Where should the line sit between what our internal team owns strategically and what we hand off to our agency to execute?
The quick answer is that if you have a strong relationship with your external team, you don’t need to draw that line at all. A capable agency partner should be doing research and contributing to strategy alongside your internal team, not waiting on the sidelines for a finished brief to execute against.
This is worth pushing back on directly, because a lot of agencies are structured to want you to draw this line. These are more like production studios than marketing partners. They take the brief in, and the push the deliverables out. It might be simpler for them, but that doesn’t produce the best work.
It’s not what the strongest CMOs we’ve worked with actually want.
When an agency is execution-only, they’re working from a brief that’s already been filtered through your internal team’s assumptions, blind spots, and internal politics before it ever reaches a strategist or a designer. The creative and content that comes out the other end reflects the brief, not the market. That’s how you end up with technically competent work that still feels generic. If it was built to satisfy a document, it can’t win against the competitive landscape.
When an agency is doing research alongside you, they’re giving your team competitive positioning, audience insight, category analysis, keyword and search-intent research, and a genuine read on where the market’s actually moving. This allows the briefs to get better before a single creative concept is developed.
This doesn’t mean an agency should be making all of your strategic calls for you. A partnership means there is give and take, and your team is still responsible for being the people on the inside. Your agency should be helping shape your team’s ideas, providing perspective, and sharing data. Your agency should not just sit back and wait for direction.
If you’re evaluating a prospective agency partner, let’s chat about what your team is capable of and what your needs are. Reach out to us today and let’s make a plan for a partnership that really helps your business grow.
