Who We Are

Aquent Consulting is a division of Aquent LLC, a global company established in 1985 that is the leading provider of creative, marketing and IT staff to thousands of corporations and ad agencies around the world.

What We Do

Aquent Consulting helps companies improve the efficiency and effectiveness of marketing communications development and execution with a focus on:

• • Agency resource screening, review, and selection
• • Organizational structure
• • Staffing skill set level and mix
• • Creative workload assessment by type and volume
• • Establishment of “best practice” work processes

Why Use Aquent Consulting for Agency Review?

We have a unique understanding, experience, and process to offer our clients.

• Our Unique Qualifications
  Aquent Consulting is uniquely qualified to conduct successful agency reviews because of the range and scope of our parent company’s core business – creative and marketing talent placement. This gives us direct, ongoing involvement with the creative end-product at over 3,000 clients world-wide.
  
  These ongoing relationships give Aquent Consulting a deep understanding of:
  
  • • Agency capabilities, cultures, and costs
  • • Agency differences in the creative process
  • • Creative trends in the marketplace
  • • Creative needs in an ever-changing media marketplace
  • • Agency demands and challenges
  
  Our team’s breadth and depth of experience is extensive. Our consultants have:
  
  • • Conducted over 40 agency reviews for clients in a wide range of industries including:
    
    • • Automotive
    • • Computer hardware/software
    • • Consumer package goods
    • • Financial services
    • • Petroleum/Oil
    • • Pharmaceutical
    • • Publishing
    • • Real estate
    • • Restaurant/Fast food
    • • Technology
    • • Telecommunications
  
  
  • • Conducted reviews across a wide range of marketing communications disciplines and agency types, including:
    
    • • General advertising
    • • Direct response
    • • Promotions
    • • Interactive/Web
    • • Identity/Branding
    • • Public relations
    • • Diversity/Ethnic/Multicultural
    • • Collateral
    • • Packaging/Design


• Our Unique Process
  Our unique process provides our clients with a fully integrated assessment of:
  
  • • Agency staffing experience and capabilities
  • • Client budgets vs. agency costs
  • • Cultural fit between agency and client organizations
  • • Proposed agency staffing plan to deliver the client’s scope of work

  Our unique process predicts the success of a client/agency relationship before a review is fully underway, saving both agencies and clients time and money spent participating in reviews that are unlikely to lead to positive outcomes.

  The tool we use to determine this is the AquentAffinityIndex (SM), or AAI, a predictor of a client and agency’s ability to work together effectively over the long term. Containing a range of attributes considered highly important to our review clients, the AAI predicts each agency’s ability to deliver on client expectations through a quantitatively driven process.

  Developed by Aquent Consulting after identifying “cultural fit” as one of the key predictors of client/agency success, our qualitative techniques measure the fit between client expectations and an agency’s ability to deliver on them. Areas of focus include management style and business practices.

  The index enables our clients to effectively compare alternative agencies in a structured manner on both harder and softer measures, leading to a better, more effective client/agency match.

Lead Bio

Peggy Mitchell-King leads the agency review practice at Aquent Consulting. She has over 25 years of marketing and advertising experience on the client side and in management consulting, focusing on agency review, client/agency relationships, work practices and compensation. Peggy is a former Marketing Manager and Vice President of Global Advertising/Branding at American Express, where her experience included all forms of creative development, execution and agency selection/management. She received degrees in art from Vassar College (BA), urban landscape architecture from CCNY (BSLA), and business from Columbia University (MBA), where she concentrated in marketing.