Agencies Vanguard Is Bringing Agencies Together at a Moment They Most Need It

From the rise of AI to shrinking client budgets, agencies are arguably facing their biggest inflection point yet. 

The pressure to figure out what’s next is creating a new dynamic of collaboration and knowledge sharing in an industry that has historically been highly competitive.

After successfully building out the Marketing Vanguard program, an invite-only club for chief marketing officers that provides networking, knowledge-sharing, intelligence, and inspiration, Jenny Rooney, chief brand and community officer at ADWEEK, knew the agency space was the next area ripe for where her team could help.

“It’s sort of an existential reality right now for agencies,” Rooney said. “Now more than ever, they’re looking to share best practices with each other, learn from each other, and help each other navigate this period of what I would argue is probably even greater disruption than the agency community has heretofore experienced.”

The Agencies Vanguard membership program launched July 7 and is similarly designed to the existing Marketing Vanguard program, providing intelligence, networking, and access to C-level agency leaders. It was designed with a group of 20 founding members from holding companies to independent agencies who helped shape the program to meet their needs.

The resulting program “leverages the best of ADWEEK with what those leaders have told us they need from us and need from each other,” said Liz Kneebone, vp of community programs and development at ADWEEK. 

That includes off-the-record discussions, access to opportunities on ADWEEK’s platform, and Vanguard’s signature “inspiration excursions,” where members share an experience that takes them out of their day-to-day work. 

Agencies Vanguard hosted its first inspiration excursion at the Banksy Museum in New York in October. The second excursion took place during Possible in April at Miami’s HaSalon, where a mentalist led 30 agency leaders in a session about connection. The next event will be at the Explorers Club during Advertising Week New York in October, where attendees will get a tour of one of the most storied and exclusive venues in the city, including its archive.

Agencies Vanguard also hosted its first summit at Cannes Lions in June, and ADWEEK published its inaugural Agencies Vanguard Award winners in April. 

“We sit at the center, and we have access to so many different resources, thinkers, and doers that we can bring to our membership,” Rooney said. “What these people need more than anything are opportunities to convene and just talk.”

Thanks to input from its 20 founding members, Agencies Vanguard is introducing a new pillar around action, where members can collectively tackle some of their biggest challenges. 

“We want to create a space for them to think through, in this moment of immense change, what do they want to put out there as calls to action?” Kneebone said.

While many networks exist for independent agencies, Agencies Vanguard is uniquely designed to attract agencies of all shapes and sizes, Rooney said. As the program grows, there will be opportunities to create “affinity groups” for similar types of agencies.

“We firmly believe that you learn more from the different than the same,” she said. 

While ADWEEK’s editorial core is central to the offering—creating pathways to access and influence for members—there are also off-the-record spaces to safely share ideas. All Vanguard networking events are “Chatham House Rules,” meaning, “it’s not like our editorial team is going to get access to everything you say,” Rooney said.

“But editorial perspective is an expertise that, quite frankly, no other group has,” she added. “Our reporters have frontline visibility into where this industry is going, the trends that are happening in real time on a day-to-day basis.”

As Kneebone put it, that journalistic backing brings a sense of “academic rigor” to Vanguard.   

“That’s a really critical element of the Vanguard platform, too. It’s not just a therapy session. We’re here to do real work and have conversations that actually bring back insights that move the needle for your business,” she said.