Mark Lund sits down ‘In The Hotseat’ to discuss his experience of both Independents and networks
Mark Lund, chairman of the Advertising Standards Boards of Finance (ASBOF), was recently In the Hot Seat as a guest of the Alliance of Independent Agencies.
Interestingly Mark has also been in leadership roles both in an independent agency, as founder of DLKW, and in a network agency, as President McCann Worldgroup UK and Europe. It was therefore a perfect opportunity to ask him how the experience of both independence and networks compared.
Learn more about the conversation by clicking here.
Mark’s view was that they have intrinsic similarities. “The key thing for both is to have enough creative, entrepreneurial, brilliant people feeling both safe and challenged, so that they can have good ideas and, and carry them through”.
However, Mark did talk about two things that differentiated them from his point of view.
Being independent meant that DLKW “could do things very fast and we could do things very efficiently”. Something that many independent agencies believe gives them an advantage in client management. They can react with agility and be very innovative. As Mark says they can be fast and efficient.
Mark did miss something when he was running his own agency, “a sort of richness of influences coming into the business”. “I think the downside was that we didn’t have as much stimulus from outside”.
That is something that we recognise at the Alliance and it’s why we engage our agency members in as much stimulating external influences, across all fields of agency and client management, as possible. With over 50 events a year, over 100 workshops and a community of 7000 people there is no shortage of “stimulus from outside”.