hard way) and that your legal team reviews this specifically.
Get clear, specific deadlines in the SOW (these may shift, on purpose, but at least you have a benchmark).
Establish communication and meeting cadences up front, and get the calendar events scheduled well in advance so no one can say they didn’t know it was coming.
Define the review process and stick to it—how will reviews be conducted, who will be in the room, how will feedback be captured and shared, who are decision makers vs. input-givers? Use a DACI.
Be clear about who has final say. It’s probably the founder or relevant executive, but make sure they know that, and that they don’t drift from the project as competing priorities arise. If it isn’t that executive, make double-sure that everyone is on the same page because even if they say they’re delegating, odds are they will probably make the call, one way or another.
KK: What are some of the best habits of clients that make it easier for you to do your best work with them?
The New Company:
One answer that might go under the radar is helping the agency understand your internal culture—what’s the structure of the team? Who are the stakeholders? Who might have to get looped in later? How are decisions made and ultimately, what is the internal culture like and how can we best set ourselves up for success within it?
It’s easy to overlook, but each client’s situation is different and the internal challenges they face are often not obvious to the agency, especially at the beginning of a relationship. Some have cultures that need/want big, emotive ideas. In others, more precise, technically-driven solutions are needed.
Some CMOs and CEOs are super hands-on. Some aren’t. One of the experiences that prepared me best to run an agency was working in-house at Airbnb. It helped contextualize the depth of work and cross-team collaboration that happened internally—which from the outside looking in isn’t always clear. Helping the agency establish the right points of contact and proper context for how decisions get made will aid in creating work that is contextually correct throughout the process.
Our job is to make great work that solves a company’s core needs—but how we get there often plays a big factor in the quality and success of that work, as well as how everyone feels at the end.
Fuzzco:
Have clear decision makers. Bring a confident position to all conversations and feedback that are rooted in the business strategy.
Gain internal alignment on this position for consistency.
Stay true to the linear progression of the process and trust the decisions that have been made to inform the work ahead.
Make friends with your partner. Have fun.
Instrument:
Involve us earlier in the strategy development. Our role is to really get what the client’s business is about—goals, numbers, the whole picture—and bring that extra spark of creativity. The earlier we’re brought in, the more context we have to work with.
Set clear principles and boundaries. Clear communication and expectations lead to a more successful, productive partnership. Establishing these upfront helps protect both the relationship and the success of the project.
“The truth is, agencies tend to have a fickle relationship with consistency. There’s rarely a ‘let’s see how much of the old identity we can keep’ discussion in branding agencies. And advertising agencies are often focused on making lovely shiny campaigns over brand building, typically with one eye on some awards.”
Don’t get me wrong—I’m a big fan of Koto and their impressive work. And who doesn’t want their campaigns to win awards so they can go to Cannes? But unless you’re McDonald’s or Anheuser-Busch, big-budget campaigns designed mainly to tick a submission box probably aren’t your top priority. Your priority (or at least mine) is building a sustainable brand system, and often it’s about getting the most mileage possible out of existing assets so you can show good value to your execs and financial partners (and get budget approved for future work).
I rarely want to rip-and-replace my existing brand identity unless I’ve already intentionally and meticulously gone through the exercise of determining how and why the existing identity isn’t serving us or our future business goals. Branding agencies are much more ready to introduce change because few of those factors I mentioned above are at stake in the same way for them.
If we’re being direct, brand agencies have two primary motivations:
Getting hired (and rehired)
Creating portfolio pieces to help them get hired by other companies
Meanwhile, companies are usually motivated by making as much money as possible while spending as little money as possible. 🤭 Yay capitalism! But it’s fine for each partner to have differing motivations. It’s just useful to be aware of them, and avoid the tension agency motivations can create when not aligned with in-house priorities.
When your startup’s motivations aren’t aligned with your brand agency’s, you risk scope creep, budget overages, or early termination (e.g., firing that incredible agency you just fought for three months to sign).
Many larger agencies will see startups as less attractive clients because we typically have smaller budgets and operate in shorter financial planning cycles. They’d rather land a big-budget retainer than try to make it work with month-to-month projects.
Sometimes the best partnership is with a smaller agency that’s more flexible and attentive to your needs (or comfortable with startup timelines and…chaos). They may not have the big-name portfolios to the same degree, but they’re often better suited to growing with your brand and adapting to your needs (and budgets).
Try as you might, the agency you choose might not be the right fit. And even if they are, they could still make mistakes or engage in practices that don’t match your needs and goals. 🚩 Watch out for these warning signs:
Scope creep suggestions in early meetings—the scope has been defined in the brief. If your partner is suggesting adding more, your ears should perk up. It’s okay to hear them out, but also to be firm and say “Let’s focus on what we’ve aligned on, and once we have a sense of the outcome, we can figure out what comes next.”
