Traditional model of brands giving a brief for agencies to follow has evolved significantly.
In today’s fast-paced business environment, successful collaboration between agencies and brands is key for delivering innovative and impactful work.
This shift towards closer collaboration allows for greater synergy, creativity, and adaptability, ultimately leading to solutions that resonate with consumers.
TBWA\RAAD’s panel at Dubai Lynx featured moderator, Joe Lahham, Managing Director, TBWA\RAAD and speakers, Eman Murad, Director of Marketing and Communications Enterprise at du and Ahmed Arafa, Marketing Director at KFC MENAPAKT & CIS.
The discussion included the pillars of building partnerships, through solid two way collaboration between agencies and clients.
They highlighted insights and points of view on the evolution of the agency client relationship, based on their own experiences and journey together.
The panelists also delved into the good and the bad, talked about the challenges and obstacles that they faced together and about the achievements and success stories.
Joe Lahham: How can agencies and brands work together to navigate these challenges and foster stronger, more resilient partnerships in the face of ongoing change?”
Eman Murad: Open Communication – two-way communication with our counterparts. What open doors when it comes to aligning on specific goals that we would like to achieve collectively both as client and as agency. Having that open communication alone is not enough. Focusing on adaptability and flexibility in dire times is also a winning factor between clients and agency.
JL: Have you encountered situations where agency creativity did not help clients meet their objectives? How did you navigate through those challenges?
EM: Believe it or we actually are on the agency side. So we fight a much bigger battle with our commercial counterparts in the organisation. So we are not in a situation where we try to negate away from creativity. Coming from an enterprise background, we have so many technical terms, that it’s so difficult for the layman person to kind of understand what we try to offer.
Having someone who can see it from a human perspective, and this is where the TBWA team comes in. They give it a human factor. Having the ability as an agency to understand. As a creative you definitely have to preselect the battles in terms of what you can definitely push the envelope on when it comes to creativity vs. what should take the approach of just technical and tactical
Ahmed Arafa: It will always be a relation of creatives wanting to have the most creative creatives, business trying to absolutely have good creatives and win awards but also we have transactions and numbers to run behind. I don’t think that this negates that.
I actually believe that whether it’s a brand campaign or a very creative campaign or if we’re after transactions, it’s just different solutions will come to solve for different problems. And this is what we have built together as agency and client. We started looking more at platforms vs. campaigns. If we need to be talking value we have a value solution that is as creative as a brand campaign or as any other campaign that we can get.
