[Top Agency Series] Building a Thriving Agency Through Pricing and Diversity With Scott Knox of ICA

Scott Knox is the President and CEO of the Institute of Canadian Agencies, the nonprofit association for Canadian advertising, marketing, media, and public relations agencies. He is also the Founder of PrideAM, the world’s first LGBTQ+ advocacy group in advertising and marketing. With nearly 30 years of professional experience, Scott is recognized among the top 25 most powerful LGBTQ+ leaders in British business by The Telegraph. After a significant career in the UK he moved to Canada, bringing his passion for agency transformation and inclusivity to the ICA. Scott works to enhance the collective potential of Canadian agencies, protect the interests of agency members, and champion equitable representation in the industry.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

• [3:28] Scott Knox discusses how agencies benefit from the Institute of Canadian Agencies’ collective approach to industry challenges
• [5:05] The consultancy services that ICA provides, including training and development for agencies
• [7:29] The dynamic networking opportunities available through ICA’s advisory groups
• [11:29] Common misunderstandings in agencies regarding client pricing and procurement relationships
• [16:47] Strategies for agencies to adopt ROI-based pricing
• [24:09] Scott’s career journey and his reasons for leading ICA in Canada
• [30:01] The real-life experiences that fostered the founding of PrideAM and its crucial purpose
• [39:59] The original objectives behind PrideAM and its influence on agency inclusivity
• [43:14] The profound mentorship impact on Scott within the agency ecosystem

In this episode…

Have you ever wondered what makes an advertising agency thrive in today’s competitive environment? Scott Knox believes it takes more than just creative talent and hard work. But how did he help redirect the focus from time-intensive commoditization to value-based success?

LGBTQ+ leader Scott Knox, with his drive for improvement and equity, is reshaping the landscape of the Canadian advertising industry. He discusses the challenges of outdated pricing models, the significance of networking and partnerships within the agency realm, and how the Institute of Canadian Agencies’ training and consultancy services help reshape the agencies’ strategic horizons. Scott’s journey and the initiation of PrideAM highlight his dedication to inclusion and diversity in the workforce. His dynamic leadership ushers in a change where agencies aspire to be valued for the results they drive rather than the hours they log.

In this episode of Inspired Insider Podcast, Dr. Jeremy Weisz interviews Scott Knox, President and CEO of the Institute of Canadian Agencies, about his journey and unwavering advocacy for change and inclusivity. Scott discusses how ICA helps agencies through its collective approach to industry challenges, common misconceptions about client pricing and procurement relationships, how agencies can adopt ROI-based pricing, and the real-life experiences that inspired him to found PrideAM.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• Scott Knox on LinkedIn
• Institute of Canadian Agencies
• PrideAM

Special Mention(s):

• Leah Power on LinkedIn
• Ira Baptiste on LinkedIn

Related episode(s):

• “[Top Agency Series] Revolutionizing Agencies and Meetings With Howard Chang of the Turn Lab” on the Inspired Insider Podcast
• “[Top Agency Series] Hiring an Executive Team: Advice From Devon MacDonald of Cairns Oneil” on the Inspired Insider Podcast
• “[Top Agency Series] Navigating a Merger and Becoming an End-to-End Digital Partner With Kevin Hourigan of Spinutech” on the Inspired Insider Podcast

Quotable Moments:

• “When an agency is more financially thriving, you can grow that by training, developing your talent, by employing really high-weight consultancy externally on to deliver more and better for that client.”
• “We need to treat consultancy and creative people with their legacy of understanding, not how long it takes them to get there.”
• “We have to create that bandwidth and agency management teams to take back ownership of their agency.”
• “Procurement needs to be ready to have those grown up business conversations on behalf of their corporation.”
• “Canada can kick ass when given the opportunity to deliver great comms.”

