Progency
Progency is a new type of agency built on top of a product (in this case, a martech platform). It is thus a product-led agency. It combines product, people (professionals), process, and pay-for-performance. It brings to the world of martech and customer retention, growth and cross-sell the ease of outcome-driven marketing that adtech agencies have done for new customer acquisition.
Progency extends the brand’s internal marketing team to deliver on specific KPIs. This lets the brand team focus on business as usual. Progency – like IT consulting teams focused on specific tech platforms – brings in the necessary expertise to solve specific problems like reactivation, increasing Hooked Score, driving referrals and collecting zero-party data. Each of these initiatives can be measured, improved and rewarded.
The twin goals for Progency are to increase revenues and reduce spends on adtech. It can thus bring in a focus on profits. For this, Progency needs to bring together diverse skill sets – combining creative and design, with software and analytics. Email 2.0 is what can be best driven by Progency, with very specific 30/60/90-day plans.
Here are some of my past writings on Progency:
The Coming Martech Era: Driving Exponential Forever Profitable Growth (Parts 13 and 14): “The traditional agency model needs a revamp for the coming martech era. The pre-digital agencies, built for print and TV, were driven by creative and focused on branding. The digital agencies, built for Google and Facebook, added new skill sets like analytics and campaign optimisation, and focused on new customer acquisition. The next generation of agencies will be built atop proprietary digital experience platforms and will focus on customer retention, growth and reactivation. This new agency is what I call “progency” – product-led agency. Like the adtech agencies, it will charge based on performance. This will ensure measurement and accountability – two key tenets for outsourcing core activities.”
Progency for Martech: The Missing Link: “The progency will be different because for the first time an agency will build solutions on top of its own product. In the past, agencies have not focused on having their own internal products. Adtech agencies have used products provided by Google and Facebook, and then overlaid their creative and analytical skills to deliver results. The progency will be tech-first, owning a martech platform. Ownership is important because only the developers will fully understand the power of what their platform is capable of. This is what will provide a sustainable competitive advantage to the progency… The progency is the missing link in today’s martech ecosystem. Martech platform providers need to expand their offerings to create a performance-based business unit which can interface with marketing departments to provide the solutions and outcomes they need. Marketing managers need to go beyond trying to buy every new point solution and instead focus on the KPIs the business needs to drive profitable growth. Only when the two meet will brands see success and the martech solution providers benefit from an addressable market that is 10 times larger.”
