How to Get Your Marketing Agencies to Work Together

by Tim Kilroy · 6 min · Published September 24, 2026

Your agencies can work together when you give them a shared business objective, define their responsibilities, pay for the coordination the work requires, and appoint someone who can resolve competing priorities. Each agency should contribute its expertise to the same plan. The client remains responsible for decisions that change the business, the total budget or the purpose of the engagement.

Download the editable worksheet (Markdown). Replace the bracketed prompts with your own details.

Putting everyone in the same meeting is a useful introduction. The harder work begins when one agency's recommendation requires another agency to change its schedule, give up budget or accept criticism. Your working arrangement needs to handle those situations before a campaign depends on it.

Find the reason cooperation is difficult.

Ask each agency separately where joint work gets delayed. Request a recent example, the missing input and the decision that would have helped. Then compare their accounts against the project record.

You may discover that the media agency receives creative after its launch deadline, that the website agency never agreed to build campaign pages, or that two client executives have given different instructions. Each problem needs a different remedy. Repeatedly asking people to communicate better leaves the underlying conditions unchanged.

WFA's 2022 evaluation research identified conflicting expectations within client organizations as a problem and examined how clients assess agency collaboration. Its sample consisted of multinational organizations, so use it as context rather than a benchmark for a small business. Read the WFA findings.

Give every agency the same commercial brief.

Share the customer problem, offer, relevant economics and constraints with everyone whose work affects the campaign. Explain why the business has chosen this priority and which other priorities it has postponed.

A hypothetical retailer promoting a product with limited stock needs its media, email and creative agencies to understand that limit. Otherwise, each team can pursue a reasonable channel target while the combined campaign promotes something the company cannot supply.

The shared brief should identify the business result and each agency's contribution. Agree on a small set of common measures, with channel diagnostics underneath them. Use the campaign-brief guide to prepare that document and the measurement guide when reports claim overlapping results.

Assign decisions before assigning tasks.

Name one client decision-maker for budget changes and business priorities. Appoint a coordination lead to maintain the joint plan. An agency can perform the coordination role if its remit, fee and authority are explicit.

The lead does not acquire the right to approve its own additional fees or overrule a specialist on matters outside its competence. Explain which decisions it can make, which need consultation and which must come back to the client.

Ask each agency to identify its delivery owner and escalation contact. Have specialists discuss technical requirements directly. Keep the client informed about decisions without making the client forward every question between teams.

Put the handoffs into the scope.

For every dependency, write down what the receiving team needs, who supplies it, the required format and the acceptance date. Confirm that the receiving team has capacity to use it.

For a landing page, the media agency might supply the audience and tracking requirements, the creative agency the approved message and assets, and the website agency the implemented page. Somebody must accept the completed page against those combined requirements. Assigning three contributors without an acceptance owner leaves an important job unfinished.

Read each statement of work for exclusions. If coordination, revision after specialist review or implementation is missing, agree on the commercial treatment. An agency should not be expected to absorb unlimited work because collaboration sounds like good manners.

Maintain a shared brief, current schedule and decision record in a place the relevant teams can access. Give each team access to the information necessary for its work, using appropriate permissions and confidentiality arrangements.

Agencies do not need to disclose other clients' information, proprietary methods or unrelated commercial terms to cooperate. The client should define the specific information needed for delivery. Questions about sharing confidential pricing between competing suppliers deserve procurement or legal review.

Record the reason for significant decisions. A new team member should be able to learn why the business rejected an approach without reopening the argument.

Address incentives and disagreements openly.

Ask whether any agency earns more when spending moves into its channel or when a particular supplier is selected. A commercial interest does not automatically invalidate advice, but the decision-maker needs to understand it.

Require competing proposals to address the same objective, budget and time horizon. Use the disagreement guide to evaluate their evidence. Once the client decides, record what each team will do and when the decision will be reviewed.

Evaluate cooperation using observable behavior. Useful evidence includes timely handoffs, early warnings and whether a team helps resolve a problem affecting another supplier. Avoid rewarding agreeable meeting behavior while ignoring missed commitments.

Use this working agreement.

Adapt these prompts together. The document is an operating aid and does not replace the agencies' contracts.

We are working together to improve [business condition] for [customer group] during [period].
[Client owner] decides changes to the overall objective, budget and business priorities.
[Coordination lead] maintains the shared schedule and can decide [specified matters].
Each agency will supply [named inputs] to [receiving owner] by [date], using [acceptance requirements].
We will record decisions and approved changes in [shared location].
We will escalate an unresolved dependency to [person] before it affects [commitment].
We have agreed how coordination time and additional work are paid for.
We will review both business progress and collaboration on [date].

Start with one shared piece of work.

Test the agreement on an upcoming campaign or improvement that already requires several teams. Walk through its dependencies together and confirm the next handoff with the people who will perform it.

If someone cannot explain what they need or what they owe another team, resolve that uncertainty before setting the launch date. You can then use the multiple-agency management guide to maintain the arrangement across the rest of your work.