Action Steps:

1. Reevaluate client relationships: Periodically assess client-agency dynamics to ensure alignment with your agency’s core values and strengths. This encourages agencies to build partnerships based on mutual growth and value rather than just cost.
2. Embrace value-based pricing: Transition billing models from time-based to value-based to reflect the true worth and results of your agency’s work. It challenges the assumption that all agencies are equal and incentivizes creativity and efficiency.
3. Focus on diversity and inclusivity: Commit to fostering a work environment that upholds diversity and inclusivity at its core. It is important to embrace diverse perspectives and nurture a culture that values everyone’s contribution.
4. Engage in continuous learning: Stay abreast of industry trends and invest in continual learning and development for both leadership and staff. A dedication to improvement helps maintain an agency’s relevance and competitiveness.
5. Advocate for the industry: Play an active role in shaping the business and regulatory environment that affects the advertising and marketing sector. Collective endeavor and activism can lead to significant industry-wide improvements.

Episode Transcript

Intro 0:01 

You are listening to Inspired Insider with your host, Dr Jeremy Weisz.

Jeremy Weisz 0:22 

Dr Jeremy Weisz here, founder of inspiredinsider.com, where I talk with inspirational entrepreneurs and leaders today, is no different. I’ve Scott Knox of the ICA. You can check him out the Institute of Canadian agencies. And Scott, before I formally introduce you, I always like to point out other episodes people should check out of the podcast. And since this is part of the top agency series, you’ll actually the Institute of Canadian Agencies got as a mention on multiple episodes of the podcast, including Howard Chang, who is an ICA member, The Turn Lab. It was a fascinating, fascinating interview of how he’s built up his agency in previous companies that he’s run.

Devin McDonald, who I believe, is on the board, he’s mentioned the Institute of Canadian Agencies, and he talked about empowering his team and his journey there. And that was an amazing episode too. There’s so many more. Another one that sticks out. Kevin Hourigan of Spinutech. He’s had an agency since 1995. So it was fascinating to hear kind of the evolution of the Internet business and agency life and how people, I watched a webinar with you Scott, right after Covid, and you’re talking about Covid like, he’s probably experienced like, six different versions of Covid over his career or more. So that was a fascinating one. And check out more on inspiredinsider.com and this episode is brought to you by Rise25.

At Rise25 we help businesses give to and connect to their dream relationships and partnerships. And how do we do that? We do that by helping you run your podcast. We’re an easy button for a company to launch and run a podcast. We do the accountability, the strategy and the full execution. Scott, we kind of call ourselves the magic elves that run around in the background and make it look easy for the host and the company so they can create amazing content and develop amazing relationships and, most importantly, run their business.

For me, the number one thing in my life is relationships. I’m always looking at ways to give to my best relationships, and I have found no better way, over the past decade, to profile the people and companies I most admire and share with the world what they’re working on. So you’ve thought about podcasting. If you have questions, you can go to rise25.com or email us at [email protected] to learn more.

I’m excited to introduce Scott. Scott Knox is the president and CEO of the Institute of Canadian Agencies. You can check them out theica.ca. He has nearly 30 years of experience in the business of advertising and marketing. Scott is also the founder of PrideAM pride in advertising and marketing, and the world’s first ever LGBTQ+ advocacy group. He started back in 2015 was even named top 25 most powerful LGBTQ+ leaders in British business by the telegraph. Scott, thanks for joining me.

Scott Knox 3:17 

Thank you very much for asking me.

Jeremy Weisz 3:19 

So let’s start off with the Institute of Canadian Agencies and what the ICA does.

Scott Knox 3:28 

Yeah, put in its simplest terms, because I have been warned that I can talk for many hours about this one. So the ICA exists to positively impact the business environment for agencies to thrive. And what that really means is, is that we believe at the heart of the ICA, as it was in 1905 when four agency leaders got together and decided that they needed to work together for common good. The ICA is about collective endeavor. We impact and try and influence the business environment and our own members and their people in the industry in a collective manner, we do the things that no individual agency can do on their own.

So it’s about looking at government relations, relations with society, education and clients. And by clients, I mean those brands that we deliver the marketing advertising work for. CS, it’s about collective endeavor and impacting that to make sure it’s rightly so where it needs to be for Canadian agencies to thrive and grow.

