Most clients don’t care how agencies are structured; they care whether the work is effective. Joanna Lyall knows that.
A former UK managing director at Mindshare, Lyall joined MSQ five weeks ago with a brief to bridge the gap between what the agencies promise and what they deliver. Media and Creative. Tech and people.
For years, she says, agencies have been structured around disconnected teams, with clients left to glue everything together. Her job is to change that.
‘I think my part of my job is being that connective tissue,’ she says, ‘because for a long time everything has been run in boxes where the client is trying to corral and bring all of that together.’
Her appointment as executive director of media marks a shift in how MSQ wants to show up in the market. Known for its group of specialist agencies, the company has historically grown by acquisition. Now, Lyall is tasked with making its collective firepower easier to access and better connected. The ambition isn’t to mimic the holding groups but to offer something that feels bespoke, lean and aligned around client outcomes.
MSQ’s challenge is to prove that integration doesn’t have to mean scale. The group sits somewhere between the major holding companies and the wave of independent specialists. With around 1,850 people across its agencies — including The Gate, 26 and Walk-In Media — it has enough heft to offer breadth, but not so much that it’s slowed down by bureaucracy.
Unlike WPP or Publicis, MSQ doesn’t carry legacy structures or procurement-led global deals. And unlike indie shops, it can offer multi-disciplinary firepower. The task now is to stitch those capabilities together without falling into the same traps.
Lyall’s appointment comes as the rules of agency value are being rewritten. With platforms like Meta and Google automating much of the media process, and AI reshaping how work gets done, Lyall believes it’s time to redefine what clients actually need from a media partner.
As she puts it: ‘You can buy the media better, but if you haven’t got the right creative, it will not work. Stats show that around 40 to 70 percent of performance is driven by creative.’
It’s a problem she’s seen repeatedly. Clients invest heavily in targeting and efficiency but without the right creative insight, real performance often stalls. The fix, according to Lyall, lies in collapsing the barriers between data, strategy and creative execution, so that each informs the other in real time.
Lyall also believes media and creative are on a path back to integration, not through structure, but through practice. ‘That whole dynamic between media and creative has to be a hand-in-hand partnership,’ she says.
The original split between the functions helped media grow into a strategic discipline in its own right. But in today’s more complex landscape, Lyall argues, success demands closer collaboration. With better attribution, live performance data and AI-enabled decision-making, creative and media teams need to move in sync — aligned around shared outcomes, not agency ego.
‘The fight to be the client’s lead agency now just seems ridiculous,’ she adds. ‘What matters is implementing better campaigns based on what the data tells us.’
She’s also open to rethinking how MSQ charges clients, but only if it reflects what really drives business results.
‘If a client wants to work with us on outcomes, we need to understand all of their marketing services, the partners they’re working with and all the data’s got to be in one place. So that they can see it, we can see it and we know what’s moving the needle and what’s driving results.’
Lyall is critical of performance models built around delivery — pricing guarantees, coverage commitments or vague assessments of team success. ‘It’s more about being treated as a service business rather than a business partner,’ she says.
Instead, she wants MSQ to operate as a true growth partner, flexible to each client’s setup, capable of shaping commercial terms around results, not process. ‘The model we’re building is in some ways agnostic to which delivery agency they use to actually make it happen. It’s about having a view across the piece.’
This focus on effectiveness over structure also extends to AI. Lyall believes the goal shouldn’t be replacement, it should be augmentation. ‘You don’t put the information in the slot, it spits out something and you send that to a client,’ she says. ‘It’s about the back and forth, the right prompts and the right inputs that you really get a better product out of it.’
Lyall sees MSQ’s model as more flexible, more human and more shaped around what clients actually want compared to rivals. ‘We’re not saying, “Here’s our big machine, come and use it,”’ she says. ‘We’re saying, “We’ll build it for you. What do you need?”’
Lyall has spent her career moving between scale and scrappiness — two decades at Mindshare, followed by time in startups and scale-ups. That range, she believes, is what MSQ now needs: the systems of a big agency, but the speed of a small one.
‘We’ve got the talent, we’ve got the tools, and we’re not stuck in a model that’s ten years old,’ she says. ‘If we get this right, we’re not just building a better agency. We’re building a better way to work.’
