Every Agency Win Is a Lesson for the Others

I’ve spent many years helping agencies win new business and helping marketers find agencies. During that time, I’ve heard hundreds of agency leaders explain why they believed they won an account. Sometimes it was the creative. Sometimes it was chemistry. Sometimes it was category expertise, the pitch team, or a brilliant strategy.

This year, however, I began noticing a subtle change in the conversation.

The reasons CMOs and senior marketing leaders gave for choosing agencies weren’t always the same reasons agencies tend to emphasize when explaining why they won. That got me thinking. Not because I thought I’d discovered something new, but because after years in this business you develop a feel for when conversations begin to change. I didn’t know whether I was seeing the beginning of a broader shift or simply a handful of interesting observations. Either way, I decided to start documenting what clients were actually saying.

I’ve always been fascinated by what happens after an agency review.

The winning agency heads back to the office convinced it knows why it won. The losing agency usually convinces itself it knows why it lost. Sometimes both are right. Sometimes neither is. The problem is that very few losing agencies ever receive the kind of honest feedback that would allow them to know for certain. Clients are understandably gracious. They tell agencies they were a close second. They say they loved the work. They explain that the decision was difficult or that another agency was simply a better fit. All of those things may be true. But they rarely tell the complete story.

So agencies do what every organization does. They fill in the blanks.

That explanation becomes the story the agency tells itself. Eventually it becomes institutional memory. The leadership team believes it. The business development team repeats it. The account people accept it. The junior copywriter who sat through the pitch meeting takes it as gospel. Before long, the agency has adjusted its positioning, proposals, and next pitch based on a story that may only partially reflect why the client made the decision.

The story feels true because it’s the only story the agency has. That struck me as a costly problem.

If agencies rarely receive completely candid feedback after a review, where do they learn what clients are actually rewarding today? So I started paying much closer attention to something most of us read for about thirty seconds before moving on: agency appointment announcements. Not the part where the agency talks about itself. The part where the client explains why they made the choice. Not because those announcements tell the whole story. They don’t. But they may tell us more than the polite conversations that follow a loss.

One of the first to make me pause was Wayfair’s announcement naming Highdive as its agency of record. What caught my attention wasn’t a discussion about creative awards or production capabilities. Wayfair talked about an agency that took the time to understand how the business worked before trying to tell its story.

I highlighted the sentence and moved on. A few days later, I came across Conagra’s announcement naming Barrows its commerce marketing agency. Again, I found myself highlighting different words.

Retail intelligence. Commerce expertise. Business growth. Not creative. Not AI. Not a proprietary process.

Then QuikTrip announced its selection of Laughlin Constable. This time I was looking for the pattern. QuikTrip spoke about an agency that understood its culture, business, customers, and pace, and demonstrated strategic thinking throughout the review. By then I wasn’t reading these announcements the way I always had. I was asking a different question.

Are marketing leaders beginning to describe agency decisions differently than they used to? Three examples don’t establish a trend. They don’t even prove there’s a trend. But after thirty years in this business, I’ve learned that markets rarely announce when they’re changing. They whisper. One conversation sounds a little different. Then another. Then another. Eventually, enough small observations add up to something worth paying attention to.

I have a feeling this is one of those moments. Over the next several months, I’m going to continue documenting what clients are actually saying after choosing agencies, looking for recurring patterns, and sharing what I learn with agency leaders who want to improve how they position, market, and grow their agencies. That’s why I’m starting The Agency Selection Project. I hope you’ll follow along.

Happy Post-mortem

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