Dubai: Those seemingly impregnable relationships are starting to show some cracks. Global blue-riband brands are calling in media and creative pitches — nothing wrong with that as such, but they are doing so after being associated with a particular agency for years. And those were the tie-ins that looked like going on for ever.

For Nick Vale, the Global Head of Planning at Maxus Worldwide, this process of brands looking beyond their longstanding partners is part of the great game, nothing more, nothing less.

“We’re in a relationship business — the clients we work with are looking for partners to collaborate with and reach their audiences in exciting new ways,” said Vale, who was in Dubai last week for the annual BPG offsite event. “Our clients are savvy, switched-on smart people and they want to work with people who understand their businesses.

“For whatever reason, sometimes a client-agency relationship doesn’t work out, but this is rare.

“If you get to know how to present your brand visually, then you don’t always need a huge budget to reach consumers. But you do have to get how to be timely, simple and relevant all within a 3-second window. That’s how long we have to excite consumers these days.

“So Instagram-type images, gifs, short-form text ads, embedded video, adaptive content are all key right now.”

It is within this fast-changing kaleidoscope that the recent spike in global marketers/brands calling in fresh agency pitches should be viewed. Check out any brand with a fairly sizable footprint across markets, and chances are it is in the midst of making up its mind over which agency it should go with.

“Many of the agency reviews underway are with relationships that have existed for five, ten [years] or even longer,” said Vale. “Even if clients are happy with their agency, they want to be sure they’re getting the best product and service they can.

“So they’re probably saying, ‘lets have a look around the market’. Businesses today are looking for marketing spend to be as efficient as possible — agency costs are part of that.

“We understand the business challenges our clients face right now and we’re helping them prepare for the future. With our ‘Lean into Change Positioning’, we’ve been very successful at doing that.

“Maxus has, after all, been the fastest growing media network in the world over the last five years. We know that velocity of change is the biggest driver of client business — both today and tomorrow.

“‘Lean into Change’ is more than a philosophy for us — It sits in the DNA of the agency and flavours everything that we do.”

Stirring words, but isn’t there a downbeat sentiment running through the ad industry? Western Europe might have moved on from an economic precipice, but there is the humanitarian issues it has to confront across its borders. The Middle East buoyancy has been pegged back by oil prices behaving the way they have been and ongoing conflicts on its periphery.

The global economy looks to have paused for breath after China’s shakeup. Surely, these ripples should be running through the ad business as well?

According to Vale, “Clients understand that keeping consumers happy is absolutely central to business success. With so many possibilities open to us, the communications world has never been more dynamic.

“Media delivery is now more important than ever and social media offers smaller brands and companies a fantastic way to reach their customers.

“The media world has become way more complicated... over the past few years the number of ways to reach consumers has exploded because of social media. This is coupled with further advances in ad tech.

“At the same time, clients are looking to make sense of the huge amount of data they have access to. They want to be sure they’re working with agencies who understand how the world has shifted.”