A 'Proven Agency Process' is Only Valuable if it Fits Your Business

Kelly [00:00:00] Some clients are NASCAR races. Some clients are drag racers. Some are street racers. You need to be able to adapt and find the right thing for the environment that client’s in, and that is rarely only a category-based decision. That’s everything from maturity to growth stage, to reputation, to data sets. All of those components decide what race a client really should be in, not just “I’m a food brand and so every food brand uses the same environments.” One food brand could be running a very different race than another one, even though they feel similar.

[00:01:00] Intro/Outro: Welcome to Contrary to Popular Opinion, a podcast hosted by Bougiedigital. In each episode, we bring you provocative topics and novel perspectives around leadership, business, and marketing that defy the norms because exponential growth demands unconventional thinking and visionary action. So open your mind, and let’s get into this week’s episode.

Kelly Hey, everyone. Kelly Magar with Bougiedigital. Excited to talk about today’s—

Todd Topic. Happy Monday, Kelly. I know you are ecstatic with the Arsenal-Fulham 3–0 win this weekend. Sorry I texted you before you saw the game, but I didn’t give— it was early.

Kelly It was early enough. It didn’t ruin it for me. We’re good.

Todd I didn’t give away anything. I knew that I had to be careful with what I said. Four games left—is that what we’re facing here? Three games left? Is it possible that they could clinch it in any of those next three games?

Kelly Yeah, it depends on the outcomes for Man City.

Todd So is it possible that we’re jumping on a plane to London?

Kelly Could be, although my wife and daughter have made it very clear they have to come this time.

Todd Yeah. Why is Kaya not in school? Because Arsenal might win the Premier League for the first time in 29 years—or 22 years, whatever it’s been. 1989, the year I graduated high school, was the last time Arsenal won Premier League.

Kelly [00:02:00] No, that’s not true. 2003, 2004—the invincible season.

Todd Oh, maybe that’s what it was. Why’d I think it was ’89? All right, never mind. Something else happened in ’89, I think. Well, it was a good weekend for sports. I know this isn’t about sports, but I have to acknowledge when Arsenal does good ’cause I know you’re in a good mood.

Todd What I thought we could talk about today is something you brought up in Slack, which is: we always talk about our agency being very bespoke, very non-static, very custom and curated to everything we do for every client, which has some potential issues from a business standpoint for us. It always has had that because it makes things far less predictable and manageable on our end in terms of people and tools and costs and expenses.

Todd But our belief is that’s the best way to service any one client at any given time for whatever their business objective is. And then there are agencies that are also very good at putting together a very specific sort of framework, and if you hire that agency, they put you through that framework, and that’s it.

Todd [00:03:00] You just hope you fit that framework—or that if you’re the marketer, you hope you fit that framework. And while it might be the same for everyone, maybe it works good for 80% or 90%, and maybe you might be the 10% that it doesn’t work good for.

Todd But you had brought up the idea of being super agnostic to all of the capabilities that are available to a brand advertiser at any one given period of time, and whether or not—or maybe this is the question—whether or not an agency is better served just being super agnostic.

Todd I brought up the comment about programmatic. We use The Trade Desk, for example, and your comment was, “Well, I wouldn’t only—or wouldn’t just—use The Trade Desk as a healthcare client, because there are specific DSPs.”

Todd [00:04:00] And so you would lobby and argue that we’re in better service of an advertiser if we’re agnostic, and it’s our job to test every tool out there to know which is the best one for a client, rather than have a predefined framework that every client just sort of has to run that gauntlet through. That was sort of your POV. So expand on that for me—your opinion there.

Kelly I think for me, when I think about a client engagement, I always take the approach of: we’re being hired or considered for our expertise and our ability to think through a problem—not to apply a prefixed solution or a prefixed set of rules that are going to be the same for everyone that fits in it.

