Our Manifesto
VoxComm is the global voice for agencies, championing the value that agencies bring to their clients as turbo boosters for growth.
We stand for the power of commercial creativity in all its forms – across strategy, ideas, content and media – as a proven lever for growth that businesses neglect at their peril.
We stand for creativity at the heart of the application of data and new technologies, not as an afterthought – agencies and clients should be running towards creativity, not away from it.
We believe that agencies are indispensable business partners, bringing they clients outside perspectives, cross-category insights, provocation and a breadth of specialist expertise.
We stand for partnership, new agency models, and creating an environment where agencies can flourish, and clients can benefit from the unique business value agencies can deliver.
We advocate for better ways to procure and compensate for the added value, talent-based services agencies offer and will work with agencies and clients to deliver these.
We will promote good practices but speak out where we see bad practices and value-destroying behaviours that ultimately benefit our clients, as well as agencies.
We will do this together as a global partnership, sharing our resources and best ideas because the challenges to the unique business value agencies can deliver are the same everywhere, in every market and region, on local and international assignments.
Agencies and the commercial creativity they deliver are turbo boosters for growth – businesses that are looking for top-line growth neglect the creative multiplier at their peril.
The Current Situation
The agency business globally faces transformational challenges in adapting to rapid and continuous change driven by technology.
Agencies are not alone in facing these challenges; our clients and their marketing, sales and operating functions are also struggling to figure out how to engage with consumers, grow their businesses and build their brands in a fast-changing environment. However, agencies face particular challenges – with the rise of procurement and the prevalence of performance marketing at the expense of longer-term brand-building impact of short-termism, marketers sometimes minimise their relationships or engagements with agencies, viewing marketing as business costs rather than long-term investments.
It risks becoming a demotivating, value-destroying environment for agencies, with the unintended consequence of killing the conditions for creativity and undermining the value that clients need agencies to deliver more than ever.
Talking Points
#01
Agencies and the commercial creativity they deliver remain a powerful and proven lever for growth – alternative marketing solutions that minimise the role of agencies may contribute to efficiency and productivity but are rarely true alternatives in terms of delivering top-line growth.
#02
Business growth is linked to creativity and innovation from external partnerships. Agencies bring outside perspective, provocation, and breadth of expertise to provide the creativity multiplier effect that boosts growth.
#03
Agencies are indispensable business partners, armed with foresight, creativity, and the ability to develop brilliant solutions that create brand value, engage consumers and expand their communities, and help transform the industry.
#04
Agencies’ experience working across categories gives them a clear, objective view of the future and the big picture and can identify new business opportunities for their clients.
#05
When brands and agencies come together in a trusted partnership, the rewards and opportunities for both parties can be limitless.
#06
Leading in the quantum age of marketing requires a partnership invested in the future to ensure businesses survive and thrive.
#07
96% of marketers in an Adweek survey said creativity was a primary benefit they got from working with agencies. Other primary benefits marketers cited include strategy and innovative ideas (79%), as well as experience, marketing efficiency and consumer insight (percentages unspecified in source but all around 60%).
New technologies and the possibilities created by data are a new battlefield for commercial creativity, not an alternative to it.
The Current Situation
Technology and data are changing the world, bringing many new alternatives for businesses and consumers. Embracing this is not optional, it’s a business essential. But with the power of technology and data being sold hard, they risk being treated as alternatives to creativity – and the agencies that deliver it – rather than a new battlefield and vehicle for it.
Agencies that fully embrace the new possibilities opened up by technology, generative AI and data have an ever more important role for their clients, both in delivering creativity, brand and human insight that will help maximise their benefits and in avoiding their unintentional negatives: translating innovation into sustainable competitive advantage; as a counterbalance to short-termism at the expense of the creating long-term brand meaning, and ensuring that generative AI is not at the expense of human connection and respect for consumers.
Talking Points
#01
Technology and data present opportunities – and needs – for commercial creativity. Businesses need creativity to maximise the potential benefits they bring and deliver sustainable competitive advantage and brand value over and above that delivered by technology and data alone.
#02
We stand for creativity and technology, not creativity or technology.
#03
We stand for data as a creative opportunity and enhancer, not an alternative.
#04
We stand for AI as a transformative force that will drive agencies towards unparalleled levels of creative and business excellence. We believe AI will serve as the foundation for future greatness, enabling agencies to reach new heights in innovation and effectiveness.