Vague timelines or deliverables—here’s where you put on your project management hat. No vaguery! Set dates, documented and aligned deliverables… your life will be much easier.
Resistance to incorporating existing brand elements—unless you’re fully rebranding, your brand is probably working to some degree. Your brief should include what’s working as a nudge to the agency to figure out how to amplify that good chemistry.
Over-emphasis on awards/portfolio potential and lack of emphasis on your business metrics—I imagine that at some very large companies, awards are the actual business goal. But very few. If your exec partners are saying this, it’s a red flag. The goals for brand work are fairly straightforward—strengthen the brand in order to grow the business. Your customers almost definitely won’t know if you won an award for your campaign assets. They will (hopefully) know the campaign exists at all, and take the action you’re trying to drive. Your agency partner needs to be on this page, otherwise what’s developed won’t move the right needles.
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Let’s wrap on a productive note with a few more questions for our friends at Fuzzco, The New Company, and Instrument:
KK: What do you wish clients thought about when working with you?
Be open to surprise. What is your tolerance for risk? Be honest about your comfort levels and any potentially limiting expectations you’re carrying into the engagement. If it’s a rebrand how far and close can it be? Encourage your partner to explore far and close. Even if you think you’ll end up close to the before. Sometimes seeing something far afield will help you really understand what is right for you. Sometimes you’ll get surprised and if the quality and thought are there, it might be just enough to help you take a bigger leap forward. Bravery is rewarded.
Instrument:
Make space for big ideas—and failures. If you want bold concepts, be ready for a mix of hits and misses. The best partnerships embrace the mix.
Committees can stifle creativity. When too many people with different viewpoints are involved, the original idea gets watered down, criticized too much, and risks are avoided. The result can end up being bland and too safe.
KK: Do any specific examples of a good collaboration come to mind?
Fuzzco:
Dropbox: The Dropbox team has always come to us with projects that require big dreaming and even bigger execution. We’ve worked closely with their brand marketing leads and in-house creative directors across multiple campaigns, creative retainers, and identity projects, providing everything from creative concepting to production. Our success is largely in part to their team’s ability to come to us with a thorough brief that always gives us the brand and product-level context we need to do great work together.
Figma: For two years when we were on retainer with Figma we had the opportunity to work very closely with their marketing team to expand the brand system, launch FigJam, create identities for Config and Schema, redesign their homepage and concept and produce a large brand campaign. We built a shared trust between our teams and were able to create a vast amount of work together and very quickly. It was incredibly fun and rewarding work.
Fuzzco’s collaboration with Figma on their new homepage.
Notion: The Notion team was always very intentional with what projects they chose to have us work on and what they were hoping to achieve out of the work. This gave our team so much clarity in terms of when we were meant to expand the brand, build out the existing system or execute production files, which allowed us to be efficient with our time and deliver the most value at every point. Together we created their first out of home campaign, concepted how the brand expands into physical space, created internal culture identity systems, and executed many other projects across teams over our three year engagement.
Notion’s London (top) & Tokyo pop-ups my team worked on!
Mailchimp: This was perhaps our most formative early relationship. The Mailchimp marketing team engaged us to help them figure out what brand marketing meant at Mailchimp. We worked together for four years and through our 100+ projects together. We had carte blanche and endless support from Mailchimp to self-direct projects that included everything from videos of chickens writing the Mailchimp logo with mealworms, to kinetic sculpture, a series of comic books, paper cut out diorama kits, playing cards, wooden puzzles, as well as product work, ads, and the usual.
The relationship was a dream. This work was enabled by forming deep friendships formed with the Mailchimp team as well as from a general culture of creativity that their CEO encouraged. We feel like in our work with Mailchimp (~2012-2016) we very much laid a blueprint for how many B2B SAAS businesses create brand experiences to this day. We proved that creating highly creative brand experiences that are authentic to your culture can build strong relationships with your customers. In those days Mailchimp very much developed a cult following.
Nuuly: Probably the fastest, highest impact branding project we have worked on. We worked with the executive team at URBN as well as the leadership team at Nuuly to create a name, a brand strategy, a visual identity, packaging, art direction for the website and photoshoot in around 10 weeks. It was fast and furious and we were able to have crazy fast momentum because we had such a strong relationship with the project team and developed early trust with a multi-day work session in their offices followed by daily check-ins.
So many good ones. The work we did with AG1 comes to mind. Amazing creative team that trusted us, advocated for us and built the brand collaboratively.
