“I guess I got a little bit disillusioned with only having one string to your bow,” he reflects. “If you’re given a whole set of marketing and business challenges, there are a gazillion ways of solving those problems. But a media agency will always say you need to buy some advertising, which, of course, is part of the mix, but is only a very small part that usually takes up a big part of the budget.”
That frustration proved to be the spark to launch his own full-service B2B agency. “The gap at that time was that there were lots of B2B creative agencies, but none of them knew anything about the buying.” Transmission was the first true B2B agency that put media buying at the heart of the marketing mix, Bagnall tells The Drum.
Early feedback to the fledgling agency proved Bagnall’s theory: brands didn’t want lots of agencies, they wanted fewer. “It’s the businesses that either do that niche thing that no one else can do really well, or businesses like ours that have the breadth and scale to be able to turn our hands to solving so many different problems, and therein lies the agency’s success story,” he says.
The agency has grown rapidly in its 12 years. Opening its first office in London in 2013, Transmission now has 13 offices across eight countries with over 300 employees. It has been recognized in The Sunday Times Fast Track 100 and Financial Times’ Europe’s Fastest Growing Companies. The company made its first acquisition this year, the creative agency Earnest.
These days, Bagnall sees Transmission as more of a consultancy on account of the services it now offers. Like Bain or McKinsey, Transmission has “models” that can assess the impact of recommendations on overall business growth. Bagnall stresses the importance of rigorous market analysis, a step he claims is often neglected by marketers.
“Most clients don’t have the luxury of time. They also, dare I say this, don’t have the courage of their conviction to stand up to a board and say, ‘Spend X and we’re going to get Y,’ and they need the evidence. Sometimes they don’t even speak the language of the board, right? Sometimes they’re not even on the board.”
After years of “brave” marketers having “banged the drum” about the importance of brand in B2B marketing, Bagnall believes the message has finally landed. This is one of the biggest changes he has noticed over the past 12 months. He speaks of companies such as Salesforce, Visa and Mastercard, which have proven the value of brand. “These are the companies that are being brave and it gives the industry more evidence and case studies to talk to our peer set about. It’s the ammunition to take back to their boards.”
Armed with case studies and confidence, Transmission is encouraging its clients to invest in brand storytelling and consider entertainment as an avenue rather than what he terms “dollar in, dollar out” advertising. The agency, through its acquisition of Earnest, has been challenging its marketers to think about cultural moments, sponsorship, product placement and even the production of mini series to pitch out to media companies such as Hulu or Netflix. “Don’t just market to your audience on the channels you know they absolutely will be on,” he urges.
Transmission and IBM produced a documentary revisiting two of the tech company’s most iconic milestones: the 1997 chess match between Garry Kasparov and its Deep Blue supercomputer and the 2011 Jeopardy! showdown, where IBM’s Watson took on human champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter. That documentary is a great way of telling a brand story, says Bagnall.
He does, however, counter that not every idea needs to be that “grand,” but encourages marketers to think: “How can you do something that really puts you out there and makes people say ‘Wow, that is freaking cool’ and that you wouldn’t necessarily expect to see from a business in a certain sector?”
AI is also making brand more important to B2B marketing. B2B buyers are increasingly relying on LLMs, not search, to research and decide which companies to sign deals with.
“In many cases, we’re seeing people using LLMs to such a distinct degree that they are cutting down all that middle content consumption, time and process that used to exist,” he explains. Brand has become more important at both ends of the buying journey; it’s what gets you on to a buyer’s shortlist on day one and it’s what gives them the confidence at the final stage to sign off a multi-million-dollar deal.
The proliferation of AI in this research stage has led Transmission to produce content specifically for LLMs. “It is not even for human consumption – it is only answering questions that LLMs will want to know. In some cases, it doesn’t even matter what it looks like, because no human is ever going to read it.” This is what has been termed ‘generative engine optimization,’ which Bagnall says is the “hottest thing” right now. Responding to the trend, Transmission has partnered with an AI company to build a model that allows it to grade all client content against all LLMs and against that client’s competitors.
Beyond this AI-powered service, the agency has introduced automation into its workflows and built an AI model that can both audit and create content. The latter will potentially power about half of Transmission’s services. This month, the agency hired former Accenture AI lead Josh Neland as its first vice-president of AI.
“For us, it has been about just continuously evolving service offerings, trying to get there first as much as you can,” he says of how he plans to continue growing the agency. Investment in research and innovation is key.
“Any agency can turn its hand to creating content, buying advertising, being creative, but it’s those that are looking at different ways of solving the same problems, different ways of proving the value of marketing to the business and not just to the marketing team, that will win.”
