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Occasionally, creative and media agencies will partner together in a pitch in order to have the scale needed to compete against holding companies, but those collaborations are often in one-off instances. But Joan Creative and Crossmedia are bucking that trend with a formal partnership that has proved that working together can be a boost to both.
Earlier this year, Joan and Crossmedia rolled out a unique offering, called JoanxMedia, which was designed to offer both agencies’ clients more options but also show that media and creative could effectively go to market together.
At a session at the inaugural Adweek X event in Los Angeles on Monday, Lisa Clunie, co-founder and CEO of Joan and Kamran Asghar, co-founder and CEO of Crossmedia U.S. shared the stage with Adweek’s Olivia Morley to talk about how the relationship came about and how it is flourishing.
From Joan’s perspective, bringing in Crossmedia opened them up to better pitching.
“Now we can pitch things that ask for media,” said Clunie, adding that Crossmedia sits within the planning team and the staff at Joan works with Crossmedia staff just like they were Joan staff, facilitating better integration of the two.
Working together shortcuts a lot of the work that used to be separate for Joan and Crossmedia, but allows the two companies to keep their independence.
“We are both independent agencies—we’re both minority owned and women owned—but come together with kind of a shorthand that creative and media have always enjoyed in the past, but just has become a lost art,” said Asghar.
Uncovering blind spots
The separation of media and creative is something Asghar calls “the original sin,” and the JoanxMedia collaboration is a chance to help undo that sin.
“The right way is to be integrated as much as humanly possible,” added Asghar.
The first collaboration of the agencies was on a pitch, which was won, for S&P Global when it merged with IHS Markit. It was the brand’s first global, fully integrated campaign, and it showed the power of what both agencies could accomplish by working together, said Clunie, adding that it was a success because Joan was able to tap into Crossmedia’s global insight and global understanding and the two agencies were able to build a cohesive plan together.