Kelly [00:05:00] I think it’s a lot more useful to have the ability to diagnose a unique situation, a unique environment, a unique need, and have a knowledge set and an experience set that can tap into a consideration set of things that may or may not be the best mix to solve that problem. And I think that’s very antithesis to a lot of the ways agencies either do or are forced to operate, for a variety of reasons.

Kelly I think typically an agency would have a set of tools—platforms that they either have seats on or licenses to, or are part of their holding company or, you know, for whatever reason. It’s “all clients follow this process and fit this rule, and we go in there.”

Kelly But if you know how rapid our space moves, you know how often things change, how quickly new things come up, you understand that there are all these subtleties and nuances between different tools and techs that pop up that each have their own little advantages and differentiators and specialties.

Kelly [00:06:00] And I think maintaining an open ability to say, “Hey, this is the client’s needs and desires and goals and budgets, and everything bespoke to them. Let me go figure out what is the right DSP that has the right mechanisms and tools; what’s the right set of data providers to identify the right audiences and the right group of people; what is the right management system and protocols?”

Kelly All of those things that come together for the perfect solution for that unique scenario, to me, is the better way to have that freedom and flexibility to go about it. But that does require a certain level of independence and non-biased setup that most agencies that aren’t completely uniquely independent don’t necessarily have the benefit of.

Kelly The reality is: if you’re part of a holding company or a group of some kind, you’re often going to need to use the set of tools that are set up. And that can be everything from a variety of just simple expertise and rule set, to the darker side of it, which is: that is a lot of the ways where the extra and hidden and unknown money is accomplished and made.

Kelly [00:07:00] And therefore, the only reason that you’re charging what you’re charging on one end is ’cause you’re making it up in the other, which only happens if you’re operating within that closed ecosystem—that is sort of that waterfall tax that we all hear about that is the darker side of what we do.

Kelly So I think it comes down to: it always gets interesting when we have the conversations where sometimes people are like, “Well, who have you done this for before?” Which I can kind of understand on a category experience, because the ability to know what’s unique to healthcare or financial services or higher education—there’s a thinking and a mindset that is important to have exposure and know what that consideration set is.

Kelly But I think that’s, again, more on the experience to problem-solve than it is: whatever worked for whoever you did this before is definitely gonna work again.

Kelly Now, where I find it really unique when you think about it that way is: it’s the experience and the expertise that is so valuable in the category, but so rarely is the team or the people that you’re actually going to work with, if you hire that agency, going to be the people that have that knowledge base and that experience. Most of them probably don’t even work there anymore in some capacity or another.

Kelly [00:08:00] So it’s just really interesting when you think about it. But conversely, I know that you and I can differ a little bit on this subject, right? I always operate from this very idealistic space of: we’re being hired to operate brainpower, to be unique, to dive in, to be consulting, to do all of these things. But that doesn’t sell and pitch as easily as this whiz-bang cool feature that is consistent, and it works, and these other things.

Kelly And so I know that you spend a lot of time in these conferences and these meetings and these things where you get exposed to this agency operating system, or this great new thing that is a productized and monetized thing, and I’d love to know your perspective on why that does raise your eyebrow and your attention—when to me, every time you say something like that to me, my initial reaction is like: “Yeah, I know a dozen other individual pieces that do each part of that, that if I needed it, I could go access and get it, so I don’t know why it’s so exciting.”

Kelly [00:09:00] So I know you and I kind of go back and forth on what does it really mean—what’s the value? Is it perception? Is it reality?

Todd Yeah, I think perception is reality, and that’s the problem—or not the problem. I think what you and I have seen over the course of the years is that there are agencies that do really, really, really well.

Todd It’s less on the creative side, right? I tend to always leave creative agencies out of our conversation because they’re just such a different breed that it just doesn’t matter. In the context of media and advertising type stuff that we do, I think the perception-is-reality thing haunts us because there are agencies that are really good building the machine.

Todd [00:10:00] And what’s great about that is that they can merchandise that really shiny machine very, very easily and make it really, really shiny, and it sounds really, really good. And that’s hard to beat. It’s hard to beat that when you go in and say, “Well, we don’t have a shiny machine. We have an assembly line that we’ll put together from a variety of things that will bake a better cake for you at the end of the day.”

