When Brad Simms, CEO and president of the Stagwell agency, Gale, decided to launch the agency’s media practice, he bought a book about it.

“We all went out and bought a whole bunch of physical books to read. I mean, I didn’t know what an effective commission rate was five years ago,” Simms told ADWEEK. 

Now, Gale manages more than $1 billion in media spend for its clients. 

More agencies are revisiting media integration to keep up with marketers’ needs. Many like Gale are building media practices from scratch—a challenging task for agency leaders to tackle. Expanding is necessary for top-line growth, but growing too fast has its pitfalls. Three leaders at full-service agencies of varying sizes—Gale, FerebeeLane and Walz Tetrick Advertising—told ADWEEK the secret to building a successful department is going all-in—no half measures—on the unavoidably costly investment. 

“Building a media department is daunting. It’s also kind of a bigger deal than you might think,” Charlie Tetrick, president and CEO of the Kansas-based independent shop, Walz Tetrick Advertising, told ADWEEK. “To think you can hop in the game and start buying media without knowing that you’re going to have a seven-figure investment would be a mistake,” Tetrick added. 

Be selective with talent

It’s important that a media department leader have both strategic and functional knowledge, said Jessie Thomas, group media director at Walz Tetrick Advertising. 

“You’ve just got to make sure you’re always hiring experts, [and that you’re] always upgrading your game. That is probably the key rule that we live by around here,” Tetrick told ADWEEK.

When Walz Tetrick organically expanded its relationship with Dairy Queen, Tetrick hired a competitor—a marketing leader at Sonic.

That hire “quickly brought on lots more people and brought on a lot of these different media tools that we needed to be able to do the job better. Dairy Queen, I think, saw that activity,” Tetrick said.

After 12 years in business, Greenville, South Carolina-based independent agency FerebeeLane began adding clients who wanted the agency to provide media management.

Co-founders Matt Ferebee and Josh Lane hired Katie Driggs, now vp and director of media and analytics at the agency, to launch and scale the nascent practice. Driggs told ADWEEK she started by tackling existing media clients’ needs before considering the next steps necessary to grow FerebeeLane’s nascent practice.

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