Financial services has an agency collaboration problem, and it belongs on the CIO's desk

Gail Hamilton-Brown, Strategic Accounts and Partnership Manager, CloudSmiths. (Image: AI-enhanced)

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Financial services is one of the biggest advertising categories in most markets. Banks and insurers spend heavily on media, and again on the agencies that plan, buy and create it. Gartner's 2025 CMO Spend Survey puts the average marketing budget at 7.7% of company revenue, with paid media taking 30.6% of that.

Most scrutiny of that spend goes towards agency fees, media rates and return on ad spend. Far less goes to how the money is managed once it leaves finance. That is where a growing share of value quietly leaks out.

Consider how a typical campaign runs inside a large financial services organisation. One brand campaign may go to a digital agency, a separate above-the-line agency and one or more creative shops. Each works in its own tools, and each needs a brief, approvals, budget sign-off and reporting.

Multiply that across retail, commercial, wealth, insurance and institutional business lines, often across countries, and co-ordination becomes a job in itself. In our conversations with marketing and martech teams in the sector, the same patterns keeps coming up:

• No single view of what is in flight. Almost every team wants one campaign calendar. Almost every team wants a shared campaign calendar, but few have one everyone actually uses.
• Briefs are rebuilt from scratch for each agency from e-mail threads and meeting notes, by senior strategists who should be focusing on more high-level tasks.
• Manual budget pacing. Checking spend platform-by-platform makes overspend harder to catch in real-time.
• Agency-owned reporting. Expensive resources are spending time compiling reports that software could produce. Also, when the agency owns the dashboard, they control how the results are presented.
• Placements that disappear. Direct publisher deals and external buys often get left out of consolidated reporting.
• Misleading blended numbers. Real-time digital results get mixed with outdoor and radio figures that arrive weeks later.

None of these is a line item. Together they create a material impact, paid for in specialist time, agency fees and decisions made on incomplete data.

The instinct is to push the problem outward: renegotiate the retainer, consolidate agencies, demand better reports. Budgets are tight. Gartner found 59% of CMOs lack the budget to deliver their strategy, and 39% plan to cut agency spend.

But a cheaper agency still does rework when the brief arrives late and vague. A consolidated agency still reconciles by hand when performance data sits in three dashboards with three definitions of an impression. The constraint is internal.

It is also structural. Financial services operate under strict tech governance while partner agencies work in their own separate tools. With no shared, governed space between them, work defaults to e-mail and attachments outside the organisation's access controls and audit trail. For a regulated institution, this is an IT governance issue as much as a marketing one.

Where the internal gains are

The organisations making progress treat agency collaboration as an operating model and data problem, not a procurement one. We have identified a few key considerations:

Own the collaboration layer

The organisation, not the agency, controls access, holds the documents and keeps the audit trail. Agencies plug in with exactly the view they need.

Structure the brief

One strategic brief per campaign, split into sub-briefs per agency. The in-house team owns the why and the what; the agency owns the how. AI checks can flag a vague objective or loose audience before the brief leaves the building, the cheapest point to fix it.

Work where people already are

Alerts work best right where teams already collaborate, no matter what the messaging platform is. Tools that require yet another login rarely get adopted.

Standardise the data

Pull performance from every ad platform into common definitions and label figures that are still pending. Feed it into the wider data platform alongside other customer touch points, so marketing data serves the business, not just the campaign.

Automate the admin

Budget pacing alerts, consolidated reporting and calendar views should run without human intervention, freeing specialist and agency hours for work that moves results.

Few of these changes are large technology projects. They need IT and marketing to agree who owns the collaboration layer, how data flows and where governance sits. Gartner reports that GenAI's returns in marketing so far come mainly from time efficiency (49%) and cost efficiency (40%), exactly where these internal workflows sit.

A useful test, if your agencies became twice as efficient tomorrow, how much would campaign outcomes improve? If the answer is "not much, because the bottleneck is us", the next efficiency gain is internal.

"Financial services organisations invest heavily in getting the external side of marketing right, the agencies, the media, the creative," says Gail Hamilton-Brown, Strategic Accounts and Partnership Manager at CloudSmiths. "The bigger, cheaper win is often inside. Give briefs, budgets and performance data one governed home, and every rand spent on agencies works harder."

Sources

• Gartner 2025 CMO Spend Survey press release, 12 May 2025