Husband and wife Dina and Stuart Bailey have launched AgencyFit, a new consultancy with a simple ambition to “make the advertiser, agency and publisher ecosystem stronger, but not cheaper”.
B&T sat down with Stuart, co-founder and managing director at AgencyFit, to discuss why the consultancy is fit enough to mend the ecosystem.
During the conversation, he revealed the pair “just feel like the ecosystem is not in the best place at the moment”, pointing to the amount of cost cutting taking place across the industry and a gap in the market for consultants focused on helping advertisers, agencies and publishers build better working relationships.
And through AgencyFit, Stuart and Dina will improve relationships across advertisers, agencies and publishers by building the alignment, workflows and intelligence that allow every party to create more value together.
The pair bring more than 50 years of combined experience across the agency and publisher sides of the industry, and believe there is an opportunity to improve the way those businesses work together.
Stuart has twenty-five years leading media and integrated agencies in the UK and Australia, including most recently chief media officer at Clemenger BBDO. Prior to this he was chief operating officer and chief digital officer at PHD Australia. His experience spans client leadership, digital, investment, operations and executive leadership.
His role at Clemenger BBDO was removed recently after the full service agency shut down its standalone media division after losing the Samsung account to Publicis Groupe. Yesterday marked the first day that Stuart was no longer employed at Omnicom.
Dina on the other hand harnesses 25 years on both sides of the table: communications planning at Omnicom Media Group and Dentsu Aegis Network, then agency and platform partnerships at Google, Meta and Snapchat in ANZ.
Publisher vs advertiser
Talking about how publishers will benefit from their couples therapy consultancy, Stuart said AgencyFit will help them grow revenue, optimize for agentic AI and help them with workflows that keep them visible, responsive, and connected to the systems that the agencies are using.
“Publishers at the moment are struggling with the complexity of how agencies work. So, how can we help them understand better how agencies work, so they can maximize revenue from them? That result will be good for everyone. It means that agencies get happier publishers who do better work. Advertisers get better outcomes because publishers understand agencies and what advertisers are doing better,” he said.
This result can be achieved through a four stage AgencyFit system. First the Baileys will diagnose where the relationship stands and identify the highest-priority opportunities for the business. This is done through the AgencyFit Index, which is a diagnostic tool designed to assess both how effectively organisations work together today and how prepared that relationship is for AI-enabled ways of working.
These assessments will cover 10 dimensions and roll into a single score for one of four quadrants. This score will show both the health of the relationship and where the biggest gaps sit, which gives the consultancy an objective starting point—what needs fixing, who owns the gap, and what should happen next.
Then the duo will build the operating framework around the priorities revealed in the diagnosis.
From there the frameworks that include workflows, tools and capability will be embedded into the businesses. Here, the Baileys will work side by side with the business to ensure that it knows exactly how the system works. Once this stage is complete, AgencyFit will exit the business.
However, Stuart did say AgencyFit can come in every 6 to 12 months and help update the system, but it does not need to be stuck in the business working on it day in and day out.
And from an advertiser point of view, AgencyFit is about making sure that the scope they’ve got with their agency is built on business growth, helping them optimize for outcomes, not just costs, and redesigning a joint workflow with their agency partners.
“A lot of advertisers are talking about agentic at the moment, but if you have a flawed workflow and your agencies have a flawed workflow, all agentic solutions are going to do is exacerbate that. What you really need to do first before you even think about agentic is have we got a good workflow,” he added.
Why now?
The rise of agentic AI over the last year has created the perfect storm for AgencyFit.
“I could have done this a year ago, but what I would have done is I would have gone into a meeting with a PowerPoint deck and tried to download 25 years of experience, 50 if you include my wife’s, onto the sales team and go, this is how you work with this and this is how you should work with an agency. That would have been great. They would have taken some of it on board, and then it would have gathered dust somewhere,” he said.
For Stuart, Agentic AI is particularly useful when it comes to managing and making use of large repositories of information.
“What we can do now is, if I’ve done this work—and this work will get a lot of information about how the different areas work, and then it will relay that information to publishers or to advertisers.”
Stuart also believes the timing is right as the industry risks creating a new generation of “walled gardens” as agencies, advertisers and publishers develop their own agentic AI solutions and platforms.
While he acknowledges the value walled gardens have created, he argues they have also brought a degree of opacity to the ecosystem.
His message to agencies, advertisers and publishers is straightforward: “You need to share more, you need to collaborate more, and you need people to help you, ideally like Agency Fit.”
