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Most advertising agencies treat retention as an HR problem to solve after someone hands in their notice. Kooperativa 2.0 treats it as a signal-reading exercise that starts the moment someone joins.
The result? An ~80% annual retention rate and a 3.2-year average tenure, both well above what the advertising industry typically sees (where annual turnover often runs between 30-40%, according to the Agency Management Institute, 2024).
That gap doesn't happen by accident, and it doesn't happen through a single policy change. It happens through a combination of deliberate culture-building and the infrastructure to actually see what's going on across a team every week.
Cosmin Sipos, Managing Partner at Kooperativa 2.0, a digital marketing agency, sat down with us to explain how Mirro became part of that infrastructure, what they see now that they couldn't see before, and what he checks every Monday morning.
The advertising industry's retention reality check
Here's the inconvenient truth about agency life: the skills you invest in developing walk out the door with your people. Unlike a factory line, where replacing one operator with another changes very little, an advertising agency runs on continuity. The account lead who understands a client's brand DNA after three years of briefs is not replaceable by anyone who's just read the brief deck.
That continuity problem is also a competitive advantage problem. Clients notice when teams change. Long-term relationships are built on trust, and trust is built by the same people showing up every day, knowing the history, and bringing accumulated judgment to the table.
Kooperativa 2.0 figured this out early.
"This pattern has manifested itself ever since the very beginning of the agency," says Cosmin, "because the foundations rested a lot on building a community of professionals who wanted to work together not just to make money but also to feel good about their work."
That community-first mindset survived the agency's biggest scaling phase, which came right after the COVID period in 2020. But surviving a growth phase on values alone is harder than it sounds, and the cracks started to show in a specific way.
The blind spot that appears during growth
When you build a culture on shared values and mutual care, you start to trust the culture to do the work for you. That trust is earned, but it can also become a substitute for process.
"I think sometimes we relied too much on this organizational culture that we built on values," Cosmin reflects, "and sometimes we forgot about the concrete benefits that people are looking for. Maybe we should've been more proactive and had a more personalized approach towards each colleague, and we could not do that because we did not have a process in place that would take care of that."
It's one of those sentences that sounds reasonable in hindsight and devastating in the moment. A person leaves, and only then do you trace back the trail: the recognition that didn't land, the goal that drifted, the feedback that went quiet. The signals were there. You just didn't have anywhere to look.
That's the gap Mirro filled, not by replacing the culture Kooperativa had already built, but by making it visible.
How Kudos and continuous feedback changed the culture
There's a specific friction in agency culture around recognition and feedback. When something goes wrong, feedback flows immediately, usually loudly. When something goes right, the moment passes in the rush to the next brief, the next deadline, the next client call.
Cosmin describes it plainly: "It's easy to express yourself when things go wrong and harder when things run smoothly."
Kudos, Mirro's employee recognition feature, introduced a structured prompt into that rhythm. A regular invitation to name what went right, in public, inside the team.
The data layer that comes with recognition and feedback matters just as much as the habits themselves. Who gives Kudos and feedback? Who receives them consistently? Where are the silences? A team that hasn't exchanged recognition or feedback in one month isn't necessarily unhappy, but it's a signal worth looking at.
For Cosmin, a healthy week has a simple benchmark: at least one Kudos or feedback exchange per day across the organization. "That shows me a healthy organization where members know how to appreciate and communicate with their peers, and that's one of my goals as COO when evaluating the wellbeing of the agency."
The real cost of replacing a senior creative
Let's get real about what turnover actually costs an agency, because the number almost always surprises people when they add it up.
There's the direct cost: recruiting fees or internal time spent sourcing (Cosmin estimates 20 hours for a typical hire), job ads, and onboarding. Then there's the soft cost: the client relationship that needs rebuilding, the knowledge left by the previous person, and the gap period during which work either slows down or gets redistributed to people already stretched.
For a senior creative or account lead, that soft cost can represent weeks of momentum, and sometimes a relationship that never fully recovers.
Another aspect that helps make better decisions or spot issues early on are Mirro’s dashboards.
"The first one is the dashboard that tracks leaves and holidays. That helps us a lot in preparing the teams for busy periods of time and also sets up expectations for the clients." A proactive signal, not a reactive one. Knowing in February that three people from one team are off in the same week in April changes how you take on work before it becomes a problem.
The second one is the financial dashboard that “analyzes the distribution of salaries based on each department, and seniority is also a good marker when making decisions regarding a wage raise."
That kind of compensation visibility is more valuable than it looks from the outside. Pay equity issues, retention risks in specific seniority bands, and budget planning for team growth all benefit from seeing the full distribution at once, rather than reviewing individual salaries in isolation.
And then there's the thing he stopped losing sleep over.
"The standardized process of evaluating performance. Rather than doing it manually, the fact that we set up scheduled sessions for every team member helps me keep track of their evolution and also make sure that everyone's opinion is heard," says Cosmin.
Manual performance reviews have an uneven distribution of attention — some people get thorough, thoughtful sessions; others get five minutes at the end of a busy quarter. Automated scheduling doesn't solve the problem of conversation quality, but it removes the structural inequality in who gets remembered and who doesn't.
What you can learn from Kooperativa's approach
What Kooperativa 2.0 figured out, with help from Mirro, is that retention isn't managed at the exit interview. It's managed at the moment someone's Kudos frequency drops. At the week when feedback exchanges go quiet. At the OKR review that shows a department at 140% capacity while another sits at 60.
If you're an agency leader looking to build a similar visibility layer into your people operations, here's where to start:
- Audit your current feedback flow. How often do people in your team exchange recognition or feedback? If you don't know, that's the first signal.
- Map your recognition gaps. Which teams or individuals rarely receive Kudos? This is often where disengagement starts quietly.
- Introduce scheduled evaluation sessions. Consistency matters more than complexity. Even a simple quarterly structure ensures no one is invisible.
- Build a Monday dashboard habit. Leaves, feedback frequency, and salary distribution by seniority give you a weekly health check without an HR meeting.
Mirro brings together performance management, peer recognition, OKRs, continuous feedback, and people analytics in one place. If you're managing a team of 50 to 500 and wondering what your data would reveal, book a demo with Mirro to find out.
