Growth is not always about winning the next client
Having spent most of my career on the publisher side of the media industry, working across direct clients and independent agencies, I expected moving agency side to change the way I thought about growth. In plenty of ways it has, but after more than a year at Media Republic, one thing that has surprised me is how much time we spend as an industry looking for growth outside the relationships we already have.
Who should we be talking to? What pitches are coming up? Which brands should we be building relationships with? Where is the next opportunity?
Working in Partnerships and Growth, I spend plenty of time thinking about exactly those questions. New business is obviously a huge part of growth, and always will be, but there is another question I have become equally interested in.
What else could we genuinely help our existing clients with?
That is very different from asking what else we can sell them, and I think the distinction matters.
Great work is only the starting point
None of this works unless you are doing great work in the first place. You need to deliver results, understand the client’s objectives and consistently demonstrate value, but I see all of that as the baseline of a strong agency relationship rather than the end of it.
One of the things that has stood out to me since joining Media Republic is how much our client teams genuinely care about the businesses they work on. There is a sense of ownership that goes well beyond delivering the media plan, and an ambition to operate as an extension of the client’s team. That means understanding the commercial goals behind the media strategy, not just what needs to be delivered this month.
Our independence helps with that. Senior people stay close to both the work and the client, and there is a genuine expectation that we understand the broader business rather than simply our part of it. The closer you are to the business, the more useful you can be.
A lot of what makes those relationships work is also pretty simple. Be responsive, be available when it matters, do what you say you are going to do and make the client’s life easier rather than harder.
I have always thought about responsiveness in the same way. When a client emails you asking for something, there is probably someone else inside their business asking them for it. You might not have the answer immediately, but you can let them know you are onto it.
It sounds like a small thing because it is, but strong relationships are built through hundreds of interactions like that. Over time, you also start learning more about the business beyond the work immediately in front of you, and that is where it becomes interesting from a growth perspective.
Know where the client is going
There is a big difference between knowing a client’s media plan and knowing their business.
For me, being a genuine extension of a client’s team means understanding what they are ultimately being measured against. Media has its own metrics, obviously, but the client has a much bigger scoreboard. If we are serious about growing with our clients, we need to understand what is on it.
Where is the business trying to get to over the next twelve months? What are they trying to grow? What is changing internally? What pressures are they facing? What does their leadership team care about? What is coming that might not have made its way into a media brief yet?
The better you understand those things, the easier it becomes to think ahead rather than simply respond to what comes through the door.
If you know a major product launch is coming, what could you bring them before the brief arrives? If they want to reach a new audience, what thinking could you start doing now? If their category is changing, what perspective could you bring? And if you understand what your client is being asked to deliver internally, how could you help them get there?
That, to me, is where client service and growth start to become the same conversation. You are not looking for somewhere to insert another agency service. You are looking at where the client’s business is going and asking where you could genuinely contribute.
Sometimes there will be a commercial opportunity attached to that and sometimes there will not. Either way, it is probably a conversation worth having.
Do not wait for the brief
This is one of the biggest parallels I have noticed between publisher and agency life.
On publisher side, it was very easy to organise your world around briefs. A brief comes in, you respond, you present an idea, hopefully win the campaign and then start looking for the next one.
But the best publisher relationships I saw rarely worked that way.
The strongest media partners understood what the agency was trying to achieve for its client. They knew what was happening in the category, understood the broader business challenge and brought ideas when there was not necessarily a live brief or budget attached to them. They gave people a reason to have a conversation.
From the agency side, I now see exactly the same opportunity with clients.
If the only time we introduce a new idea is when a client briefs us, we are responding to a problem they have already identified. There is nothing wrong with that, and it is obviously a big part of our job, but being close to the business should allow us to see some things earlier.
We should know enough about where a client is heading to be able to say, “You mentioned this was becoming a priority. We have been thinking about it and there might be something worth exploring.”
That feels very different from turning up with another agency service you want to sell them, and clients are pretty good at knowing which conversation they are having.
This is also where I think we can be more deliberate about proactivity. It is one of those words everyone in our industry uses. Every agency wants to be proactive, every client wants their agency to be proactive and every media partner wants to demonstrate that they are proactive.
But proactivity should be something we actually plan for.
If we understand where a client wants to be in twelve months, we should be able to identify some of the conversations worth having between now and then. Not a list of agency services we want to introduce, but a list of things that could genuinely be useful based on where their business is trying to go.
Some might turn into briefs or additional work. Others might simply lead to a useful conversation. The point is that we are not waiting for the client to connect every dot for us. We are doing some of that thinking with them.
Being proactive also means getting in front of problems
There is another side to all of this, because being close to a client’s business should not only mean seeing opportunities earlier. It should mean seeing problems earlier too.
Media is complicated. Campaigns do not always perform the way you expected, timelines move, technology causes issues, strategies change and sometimes things just go wrong.
Whenever that happens, I have always preferred to get on the front foot. Pick up the phone, explain what is happening, take ownership and start working towards a solution rather than waiting for the client to discover the problem and come to you.
I felt strongly about this on publisher side and nothing about moving agency side has changed my view. If anything, seeing it from this side has reinforced it.
Clients do not expect everything to go perfectly all the time, but they do expect ownership. Avoiding a difficult conversation almost always makes that conversation harder when it eventually happens.
The value of being close to a client’s business is that you can act earlier, and that applies to problems just as much as opportunities.
Growth might be closer than we think
None of this takes away from new business. Agencies need new clients, new relationships and new opportunities, and putting ourselves in the room with businesses we want to work with will always be an important part of growth.
But it should not be the only place we look.
There is a natural tendency to look outside the agency when we talk about where the next opportunity might come from, when some of the most interesting opportunities could already be sitting within the relationships we have.
Our existing clients are businesses we already spend significant time thinking about. We have access to their challenges, their ambitions and the people making decisions inside those businesses. If we understand where they are trying to go, we should be well placed to see opportunities that someone further away from the business simply cannot.
That does not mean trying to turn every conversation into revenue. It means being curious enough about the client’s business to recognise where else you might be useful.
For me, that is the shift in how we should think about growth.
Keep asking who else we should be talking to. Keep building new relationships and chasing new opportunities. But alongside that, ask another question just as consistently:
Where else could we help the clients we already have?
Because your next growth opportunity is not always another client. Sometimes it is the one you are already working with.