Todd And so I think that’s a harder buy because of your point. People are like, “Well, show me how you’ve done this.” And you’re like, “Well, your situation’s unique. We haven’t done this for somebody like you in the way that we would do it for you.”

Todd So I think that perception is really, really tough to beat. And from the operations side and the back end of the company, what I struggle with is: it’s unpredictable.

Todd So the cost of the labor, the cost of the technology—all those different things. Always having to demo things, always having to try things, always having to know about everything out there—it just takes a lot more time, energy, and effort, and it’s not as easy.

Todd [00:11:00] How do you get paid for that? You always say, “No client wants to hire you and be their lear—” I—what? It’s their learning curve or something like that. You have some saying for that.

Todd How do we know about everything? And that time invested in trying to know about anything and everything out there—that’s expensive time, but nobody wants to pay for it.

Kelly I think that what you just said there is a really, really interesting differentiating factor in the process, right?

Kelly Because I agree: no client wants to be the training-wheels client, right? You don’t want to be the one that someone is figuring out on the fly and has to get through the mistakes in order to find out the big thing.

Kelly [00:12:00] But I would argue that’s a very unique way—and it’s a very valid way—to think of it. But that’s the difference between: are you the training wheels for someone who really doesn’t know what’s happening and is kind of learning on the fly, or are you the cutting-edge, bleeding-edge person who’s discovering new horizons and being the first to market?

Kelly And I think that’s a level of expertise and trust which should very much go in the decision-making process of who you’re entrusting your business with, right? Because if you are hiring an agency that doesn’t already have the talent, maybe is going to go out and hire for it, backfill it—if you’re going to set up a fee structure that is going to cut corners, is going to pay people less money for less time or less focus on all those things—then yeah, you’re absolutely going to be the training-wheels thing.

Kelly Because it’s going to be: “I only have so much time, and I’ve got to kind of figure it out, and I have to move on to the next thing. I have too much on my plate,” and there’s overutilization.

Kelly [00:13:00] If you’re hiring people who are deeply experienced, deeply invested, and your success is tied to their success, then you’re going to get people that are going to push the envelope. And yes, they’ll be kind of learning on your thing, but in the best way possible.

Kelly I love this quote—and I’m going to butcher it a little bit—but it’s: “Creativity is being able to look beyond the first good idea,” right? And that’s what you want. You want someone that’s going to go beyond good enough or beyond “this works,” if it’s not broke, don’t fix it, because you never know what the missed opportunity is.

Kelly You never know what could be. You never know what the learning is. And honestly, you never know when you’re kind of moving yourself down a cul-de-sac when everything’s all good and well until it breaks, and then you don’t have any other control or understanding because you haven’t experimented. You haven’t set yourself up during the good times.

Kelly I’m going to keep using these analogies. They say: you want to stock up for the harvest when the food’s good, because when it goes bad, you don’t want to have to be scrambling and be like, “Uh-oh, now I gotta figure it out.”

Kelly That’s what I think is so powerful—having people who are invested in thinking about your business and finding solutions and applying it—versus saying, “This is our tool, this is our platform, we’re going to fit you in it. We’re going to fulfill the services of our contract with the tools that we’re familiar with to the best of our abilities,” instead of, “We’re going to take on the responsibility of knowing and being nimble and evolving to your business to maximize the potential.”

Kelly [00:14:00] It’s a subtle difference, but it’s a really critical difference in the way that I think about it, and why I think it’s so much more valuable to find someone that will think of your business that way versus: “We have this really cool thing and I just believe it’s going to work for everyone universally.”

Todd I’m going to try and package this in an analogy, but it might not work.

Todd You recently used this description of the F1 race car about some things that we’ve been talking about. And so in my mind, this is coming to this picture: I’m a great F1 car driver, and I’m looking for a car. And I have two teams or companies or groups that I can go to.

