Building for a lifetime
With trust comes a sense of joint ownership in the work. A brand’s challenges are the agency’s, and the agency’s successes are the brand’s. The question is how to build that attitude into the organizational model.
One answer is transparency.
Carolina Cespedes Virguez, general manager of GoGo squeeZ U.S. at Bel Group, proactively involves her agency partners at Horizon in the day-to-day realities of GoGo squeeZ’s business. When Horizon invited her team to help pilot its new AI model, that reciprocal transparency took their relationship to the next level. “They never hid anything from us,” she recalled. “It tells us that we’re special to them.”
Sarah Reinecke, SVP of salty portfolio and brand at Kellanova, approaches every project with a long-term view of the agency-client relationship. “We are working on one agenda, one opportunity with our brands,” she said. “We are building them not for a transaction but for a lifetime of transactions.”
There’s also the matter of fit. Caroline Ingeborn, chief operating officer at Luma AI, noted that her company is young and growing quickly, and it needs an agency that can match its energy. “When the time comes that we’re launching something, everything moves so quickly,” she explained. “We’re lucky to find partners that can work at that pace with us.”
