Media Buying Briefing: Why indie agency Langrand tilts against consultancies, rather than fellow agencies, to help clients transform

By Michael Bürgi  •  September 2, 2024  •

Ivy Liu

Very often, among marketers, consultancies are known as much for telling their clients what’s wrong with their businesses, leaving behind a powerpoint deck suggesting changes and an invoice that has one or two too many zeros on the check. Langrand thinks it can do better than that for clients — and for far less.

Shannon Langrand, the agency’s founder and CEO, started the shop in 2003 following work in political consulting. At the outset, Langrand did classic agency brand work for clients in healthcare and sustainability, including Women’s Hospital of Texas, HCA Houston Healthcare, Prologis and sustainable aviation fuel brand Neste. 

But over time, the agency delved deeper into foresight work — which Langrand and her principal foresight leader, Denise Worrell, distinguish from forecasting — for clients in the healthcare space, as well as entertainment. It’s a straight-up competitive offering to what the consultancies do for businesses looking to transform in the face of a changing customer base or changed circumstances such as the pandemic. 

“How do we help legacy organizations in sectors like healthcare think beyond the things that have already happened to them, to be able to understand what the future is going to look like?” said Langrand in explaining the foresight practice. “Denise really brings that perspective — we think of it as a way to begin to help businesses and brands do something different.”

Following a stint working for Langrand from 2010-2016 as head of strategy and innovation as well as executive creative director (she started her career as an art director at several agencies), Worrell worked in health care for MD Anderson Cancer Center and Memorial Hermann Health System, then returned to Langrand at the beginning of this year as principal of health innovation and transformation. 

Worrell, who’s also an adjunct professor at the University of Houston, defines foresight as “the study of change. However, we do that through academic rigor, and it’s a systematic approach to understanding the possible and probable ways that the future can unfold. And the ultimate goal of that is to be able to make decisions in the present in order to have agency over your future.”

Most important to Worrell’s approach is the fact that the future holds multiple paths for the clients that have used Langrand to find a new direction. “It’s plural — here’s not one future,” said Worrell. “We then help them make decisions to drive their organizations towards them … and to de-risk them from going towards a future they don’t want to have happen.”

Neither Langrand nor Worrell could discuss specific work due to client sensitivities and signed NDAs, but in broad strokes they described what they did for a health client and an entertainment client. Langrand just completed a project for what Worrell described as “a world class health organization” to reconfigure its outpatient care while also helping redefine what characteristics a hospital should look for when hiring doctors in the future. It also helped another healthcare insurance provider market itself using distinguishing elements like a modern approach to family (same-sex spousal coverage, adoptions, maternity issues) that helped it stand out from other healthcare offerings. 

One marketing executive in healthcare who’s worked with Langrand and Worrell on a few of his companies, said it’s their practice of getting very deeply embedded in client businesses and mining for actionable insights that has made him go back to them numerous times. 

“What I found different between Shannon’s team and all others, is a deep understanding of what it means to actually think about a go-to market strategy,” said the executive who declined to speak on the record. “They were able to give me some nuggets of information that I thought were really useful in regards to how we’re viewing health benefits, and how the next generations are viewing health benefits and and what their expectations are — and how we’re not delivering on it today.”

For the entertainment client, Worrell noted that the democratization of content creation in the era of YouTube and the creator and influencer economy led a major studio client to rethink how it can reposition itself in the future. 

“We’re talking about content creation and what storytelling is going to look like in the future,” said Worrell. “Fundamental changes in how a business operates, potentially altering their core identity or their market position in order to remain relevant and reinvent themselves.”

A key distinction, said Langrand, is that the bill the agency leaves is far far smaller than a consultancy’s free — and the agency sticks around to help with any marketing support that transformation calls for. “We have a lot less overhead than they do,” noted Langrand, 

Langrand jokes that the foresight practice is seen internally as, “What if McKinsey and Wieden + Kennedy had a lovechild? We’re not like McKinsey — we prefer to be in there and partner with you on the journey, vs. being in and out and not getting blamed if what you worked on doesn’t happen.” 

Color by numbers

We are all probably getting a little tired of hearing about AI and its potential to transform marketing and advertising. But marketing intelligence platform funnel.io, together with Ravn Research, surveyed 327 marketing and agency executives and found a big gap in expectation between sectoers, especially when seen through the prism of in-housing. Some findings: 

• 43% of marketers say AI will make their company less dependent on agencies
• More than half of in-house marketers do not trust their agency partnerships, particularly when it comes to controlling costs and delivering tailored, innovative solutions
• 75% expect their company’s outsourcing rates to agencies will fall or remain flat over the next year
• Only 40% of marketers say their agencies are invested in the long-term growth and success of their company; just 47% believe their agencies are communicating well on measurable outcomes
• Agencies, meanwhile, are largely unfazed by worries over AI’s effect: two-thirds of agency professionals expect their financial condition to improve over the next year, with AI having a net positive impact on their business
• Less than a quarter of agencies view increased in-housing of marketing functions, partially resulting from AI adoption, as a major threat to their business. 

Takeoff & landing

• Amazon is expected as early as this week to announce the winner(s) of its multi-billion media account review, currently held by IPG. Finalists are said to be GroupM and Omnicom Media Group. 
• The Media Rating Council and IAB agreed to collaborate on developing industry measurement guidelines for accreditation of attention metric firms, effective this September through the Attention Task Force.
• Citizen Inside is a new company focused on modernizing in-house agencies and teams, co-founded by in-house veterans Jeffrey Gorder and EJ McNulty, and backed by Keystone Capital. 
• Account moves: Publicis Media won the Sky media account (reportedly $500 million in media spend), beating out incumbent GroupM’s EssenceMediacom … Omnicom Media Group won Michelin’s global media business, beating out incumbent Havas Media as well as Publicis and GroupM … Dentsu’s iProspect expanded its relationship with Reckitt Nutrition, picking up U.S. media duties on top of EMEA and APAC work. 
• Personnel moves: GroupM hired L’Oréal exec Aisha Khan to be executive director of global commerce client acceleration … Assembly Europe hired Samantha Scott as new managing director; she comes over from Dentsu X where she was managing partner. 

Direct quote

“The massive revisions on net jobs added that have been happening over the last three months show that the U.S. is basically in a recession. We are there. I actually think that’s great news, because what we don’t want brands to do is be hesitating for a recession. If they can actually say ‘we’ve actually been in a recession for the last four months,’ and they can actually understand what that means for their business — then they could be stable on their [marketing] spend.”

— Brad Simms, president and CEO of Gale, discussing the economic outlook for the rest of 2024.

Speed reading

• Speaking of Simms, I wrote about Stagwell agency Gale’s move to establish an immersive social practice that harnesses social happenings in in near real time for clients. 
• Kristina Monllos broke the news that, amidst a larger coming together of creative agencies within Omnicom, Doremus+Co. and Merkley and Partners were merging. 
• Sam Bradley looked at how sports brands are slowly but surely letting creators and influencers into their world.

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