Todd On this side, they’ve got this F1 car that’s already built and it’s already won a bunch of trophies. So I can just go sit in that car and drive that car because I already know it’s pre-built. It is exactly what it is. It’s supposed to work. It’s supposed to produce a great output. I’m going to go drive that car.

Todd Or there’s another car company that says, “We don’t have a car built yet, but what we’ll do is we’re going to learn what kind of driver you are and how you want to drive, and what you expect to get out of your driving, what you want your driving experience to be like, and then we’re going to go source the best parts from the best manufacturers and we’re going to build you that car.”

Todd [00:15:00] And I feel like that’s kind of what we’re facing right now. We’ve always come at it as: we’ll go and source the parts and build you the best F1 car. And it’s going to be driven the best, and so that’s going to be the winning combination versus: this car exists, it works a certain way, you drive it a certain way, and that’s what you get.

Todd And oh, by the way, here are some trophies that this car has won. Look at these. So we know it works, and that’s that.

Todd And so I think a lot of people go, “Well, why would I take my chance over here?” And we’re kind of straying off the subject, but it’s kind of the same thing, and the idea of: as an agency, we’re constantly rebuilding and retooling the car for every client. And that’s a hard thing for marketers to grasp.

Todd I think they want the pre-built car that’s ready to go. They just jump in the driver’s seat and drive.

Kelly Yeah, sticking with the analogy: yes, you could have a car that has won races and all of that, but I think it’s a very rigid environment, right? Because it’s both car and driver.

Kelly You’re in there and you’re trying to figure out: I both need someone who can handle that car and have the best machine.

Kelly [00:16:00] I think where I would take that analogy is: that car might do really well for you out of the gate, but racing—like everything else—is not static. You’re going to have different environments.

Kelly That car—if you’re just blindly using that same car in all conditions, rain versus shine, you can’t change out the tires, you can’t adjust the spoiler—you’re just driving it through. You’re not going to win the races in every condition and every way to use it.

Kelly And what if new regulations come in and you need to adapt it? Or what if new materials come up and now carbon fiber’s gotten lighter, but you’re stuck: “This is my car. I can’t change it.”

Kelly The ability to say what is unique for your conditions, for your environments, for what’s changing and evolving—having all that—I would find to be a lot more valuable.

Kelly I would also argue: you’re talking about everything being F1 cars. I would liken it to saying, “I’m going to buy an F1 car, but I should be racing in a NASCAR race.” They’re different cars. You’re picking the wrong car for the wrong environment and the wrong thing.

Kelly It doesn’t mean that car’s not incredible. It’s not a fit for the environment of what you need in your circumstances.

Kelly Or a drag racer versus a street car. All of these things.

Kelly [00:17:00] That’s where I would take the analogy: not everything’s an F1 race. Some clients are NASCAR races. Some are drag racers. Some cars are street racers. You need to be able to adapt and find the right thing for the environment that client’s in, and that is rarely only a category-based decision. That’s everything from maturity to growth stage, to reputation, to data sets. All of those components decide what race a client really should be in, not just “I’m a food brand and so every food brand uses the same environments.”

Kelly One food brand could be running a very different race than another one, even though they feel similar.

Todd Yeah. I think that’s a good way to point it out. I think a lot of times what we run into is brands that can only afford a NASCAR car, but they want to run in an F1 race, and they just can’t because they don’t simply want to invest in the F1 car for the F1 race. They want to buy a NASCAR and put it in an F1 race.

Kelly But that’s a problem. That’s what leads to a lot of these problems, is no one wants to admit that and be open to that.

Kelly [00:18:00] So a salesperson is going to look at something—and so many times it is a sales team that is looking to close a deal with not as much concern about what’s going to happen after that fact, and a disconnect on that.

Kelly And so of course they’re going to sell: “This is our F1 car. It’s the best car.” Whether it’s true or not, they’re going to say, “You should buy this. It’s going to work for you amazingly.”