#05
We stand for AI not as a mere cost-cutting tool but as a powerful catalyst for investment in technology and talent. Our vision is to empower agencies to thrive through groundbreaking ideas and inventive solutions, rather than simply reducing expenses.
#06
We stand for AI as a partner to human creativity rather than a competitor. There will never be a contest between people and AI; instead, we advocate for a collaboration where human insight is amplified by AI, allowing teams to tackle strategic and high-impact initiatives.
#07
We believe that investing in talent is the key to unlocking AI’s full potential. Embracing this shift involves integrating advanced technology and investing in training and hiring skilled professionals who can navigate and leverage AI effectively. This commitment will ensure that agencies not only adapt to the future but also lead it with confidence and creativity.
#08
We stand for technology and data deployed to build long-term business and brand value – and against technology and data being used as an unconscious pretext for value-killing short-termism, consumer relationship-killing tactics, and other value-destroying behaviours.
#09
Technology and data should enhance people’s lives, and the value of businesses and brands that deploy it, to create ever stronger human connections.
#09
Businesses increasingly face the prospect of competing in a world of comparison and aggregation platforms, consumer search, consumer reviews, rapidly growing private label and direct-to-consumer business models. Doing that without a strong brand at their disposal should send a chill down the back of any marketer’s spine.
#10
The brand stewardship and commercial creativity in its broadest sense that agencies help deliver for their clients will be ever more important as the ways that businesses interact with consumers change and proliferate. Technology and data should help businesses build brands, not (albeit) unintentionally degrade them. Brand are built on human connection and meaning, and that meaning needs to be created and managed.
There are better ways to procure and compensate for the kind of added value, talent-based services agencies offer, and will work with agencies and clients to deliver these.
The Current Situation
The way that many clients procure and compensate agency services risks creating unsustainable relationships and undermining agencies abilities to do what they do best, to the ultimate disbenefit of client’s business.
The traditional price-based Request for Proposal (RFP) process has long been recognized by agencies and other professional services firms (from architecture to IT to management consulting) and leaders in the procurement community, as a race to the bottom that serves neither the interests of the agency nor the client.
Talking Points
#01
There is currently often a disconnect between the way clients deal with agencies and their approach to other added value, talent-based services (and indeed how they hire and remunerate their own top talent). Which is why we are advancing better, well-proven ways of procuring and compensating agencies.
#02
Hiring an agency is a very important event for many organisations. Agency fees can be substantial, the spending agencies direct is usually significant, and the impact of the agency’s work on the bottom line of the client is often direct and critical. It is reasonable to suggest that the selection process used to identify the agency that will drive the greatest value for the client should be equally important.
#03
Along with identifying the best agency, the process should be fair, transparent, efficient and provide a tangible method for quantifying the value and relevance of intangible expertise. The decision should be made methodically based on best-practices used to purchase professional services that are often difficult to evaluate because they are intangible, custom, complex, and costly.
#04
The RFP process, whether explicitly or implicitly driven by price, is not fit for purpose for talent-based value-adding services such as agencies at their best deliver, and the great majority of clients expect. Their organisation would not recruit their own top talent on this basis, or indeed other key professional advisers.
We will promote good practices but speak out when we see bad practices and value-destroying behaviours that ultimately benefit our clients, as well as agencies.
The Current Situation
In a period of disruptive change, new possibilities and opportunities abound, there is a lot of experimentation with new ways of doing things and a lot to learn from. There are a lot of new prescriptions for how to do things better, there is a lot of advice, some self-interested, some good, some bad. New success models are emerging in some areas, but also a lot of innovations that don’t deliver their promise – and many organisations are not as good as Google in living up to the ‘fail fast’ dictum in killing failures.
Talking Points
#01
In this context, there are emerging new success models in the way that agencies and clients work together to deliver growth and efficiencies, and also in the way that clients procure and engage agencies. There are also new models that don’t deliver sustainable value and growth, as well as bad practice more broadly. We will shine a light on both.
#02
We will promote case studies showcasing new agency/ client success models.
#03
We are consolidating VoxComm Positive pitch guidelines and partnership principles.
#04
We recognise the Top Advertisers, as rated by agency professionals in terms of positive agency relationships leading to added value for their businesses.
#05
We will expand our ‘Pitch Watch’ monitoring, calling out bad practices locally and globally.
#06
We will shine a light on the realities and hidden costs of alternatives to agency services such as in-housing, frequently short-lived and failing to deliver in terms of either effectiveness or efficiency.