Agency search consultants used to make a very comfortable living playing kingmaker. A brand marketer would get restless, hire a consultancy like Roth Ryan Hayes, and pay a hefty fee to run a four-month parade of creative shops through a pitch deck marathon.
That parade is running out of permits. Marketers are running agency reviews in-house, cutting out the middlemen who used to pocket six-figure fees just to manage the scorecard. Roth Ryan Hayes has responded by linking arms with recruitment firm The Palma Group in what the parties are calling a "strategic relationship" that could eventually become a full merger.
The stated goal is to "open doors for each other" as competitive pressure mounts. What that actually means on the ground is simple arithmetic. When a brand client decides it does not need a consultant to run an agency pitch, the consultant loses the fee. The client does, however, need to hire the internal marketing director who will run that pitch internally.
Connecting with a headhunter is how a search consultant stays in the room after the agency roster budget gets pulled inside. Instead of collecting a fee to swap out the agency of record, you split a commission with The Palma Group to place the executive who fired them.
Roth Ryan Hayes is looking beyond what used to be the "bread and butter of agency reviews" because the bread is stale and the butter is gone. If the partnership succeeds in opening doors, both shops might still have a business to merge by the time clients finish cutting the rest of the agency roster.