Kelly And a client may not always know any better. They just say, “Well, an F1 car—that’s really fast. I want that.” And so they’re going to buy that thinking it. And then they’re going to go in the street race and be like, “Oh, uh-oh. That car wasn’t the right thing for me. This is a problem.” Or: “I bought a car and I don’t have the drivers that were supposed to come with it that I wanted in there.”

Kelly And these are the things that create this problem: people always want that shiniest object, or want to feel like they’re in a playing field that they’re not.

Kelly And I would argue it’s better to find a partner that will have the hard conversations with you and genuinely evaluate your business, and really tell you the things that need to be there and rightsize you and go through.

Kelly And that’s a partnership.

Kelly [00:19:00] And this is where I’d love to hear your input as well: why does an agency benefit by really focusing on singular outcomes and really focus things?

Kelly And my argument to that would be: it’s really hard to staff an agency with the level of expertise and care and investment of your top performers that are going to be able to be so nimble and agnostic, right? It’s a lot easier to find people that are: “I’m good at this DSP. I know it inside and out. I can do it. But if you throw me into another one, that’s a hassle. It’s going to take me more time,” and all of that.

Kelly And so what we’re talking about really only works with a certain talent base. I don’t know that you could staff an agency with 500 or 1,000 people the way that I’m describing it, because you’re always going to have your 90/10, 80/20 rule, whatever you want, and what I’m talking about only works if you’re operating in the upper tier of people that can really do this.

Kelly If you have a bunch of people that are more what I’ve referred to as kind of the worker bees that are very good at following a process and doing the do, but not necessarily going outside of the why we do what we do—which is what I would say a lot of agencies end up being forced to be staffed by.

Kelly [00:20:00] This creates the mismatch of what you’re hiring and selecting from, which is the hardest thing to truly sort through. Because who’s ever going to sell that as the true story? Everyone’s going to say our agency’s only made up of the top 20%, when it’s pretty hard for that to be true at any kind of scale and size.

Todd Yeah. That’s the operation model that makes a lot of sense in terms of scale and profitability: you’ve got this sort of defined framework and you can just plug-and-play staff in with that, and that’s super simple.

Todd It’s much more difficult to do things very bespoke, on the fly—custom curated. You do have to have a totally different bench of people—arguably much more senior people.

Todd I want to segue this to—it made me think, or we talked about in your Slack thread—this idea of: there are agencies that can do this really high-touch, custom-curated, very agnostic experience to build the best F1 car. And then there are other agencies that have a proven model: same car, they just drive that same car for everyone.

Todd [00:21:00] And then there are the brands that actually have—or eventually take—a lot of the stuff in-house. And that’s always a hot topic in our industry: in-house versus agency.

Todd And I think you have a pretty defined perspective on why in-housing is not maybe the way you would recommend, and I think I have—not the opposite—but I think I have a good counterpoint to that.

Kelly Yeah. So for me, my position’s a little bit bold—a little bit of a hot take on this. I’m going to take it to the extreme, so take it with a little bit of grain of salt. There are exceptions to it, but I’m going to focus on what I think the norm is and why I think it’s hard for most to do it in-house.

Kelly I believe that on an in-house team, unless you are a very unique lifestyle specialty brand—something that really connects with someone’s personal passion and attention—if you’re a business that whoever’s working for it might like the business, but it’s not their personal—

Todd Don’t most brands think they connect with people in that way? Whether you’re yogurt or shoes.

Kelly I’m saying on a personal level—for you it would be a surf brand, or for me it would be a soccer brand. Something that I’m personally close to, so I’m always going to love it.

Kelly [00:22:00] But if it’s just kind of your—not that I don’t like the client, but it’s not a true personal passion project; it’s still work is work—I think it’s really, really hard to ever get what I would call the absolute upper echelon of talent.

Kelly Because for me, the people who really love what we do, and really love media buying, and really expand their horizons, and really push the envelope on everything, I think that muscle has to be flexed across different opportunities and different environments and different things.

