This session is presented by Pathlabs, one of our Preferred Partners. To learn more, visit our preferred partner page.
Ashley Neel, EVP of Activation at Curiosity, has been solving the same problem for years: how do you deliver world-class creative and media effectiveness without turning your indie agency into a bloated holding company? Her answer isn’t what most agencies expect. Instead of adding overhead, Curiosity partners with Pathlabs for media execution, keeping their team lean and strategic. JC Clarke, VP, Agency Growth at Pathlabs, has built his career helping creative agencies scale services without sacrificing their soul. Together, they’re proving that the best agencies don’t do everything—they do what they do best and partner for the rest.
What you’ll learn:
- Why principle-based media models (where agencies own and resell inventory) create misaligned incentives
- The one question to ask any potential media partner: “How do they make their money?”
- How the MEP (Media Execution Partner) model lets agencies scale without adding overhead
- Why the best indie agencies stay obsessively focused on strategic work and partner for tactical execution
- The staffing advantage: how to flip on 10 extra hands-on-keyboard without hiring when you win new business
- Why creative agencies have a “soul” that gets diluted when they try to do everything in-house
- The difference between transactional sales relationships and transformational growth partnerships
The Core Problem: Creative Needs Media (and Vice Versa)
Neel cuts through the false choice that plagues agency pitches. “You can’t have good creative without good media,” she says. “There is no creative effectiveness if you don’t have media effectiveness.” The best ideas require both to work—no amount of brilliant creative saves a poorly planned media strategy, and no media plan succeeds without compelling creative.
Clarke sees this disconnect from the other side. Creative agencies often tell him they don’t know where their work gets deployed or whether it reaches the right audience in the right environment. “Those two sides of the coin need to be speaking with each other,” Clarke explains. When creative and media work in sync, agencies can unify strategy, provide more value to clients and stay agile in the marketplace.
Where Agencies Get Tripped Up
The trap is obvious: try to add every capability in-house and you dilute what makes you special. According to Neel, the benefit of working at an independent shop is “being really, really focused in on what we do well.” Holding companies do everything but nothing particularly well. Indies win by being borderline obsessive about their core strengths.
“The further you get away from that, and you start tacking on those additional capabilities, you just get watered down,” Neel says. “You’re still not really competing with the holding companies because you don’t have that depth. You’re just getting further away from the thing that makes you awesome.”
The Framework That Makes It Work
Clarke describes Pathlabs’ approach as the MEP (Media Execution Partner) model—a bespoke service framework built around each agency’s specific needs. The key is establishing clear communication and understanding each other’s business inside and out.
“Creative agencies have a soul,” Clarke says. “There’s a lot of unique, virtuous things that a creative agency has established because of that independence they have. So how do we then align with that soul, or align with that culture and that ethos, so that we can ensure that it perpetuates into the media that they’re running?”
The answer requires getting deep into the partner agency’s business, understanding their North Star, their culture, their strategic operations—and then building a team that integrates seamlessly. Clarke emphasizes this isn’t a “set it and forget it” arrangement. “It’s a journey. We need to make sure it’s all set up for success and that we’re educating them, helping them rethink the framework of their agency relative to media, so that it doesn’t implode and it doesn’t dilute what they’re already good at.”
Why Being Agnostic Matters
Neel takes a hard stance on principle-based media—when agencies own inventory and resell it. “The whole model is fucked,” she says, “because whose interests are you actually acting in? If you are just trying to sell the inventory that you have, you are not writing the best plans for the idea, for the concept, for the client.”
Curiosity refuses to work with principle-based media partners, whether on the linear side with specific inventory or digital side with locked-in DSPs. “That makes our ideas pure,” Neel explains. “When we start to step away from that, whether from a capabilities or execution standpoint, we just lose a little bit of who we are.”
The Day-to-Day Reality
Here’s how it actually works: Neel’s team at Curiosity owns the strategic layer of media planning, working alongside their strategy and creative teams. They set the vision and the specs. Pathlabs handles the hands-on-keyboard execution work.
“We talk to these cats every day,” Neel says. “There’s a Slack channel going on right now about this thing with Pathlabs. So we’re in constant communication, but we’ve set it up so that we’ve got a core team over at Pathlabs. It’s not like I’m dealing with faceless people. I know them all. I’ve met them all. I’ve had meals with them all. They’re just an extension of our team.”
The strategic versus tactical split makes economic sense too. “It’s really, really hard in media to make money,” Neel explains. “The margins get smaller and smaller, so just straight up, hands-on-keyboard work is not where you can charge up for clients. Where we focus is building out that strategic ownership, that strategic layer.”
The Staffing Advantage
Media staffing is brutal. Finding strong hands-on-keyboard experts is hard enough. Keeping them from burning out when you win new business is harder. “The minute another campaign turns on, you win another piece of business, you have to quickly go out and hire,” Neel says. “That’s tough. And when you’re trying to hire fast, that’s where you make some bad choices.”
The partnership model solves this. “The ability for me to keep my staff tight and strategic, and know that I can flip on an extra 10 hands-on-keyboard whatever it is on a dime—it’s gold,” Neel explains. “It makes my staffing and profitability that much easier to predict.”
Clarke adds another benefit: career development. When you hire strong people for hands-on work, their career arc can feel limited. By freeing up their time through partnerships, “they can continue to refine other skill sets that’s going to help them grow their career, or just lean into things that they’re really passionate about.”
One Question Every Agency Should Ask
In the conversation’s rapid-fire section, Neel offered the single most important question to ask any potential media partner: “How do they make their money?”
If the answer involves owning inventory, reselling media or any form of principle-based model, you know where their incentives lie. And those incentives might not align with writing the best possible plans for your clients.
The Bigger Shift: Partnership Over Sales
The conversation closed on a broader theme that matters beyond media execution. There’s a difference between growth and sales. Sales are transactional. Partnerships endure.
“We all want to grow our businesses,” the group agreed. But growth requires shared goals, clear communication and a willingness to weather challenges together. Some days will be amazing, others will present obstacles. The difference is whether you’re aligned on the same North Star.
Clarke illustrated this with a recent client story. After a quarterly business review, the agency founder asked Pathlabs to rank how good of a partner the agency was being, and what three things they could improve. “If we’re not a good partner for you guys,” the founder said, “then we’re not allowing you to fulfill your value as that partner.”
That’s the difference between transactional and transformational relationships.
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