Driving fandom and influencing culture takes an agency village

It's never been more crucial to build diverse brand teams that foster an authentic culture of collaboration.

Six months ago, I swapped agency life for the often lonely land of a solo female founder. Regardless of how good my product is, how fast my community grows, or how impressive my case studies are, the path to success isn't a solo journey. Building trusted relationships with agency stakeholders is a major piece of the puzzle - especially when you're the new kid on the block.

Those who've worked with me before know how deeply my mission resonates. Out of context, however, words won't pass vibe check on their own. So how do you show up as an innovative disrupter in an industry that relies on trusted networking?

That's all industries, by the way.

The Village Approach to Building Brand Trust

In media, brand marketers are waking up to declining audience trust. The solution? Putting audience, authenticity and diversity at the heart of brand storytelling. Leveraging the agility of an agency village can be a big benefit here - bringing with it, a collaborative network of diverse specialists working toward shared goals.

For me as a new business, that means creating agile processes that can integrate with agency partners without lowering the end result, impacting revenue, or worse, creating an unwelcome sense of competition with your time-poor partners. The challenge lies in finding that sweet spot where collaboration thrives without threatening anyone's position.

I put the question to an operational pro with an agency background, who said incentivising all parties is the thing that may actually move egos aside. They suggested something so simple it surprised me - rewarding agencies fairly for their role in the work is the only way to avoid the inevitable. Pointing to the elephant-sized problem in the room - the stampede to become the most indispensable to a client. In the bid to keep as much of the pie as possible, the work inevitably suffers.

It's got me thinking: how would collaboration shift if partner agencies had a stake in the profit margins? An affiliate scheme for agency villages almost has an award-winning ring to it.

Diverse Storytelling Drives Cultural Relevance

We've entered an era where brands have no choice but to be bold. Social teams are taking a stand - even if there's still only one of them - and metrics prove there's conversion power in authentic, culturally relevant content.

Behind the brands who’ve effectively tapped into cultural moments, you’ll likely find a team of diverse thinkers who’ve been pressure-tested across workflows and empowered in the face of failure.

Putting audiences at the heart of brand storytelling is non-negotiable. Unless you're in the business of wasting ad dollars, that is.

The worry? Performance metrics only tell us half the story when initial inputs come through a siloed point of view. You don't know what you don't know, after all. Building long-lasting brand trust hinges on effective storytelling, which, done well, should be the sum of diverse experiences and varied skillsets.

Often the best ideas are generated by fans, but social listening needs to be embedded into a brand's BAU if there's any hope of optimising those reactive moments. Diverse teams need to be working toward a shared goal when they're scrolling through their personalised algorithms, comfortably collaborating in the knowledge that inspiration could strike from anywhere, at any time.

The idea of boardrooms, marketing scrums, and creative teams stacked with like-minded opinions should be keeping executive leaders up at night.

Building Fandom Can Benefit From An Agency Village

Dear brands, there's power in choosing partners who walk their authenticity talk. If their work feels like the result of diverse minds. Whether they signal when a service is out of their scope, or push their teams until things snap.

Not that this mindset helps me as a startup business, mind you.

The realities of limited cashflow mean I don’t have the luxury of relying on award wins alone to build my reputation. My game-plan? Giving my prospective partners the ammunition to win awards and retain clients is all part of how I measure success. But ultimately, I still rely on brands and agency partners to either test and learn with me, or simply face the admin chore of onboarding yet another service provider.

The lesson, if we needed it, is clear: brands who build diverse agency villages, foster transparency, and incentivise fair collaboration have a huge advantage when it comes to building fandom. Without authenticity being weaves behind the scenes, the strategy risks becoming as fragmented as the surrounding media landscape.

Customers may not know about your away days and all-agency WIPs, nor the new startup partner you took an educated punt on. But being served more diverse content that genuinely adds to their days? That's what builds fandom and connects to culture.