Kelly I think trying to do that same exercise year in and year out for the singular same thing is really hard for the upper echelon.

Kelly I think the person who’s willing to adapt in that environment and say, “I’m just going to do this for one client in one industry for five or 10 years”—I’m not saying that person can’t be very good—but I think you’re going to miss out on the absolute upper echelon. I think your very top-tier people would not accept that environment.

Kelly And the second part of that is: even if you do get someone really good, or let’s say you get lucky and get upper echelon and they are, they’re going to have opportunity costs.

Kelly [00:23:00] They may end up being the very best in learning about what they’re doing, but they’re never going to be exposed to other things that by happenstance might create learning.

Kelly I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve looked at or demoed new platforms or pushed new processes or evaluated new things for one client, thinking it’s a solve and a need for them, only to then think, “Oh, you know what? This would be really good for this client over here.”

Kelly And for that client, there would’ve never been something that would’ve prompted me to go hunting and searching and to discover that thing because there wasn’t a need. Everything was working—again, it’s the “if it’s not broke, don’t fix it.”

Kelly And so the opportunity cost of the cross-channel exposure, the learnings, the different personalities, the different learnings—I think you just lose that in a singular focus in-house that’s in good.

Kelly And it’s really funny because one of two things happens.

Kelly Either the in-house is going incredibly well, which means you’re not being pressured and forced to problem-solve and push the envelope and really solve things. You can get stuck in a little bit of a rut, which again means you can’t go as high as you might have otherwise gone.

Kelly Or it’s not working really well, and you don’t really know where to go to solve through it.

Kelly And so I think either path—if it’s going well or it’s not going well—in-house is a lot harder to solve than I think an agency environment, which is naturally open to more opportunities and consideration.

Todd [00:24:00] All right. So I have a counterpoint to that. I’ll say it, and then I have a final question for you and we can wrap up.

Todd My counterpoint to that might be what it is because the lens and sort of what my point comes through is tailored more towards those passion brands.

Todd So I think about it from the experience I’ve had working on the brand side. And we had an agency, and then what we learned was: there was no way that agency could ever drink the Kool-Aid, if you will, as much as the in-house people could or would want to.

Todd And when you’re working for the brand, I think if you’re working for a brand that, like you said, you really are passionate about, I think you’re going to be way more passionate about doing anything and everything you can with that brand than any agency person ever could be about that brand.

Todd I suppose unless in the most rare instances—like we got hired by the Arsenal Football Club to be their agency—you would pour your life and soul into that, right?

Todd But that’s my counterpoint: I feel like that’s a hard thing to juxtapose, because I do think that people work for brands, they sort of drink that Kool-Aid, and I don’t think an agency can ever come from that same perspective. I think they’re never going to be as connected to the brand as the brand people are.

Todd And so it makes me wonder if an agency could ever be as successful—as a well-built in-house team.

Todd So if you could go to a brand—whether it’s one that you would be personally super passionate about or not, and I don’t know if that makes a difference—would you, knowing what you know today, build your team in-house or would you hire an agency?

Kelly [00:25:00] It would honestly depend on the size of the brand for me, and I’ll tell you why that’s really important.

Kelly Because I agree with you that in an absolute all-things-equal way, there is an advantage to the passion and the investment level being at the brand. Again, I think that’s very unique to a certain type of lifestyle, personal passion brand.

Kelly There are certain industries that no one’s going to be super passionate about—garbage removal, or fill in the blank. A job’s still a job to that degree.

Kelly But I think there’s a risk factor there as well. Let’s say you even go with the passion brand really heavily: what happens if the person who owns and runs everything gets sick or leaves or gets a better offer? The ability to replicate and replace and have consistency on their—

Todd But agency people come and go all the time. Well, I get to have the luxury of saying ours don’t, but most agency people come and go too, so brands are always complaining about how their agency team is always turning over.

Kelly Which is absolutely, in and of itself, a big, big problem.