Nike SB is another one. A small, super passionate team that helped elevate the work and deploy it in really beautiful and surprising ways.
It’s hard to pick a few — our longstanding relationships with EA Sports, Station Casinos and Venmo have all been built on great relationships.
The surprising ones of late have been with C2, the LA-based film production studio that developed the movie Longlegs, and Mainside Capital, a European venture firm with whom we’re creating a new burger restaurant concept called One Burger.
I say surprising because both are founder-led—and quite often those are the projects I’m most cautious of... not because founders are bad to work with, but they’re passionate and sometimes that passion can spill over into making the working structure complex. Both of these projects had founders that were able to play both decision-maker and creative collaborator roles, which can be incredibly hard to balance.
Often there becomes a lot of spin that can dilute the quality of the finished product. Yet with both of these clients, we were able to take an idea and build it out into something that felt fully thought through because the founders were able to bring clarity and collaboration to the project.
From The New Company’s work on eharmony’s rebrand.
KK: How do you prefer to involve or partner with internal creative teams? What best practices do you follow that help this collaboration go more smoothly?
Fuzzco:
This changes a bit based on whether we’re working on a project or an ongoing retainer with a client, but the fundamentals are the same.
We hold standing weekly meetings to review work and ask for feedback from clients within 24 to 48 hours. This allows us to maintain a momentum we believe is critical to creating fresh/successful/good work.
We find ways to incorporate team members and skill sets our clients have within their in-house team, so if they have a design team, writer or product team, we find ways to include them in the work.
Regardless of the type of engagement we’re entering into, a major factor that determines whether a collaboration goes smoothly is whether our client is internally aligned on the business strategy and goals they are hoping to achieve with the work. No matter how talented a creative team is, it’s rarely a good idea to outsource major business strategy decisions.
The New Company:
We always involve internal creative teams—how many and how often is the challenge.
We find the best structure is when we have a handful of people we work with directly and consistently. This team becomes the core working team—essentially NewCo and our client teams make decisions together and work together to craft the right approach to the work.
From there, the work travels up and down. The work is presented to the C-suite—sometimes by us, sometimes by the internal team. And then figure out the best time / way to loop in everyone who needs to work with the solutions we create. Particularly with brand projects we often run workshops before a project is done to ensure people across the organization can give feedback and consider it from different angles.
At the end of the day, NewCo is really good at solving brand problems, but our clients are the ones that really understand their brand and we need that expertise throughout every project. It’s the internal team that is going to carry the work forward and determine its success, so it’s crucial we have a close partnership with them throughout the process.
Instrument:
Break down client <- -> agency walls. We’re all about breaking down those client-agency walls whenever we can. We love creating shared workspaces, dedicated Slack channels, and fostering an embedded team mindset. By acting as extensions of our clients’ teams, with shared metrics for success, collaboration feels natural and we create space to co-create work that genuinely pushes the needle forward.
Find inspiration everywhere. We love stepping back and pulling ideas from all sorts of places—whether it’s creating playlists that capture a brand’s vibe or swapping podcast recommendations. Our work is all about building unique worlds, and it’s always a blast bringing that feeling to life as a team.
KK: Any opinions on what work should not be outsourced to an agency? What work should be done in-house?
Fuzzco:
In addition to the specific skills or types of creative work an agency does, there are three overarching categories of work that you can generally bucket everything into: creating, doing, maintaining.
Some teams are better at generating new ideas and creating worlds for brands. Others are better at operationalizing those ideas and executing on them in the form of tangible deliverables. And others are great at taking an existing execution and maintaining it and taking care of it over time so it stays relevant and fresh. Some teams can comfortably execute some combination of these things.
What’s tough is when you ask an agency that’s great at “doing” to “create” or an agency that is create at “creating” to “maintain”; some form of friction is created that you may be able to work through together or you may find that specific project wasn’t as successful as you’d hoped.
Your internal team is your anchor to define what you keep in-house and what you outsource. If your internal team is great at doing, outsource creating and maintaining and leverage your team to be a bridge between the two. If your team excels at maintaining, outsource creating and doing and set your team up with a really strong foundation to work from.
Asking any team to execute on something that isn’t their real strength can lead to frustration on both sides. If an agency says they’d rather not be doing production design or optimizing performance ads, you’re probably not going to get the most enthusiastic brains on the project and they may not have the internal processes in place to make that specific type of work as efficient and cost effective for your team. This requires teams—both internal and agency—to be honest about their strengths and understand they not only can’t be everything to everyone, they shouldn’t try to be.
What other questions do you have about working with brand agencies? Who are your favorites? :)
Congrats on 2K 🥳