A white label agency is an agency (or even a sole-proprietor) who hires an outside digital marketing agency to help with servicing their clients.

For example, agency A may have increased their client base to a point that their team may be too overloaded to manage accounts efficiently.

Or, maybe agency A is a one man or one woman operation and wants to offer their clients a full suite of marketing options that are beyond their own skill sets.

In any case, agency A simply needs to offload some or all of their client work but maintain the original relationship with their clients. After all, the client hired agency A because agency A has a great reputation.

So, agency A searches for agency B and hires them to fulfill agency A’s work load. This is what we call “white label.”

White label is not to be confused with outsourcing in the traditional sense. Normally, outsourcing involves utilizing a contractor or service to complete a single, or multiple, tasks for a particular strategy. However, the account management, strategy, and communication remains the responsibility of the agency.

White labeling, on the other hand, involves hiring another agency to complete ALL of the communication, strategy, execution, and reporting for a client’s marketing campaign. Oftentimes, the agency that is doing the work “assumes the identity” of the white label agency so that the client is none the wiser as to who is actually performing the work. 

You may be asking “but isn’t that lying?” 

Nothing could be farther than the truth. 

Think of it like this: you are marketing yourself to the world and saying that you can do XYZ for your clients. So, you are hired to do XYZ. As long as XYZ is completed as promised, does it matter to the client wether or not you are the one actually doing the work? It really doesn’t. As long as the client is getting what they paid for, and is happy with the service, there is NOTHING unethical about how the work gets completed, even if it’s not completed by you.