Jimmy Gilmore

I’ve been spend­ing a lot of time think­ing about what’s next. On both a per­sonal level, for the agency where I work, and for the indus­try as a whole. One thing that’s pretty darn obvi­ous, things have already shifted. There have been sev­eral reports on indus­try spend­ing and the shift toward dig­i­tal. Spend­ing is pre­dicted to con­tinue to increase in dig­i­tal seg­ments while it will stay flat at decreased 09 lev­els in tra­di­tional seg­ments. There have also been so shifts that will most likely not be long term.

Agen­cies have heard loudly that serv­ing the same old sauce isn’t going to land new clients and keep old ones. Things have to change so I’m going to go way out on a limb and make some predictions.

1. Agen­cies won’t be siloed the way they are in the future. Media, cre­ative, and account ser­vice. We will still have cre­ative girls and num­bers guys, but media, plan­ning, and some of what account ser­vice now does will be blurred. This will help pro­duce bet­ter solu­tions for clients.
2. Suc­cess­ful agency/client rela­tion­ships will touch a lot more depart­ments. Work­ing with a mid-level mar­ket­ing depart­ment exec­u­tive for the day to day won’t be enough. Cus­tomer expe­ri­ence, out­bound com­mu­ni­ca­tion, and even inbound com­mu­ni­ca­tion will become so impor­tant to the brand that great client/agency rela­tion­ships will work on all of this and more on as part of a brand­ing effort.
3. Agen­cies will finally stop talk­ing about the big idea and start talk­ing about get­ting the details right. Who cares about a big idea when the brand expe­ri­ence is the new media? Get­ting the details right will make the brand successful.
4. Long thought of a slick huck­sters, ad folks will be preach­ing truth, trust, and respect for the cus­tomer. Remem­ber David Ogilvy’s “the cus­tomer isn’t an idiot, she’s your mother.” Well, don’t for­get it. In fact, repeat it once or twice and you’ll be on the cut­ting edge.

Bonus pre­dic­tion: Agen­cies will be con­fused about what to call them­selves for near future. Using monikers like group, Inc., col­lec­tive, part­ners, labs, and idea fac­tory because they’re afraid to com­mit to being grouped as just a dig­i­tal shop or a old school adver­tis­ing agency. Even­tu­ally, they’ll all agree on what their indus­try is called and rename the AAAA.