Kelly But I’m saying the ability for an agency to find talent and top-tier talent to replace it, if it comes in, is going to be a lot better than a brand’s, in terms of that. So there’s a concentration risk into that.

Todd I don’t know that I agree with that statement. Why would it be easier for an agency to hire someone than a brand to hire someone?

Kelly Because again, I think that you’re pulling in from people who are exposed to multiple things, who come over, who have cross-expertise and all of that, versus a singular brand. I just think you have a concentration risk on what happens there.

Kelly But again, to go to your question: if all things lined up, I would always want to be in direct control.

Kelly But again, it’s hard for me to take myself out of that because I know what I would oversee.

Todd I know, but I’m saying: take yourself today. Describe a scenario where you would absolutely build your team in-house—size of company, type of brand, whatever it is—and give me an example of when you wouldn’t do it and you would hire an agency.

Kelly [00:26:00] Yeah. So where I would build it myself, again, is if it was a lifestyle passion brand—where it was a niche industry where I believed that the team that I could hire would be bought into the business itself, its vision. A football club; a lifestyle brand; a clothing brand where it’s like, I love this; it fits my passion and personality.

Kelly And that we had enough size to where I could have a diversified team. I wouldn’t in-house a team at three, four, or five people. I would need to be able to have a dozen or more people.

Kelly I’d need to be able to flesh out every department and have experts in each field—experts at social, experts at programmatic, experts at data science and modeling.

Kelly I wouldn’t want a bunch of people that have to try and be the very best at both Meta and search. I don’t think there’s anyone that’s ever the absolute best at both of those. You have vertical specializations and relationships.

Kelly I would want to make sure that my size is large enough to where I can maintain relationships with the platforms and get access and understanding of what happens in those—the same way that an agency would.

Kelly And I would want to know that I would have that hierarchy.

Kelly If I couldn’t fill out all of those—if I couldn’t have a big enough team for specialty; if I didn’t have enough weight behind me to maintain the relationships; and I wasn’t in a category that I thought that whole team would be working for me not just because it’s a job with a paycheck, but because it’s something they believe and love and really want to come into work every day—if I can’t fit all of those criteria, I’d find an agency that can gap and I can understand all of those things off of that.

Kelly And I would say very few things have the luxury of fitting in that first category in all of those buckets where it’s better off that way. It does exist, but I would say the majority would land in the latter category more likely than not.

Todd Yeah, fair enough. I think I would agree. I think if I could build a big enough team with enough money to fund it and carry enough weight, I would do it in-house based on what I know today. And barring anything short of that, yeah, I would hire an agency because they’ll have the collective experiences across that board that I would have to rely on.

Kelly [00:27:00] And the other thing I would say is: in this area—obviously in the role you said, like, I would be in that CML role overseeing that.

Kelly If I was the owner of that brand or the decision-maker, and I wasn’t playing the CML role, I would sure as hell make sure I had a leader that was truly able to oversee and analyze and monitor that team—in an amazing CML role. I certainly wouldn’t try and do that in a headless capacity or as an owner that wasn’t in that space thinking I could do that.

Todd All right. Fair enough. Okay. Well, we come back together again in two weeks. How many games will Arsenal play of the four—three, three or four—that are left?

Kelly In two more weeks… so the season ends, I believe—I want to say it’s like the 24th. So yeah, we have three games left.

Todd So we’ll be close to know if you’re in a good mood or a bad mood for our next one.

Kelly Yeah. Well, I’ll also know where the Champions League is going. There’s a few things to fight for, so there’s a lot.

Todd All right. Fair enough. Happy Monday. Tomorrow’s Cinco de Mayo, so maybe I’ll have a margarita.

Kelly Oh, yeah. Today’s Star Wars Day, right? It’s May the Fourth be with you.

Todd Today is May the Fourth be with you. Tomorrow is Cinco de Mayo, so it’s a good week all around. Good chatting with you. Talk to you in a couple weeks.

Kelly Thanks, everyone.

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