Jeremy Weisz 4:39 

Scott, if someone’s listening to the audio, there is a video version, and we’re on theica.ca site, so you’ll be able to see that. But one question I have is, it’s always fascinating with any groups, whether institute or association or membership group. Why do people join? You know, I’m looking at the member benefits, but why do people join the ICA?

Scott Knox 5:05 

Yeah, really, for two reasons. One, to take their part at the table in understanding and pushing for a stronger business environment for us to thrive. So it’s that, again, that collective endeavor element. But actually, many agencies join because of the consultancy services that we deliver to the industry, whether it be on training, developing talent, we’re doing a lot of training with agencies right now on changing their pricing model, looking at how to get away from input costs and to output success in our ROI. I’ll get one of those right. Far too many acronyms. ROI-based pricing. So rather than how much does that cost to produce.

Well, actually, what will that generate? And so helping agencies to have better successful remuneration and actually focus the client on success driving as opposed to how many hours will that take to put together? And so we do a lot of that consultancy work, helping agencies to be able to thrive in a market that’s successful for them. And the other thing is, really the heart of it is also that networking element. We have a number of advisory groups within the organization, whether they be around talent development, diversity and inclusion, whether it be on agency growth, whether it be on creativity, on strategy development, so where the industry gets together with like-minded individuals to unpack and understand problems and issues and to get to what was at the heart of us co creating solutions for them.

So there’s a whole array of services we deliver that actually help agencies, on an individual basis, improve performance, gain recognition, and we sort of baggage that up into we’re here to help agencies amplify, protect and transform their business.

Jeremy Weisz 7:13 

Talk about the opportunities. I want to talk about what you were saying before, about the training, the pricing model, but before we talk about that. What are the opportunities from a networking perspective? I’m seeing there’s the advisory groups. How do those work?

Scott Knox 7:29 

Yeah, they work on the basis of understanding that actually, sometimes the best way to deal with an industry issue is to do it through collective endeavor, to learn and understand from peers who’s approached that being challenged by that, and what do we do about it? Or even in some instances, they’ll come up with a solution that needs collective endeavor. One of my favorite ways of showing how this works was when we had a group of agencies come together to look at the fact that we were being continually challenged as an industry.

This isn’t just a Canadian problem. It’s a global problem, on being commoditized, on being remunerated by hourly rate, rather than by outcome, generation and success generation and business innovation and growth. And the process of new business was run by procurement was becoming more and more taxing. Was actually becoming more about show me the rates of an account director. What do you pay them? And getting down to into that sort of minutia, and there was points in time where you’d have an entire pitch process for that a client would deploy into the industry, where you’d have, I don’t know, an open cattle call, if you like, for the entire industry to respond, and each of them would have to put forward brand new creative ideas to win the business.

And apart from that, being costly, inefficient, but also, why would a client select an agency on the basis of them coming up with a new ad campaign in a vacuum, having never worked on the business and with no idea whatsoever. And so what we did was the industry sort of said, well, what can we do to intervene here? How can we get clients to do pitch review process, agency search in a better way? And that’s when we came up with pitch watch, which was a service whereby agencies can notify us where there’s a client review process underway that won’t get the client the right results that they need. And when we verified that that process is in play and impacts multiple agencies, then we actually contact the client and say, look, this review process using is not best practice standards. It’s actually going to be really inefficient and it’s not going to get you the results you want.

Here is an entire template of how to do it better. And then we consult with that client group to actually repackage its review process to make it more fair and equitable. And ultimately get the client the best partnership with an agency that it can deliver. There’s a lot of mess and nonsense in the whole agency pitch process that’s decades old in the making, and what we try and do is get that to be much more robust. And part of it, we built a thing my dear colleague, Leah Power, who’s my EVP, and her background is actually she was chief operating officer for Gray Advertising and also DDP, as well as a number of independent agencies. And she helped us build this toolkit called Qualification Based Selection, which is a really robust, focused way of selecting an agency in a process that’s fair and equitable and will ultimately get the client the best results.

So the pitch watch thing was something that came out of a cry by agencies to go. We’ve all got this problem. What do we do about it? And then the agency sector came together and put the ICA in a position to go, okay, let us step in and see if we can build and develop better best practice.

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