In 2022 we were hired for a market test with an audience we already knew by name.
We were running an engagement for another vendor selling to almost exactly these people at almost exactly this time. Same job titles, same buildings, adjacent problem.
That is worth being honest about, because it is one of the real advantages of an agency over a first in-house hire. The rep who has spent three months learning who owns e-commerce at fifteen consumer brands does not have to learn it again for the next client with the same audience. He starts at week twelve.
What we did
Three months across the UAE, Egypt and Turkey, with consumer brands and their regional distributors. 23 meetings booked, 16 confirmed held, 21 companies introduced.
HP, Bose, BenQ, Asus, Xiaomi, Haier, SMEG, Bissell, Clorox, Energizer, Johnson and Johnson, Perfetti Van Melle, BIC, Marico through Transmed, Super General, Eros Group, Al Islami Foods, Cosmoplast, Hemani and White Whale.
The adjacency argument, and its limit
The overlap made the first month faster and the third month harder.
Faster, because the doors were already open and the reps could name the person who owned marketplace performance at a dozen groups without research. Harder, because the same buyer had been approached before by the same agency about a related problem, and a second product from a familiar sender needs a genuinely different reason to exist or it reads as a bundle.
The rule we took from it is to lead with the different problem, not the shared audience. What a brand puts on a retailer's product page and how that page is found in search are two jobs owned by the same manager on two different afternoons. Open on the afternoon you have not talked to him about.
What it shows
An agency's real asset is not a list, it is knowing who owns what inside two hundred companies. That asset compounds across clients in the same audience, but only if each new campaign is anchored on a distinct problem. Reuse the map, never the pitch.