Okta’s global CMO Shannon Duffy has highlighted the growing importance of brands holding onto agency villages, arguing that those labelling themselves as “full-service” can’t be experts in all things.
Sitting down with B&T during Sydney’s Oktane conference on Thursday, Duffy said brands using agency villages are more likely to get access to the right expertise for their specific needs.
The CMO, based in California, said Okta (a digital gatekeeper for organisations) keeps most of its strategy, creative work and paid advertising in-house, it is a big believer in using agencies to augment its team for particular needs, most notably events.
Event agencies help the brand with logistics, staffing, lighting and attendee check-in, particularly for large events or when the regional team needs extra capacity.
“We do a lot of our marketing in-house, and that’s by design. However, we also use agencies, because they augment us for certain projects, but the strategy and the creativity comes from in-house,” she told B&T. “We do a lot of paid ads, and we do them all in-house right now.”
One area where Okta is expanding its external partnerships is influencer marketing. In particular, the brand has brought on ‘Corporate Natalie’, who has 1.5 million followers on Instagram alone.
Corporate Natalie is the social media persona of Natalie Marshall, a creator known for her satirical short-form videos poking fun at modern corporate culture, work-from-home life and office quirks.
She works with Okta as an official brand partner and on-site event correspondent, where she turns enterprise topics such as identity security and AI governance into relatable workplace comedy across Instagram, TikTok and LinkedIn.
One example is her conference skits. She creates character-driven comedy reels on-site, including one in which she brings her mum along to Oktane26 in the US to humorously navigate keynote sessions and tech jargon.
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Duffy said a major reason Okta keeps much of its marketing in-house is to ensure the brand remains “authentic”.
“You can’t outsource authenticity,” she told B&T.
However, she said the brand is more likely to outsource work when operating in non-English-speaking markets, particularly Japan, where the language is “very different”.
The same applies to large-scale events, where external support is needed to manage the additional workload.
“We used an agency for the event because we need to staff-up more. If we have to have an event for multi-hundreds of people, you need somebody to do the logistics and make sure we check everyone in and stuff, and that’s something agencies can do,” she said.
Ultimately, Duffy said she is firmly in favour of an agency village, arguing that brands benefit from bringing in specialists to complement their in-house teams.
“I’m team village, and there’s a couple of reasons why. One, my goal from hiring a leadership team is to hire people that are better than me in brand, in comms, in demand gen, right? And I want them to have the autonomy to use the experts that are going to make them better.”
“I do believe it’s hard for one group to be an expert in all things. So if you want the best event agency, hire the best event agency. If you want the best demand agency or, you know, GEO agency, hire them.”
She added that AI is helping smaller agencies move “just as quickly” as their larger counterparts, reducing the need for the scale that once gave bigger agencies an advantage.
“All these tools are ubiquitous for everyone, so that need of having a big muscle is not the same because we can all move so much faster.”
How agencies’ roles are changing
While Duffy believes agencies still have an important role to play, she said AI is increasingly allowing in-house marketing teams to take on work that would traditionally have been outsourced.
“No one better than the actual marketing teams knows their customer better, right? Or they should. And so when you think of what an agency has done, it’s similar to what AI can do in some ways now. Which means a lot of the stuff that we might have traditionally done with an agency, we can do with AI now.”
However, she stressed that agencies are not going away, pointing to the continued need for specialist support, particularly for large events.
“Agencies aren’t going away,” she said. “When we do events, for example, we have event agencies that help us with the important things like setting up the chairs and making sure the lighting is set up.”
Instead, she believes agencies will need to find new ways to demonstrate their value, particularly by developing a deeper understanding of the businesses and customers they work with.
“The next frontier for agencies is how do they build even closer relationships with their customers and their customers’ customers? Because that’s where the value is going to come from, not from how do you put a bunch of things into an agent and get an answer back. Because we can do that ourselves.”
Duffy said agencies should ultimately look to automate more of their processes, freeing up time and resources to focus on the more creative and strategic work that clients cannot easily replicate in-house.
“One, I think they need to automate themselves as much as possible. There are probably certain use cases that their customers use them for. How can they automate the basic tasks?”
“One of the great things about working with agencies is for those times when you want an outside perspective, because sometimes you know your customer so well and you’re so close to it, you want someone else to check you.”
“The second thing is really deeply being experts in the industry and the brand that provides that expertise and that creativity that the LLMs just can’t do in the same way.”
Duffy’s comments echo a growing shift among Australian brands towards agency village models, with Honda Australia also highlighting the benefits of bringing specialist agencies together.
Honda Australia CMO Eva Barrett has previously credited the success of the brand’s move to an “agency village” to a desire to keep agencies accountable, while avoiding conflict between them.
Speaking with B&T, the general manager of brand, marketing and customer experience said the new structure has helped Honda “create stronger campaigns” by bringing all agencies into the same room from the beginning, rather than briefing them separately.
In Australia, agencies that describe themselves as ‘full-service’ include Thinkerbell, which has both media and creative teams operating within the business. Others include the likes of Howatson+Company, Clemenger BBDO and Paper Moose.
