Jimmy Gilmore – Writer – Director

70% of your tar­get audi­ence uses the mobile web

%50 is on FB

%60 reads blogs

%50 watch online video regularly

30% is on Twitter

Only 12% watch Amer­i­can Idol

Ed. Note: This is not a far fetched

Are you really going to run another tele­vi­sion cam­paign just like last years? Are you going to expect it to improve your client’s sales because the cre­ative is fresh and a lit­tle less watered-down? And are you then going to ratio­nal­ize it by throw­ing in a cou­ple of after thought dig­i­tal things like an iPhone app that some­how ties into your tele­vi­sion spots?

If you are, you’re not alone. Is it pos­si­ble you’re screw­ing your­self faster than you’re screw­ing your client? Well, good thing the client’s inter­ac­tive shop can’t do brand­ing. Oh wait, they’re start­ing to fight for that busi­ness now, aren’t they?

In a recent provoca­tive post, Bud Cadell says many agen­cies and their mod­els are bro­ken for good. I cer­tainly agree that some agen­cies may finally be ready for the waste bin of his­tory but we must also rec­og­nize that agency Bill Bern­bach thought was a dinosaur is still going and reap­ing in much, much larger billings than the agen­cies that are now pro­fessed to be the way of the future.

While these dino agen­cies may not be barom­e­ters of the future, they sure are a great exam­ple of what the clients are demand­ing. And as wants have changed over the years, so have the big, bloated account ser­vice dri­ven shops. They adapted with TV and took baby steps with their clients to the inter­net. And now, many are in acqui­si­tion mode, acquir­ing the tal­ent and band­width needed to ser­vice their large clients in the Web 2.0 world. Sure, they’re way behind now but they were also way behind Bern­bach in the cre­ative revolution.

Ten years ago, I was con­vinced the new breed of MBA adver­tis­ing man­ager, and the rise of the CMO role on the client side, meant a more sophis­ti­cated client and less reliance on big agen­cies for heavy lift­ing. Silly me, I thought this would be a boon for smaller shops and bou­tique agen­cies. Instead the next decade was a feed­ing fest for hold­ing com­pa­nies – swal­low­ing up the agen­cies they didn’t run out of busi­ness. And advert­ing man­agers and CMOs still relied heav­ily on agen­cies as their own jobs grew more com­plex with the rise of new media and more demands of pro­duc­tiv­ity and ROI from within.

The next decade will prob­a­bly be even more com­pli­cated than the last for mar­keters. And even more com­pli­cated for agen­cies as they strug­gle to pro­vide value for their clients in a rapidly chang­ing media land­scape. There’s a good chance that I’ll be as wrong as I was 10 years ago but I think there is still a lot of “value” that good old ad agen­cies can pro­vide their clients.

Clients in the future will need

Strat­egy: Clients strug­gle with this one inter­nally, not because of a lack of brain power but because of a lack of objec­tiv­ity and an abun­dance of politics.

Cre­ativ­ity and pro­duc­tion: Sure they can crowd source ideas but agen­cies are good at stick­ing to a strat­egy, bring­ing tal­ent together, man­ag­ing cre­ativ­ity and pro­duc­ing some­thing on time.

Devel­op­ment — Long the unwanted job of the inter­ac­tive agency, tra­di­tional agen­cies that can inte­grate this effec­tively with a mar­ket­ing com­mu­ni­ca­tions plan will show value over siloed efforts.

Clients in the future won’t need but will still prob­a­bly still buy

Account man­age­ment: Clients these days are sup­posed to be man­ag­ing the brand them­selves but they love hav­ing some­one to call for expe­ri­enced advice. Agen­cies have been toy­ing with elim­i­nat­ing this posi­tion or tran­si­tion­ing it to more of a project man­age­ment job. But it still cre­ates rev­enue. Account man­agers of the future will have to be great project man­agers, client man­agers and under­stand dig­i­tal beyond “I’ll ask my inter­ac­tive guy.” And great ones will also need some strat­egy chops.

Media plan­ning and buy­ing: This can eas­ily be con­tracted to a spe­cial­ist media agency but when you have your account man­age­ment at the agency, there’s a good chance some shops will still con­tinue to reap prof­its from media services.

What adver­tis­ing clients don’t need and won’t buy

This is a trick head­ing. Adver­tis­ers will buy just about any busi­ness ser­vice from an agency that pro­vides value. Agen­cies that are sur­vivors, sur­vive because they are good prob­lem solvers for clients. The task of our busi­ness is to solve mar­ket­ing prob­lems and apply mar­ket­ing solu­tions to busi­ness prob­lems. Because client prob­lems are con­stantly chang­ing, mar­keters will need part­ners that can adapt and throw band­width at their cur­rent prob­lem quickly. They don’t want to hire in-house for what may be per­ceived as a tem­po­rary prob­lem — let the agency hire, adapt and fire staff – our busi­ness does that well.

What does this agency look like? It’s big but it runs on a lean mix­ture. It has strate­gists who are com­fort­able with the web and out­door. Art direc­tors who know what HTML5 is, copy­writ­ers who blog and can tweet about more than their break­fast, and devel­op­ers who col­lab­o­rate with the cre­atives. Pro­duc­ers who aren’t siloed between Web, broad­cast and print. And account man­agers who can use tools like Bootcamp.

These agen­cies will cre­ate prod­ucts that may be adver­tis­ing, may be events or may even be more like online move­ments. They could be a dinosaur that has evolved into a lizard agency or they maybe been an inter­ac­tive agency that picked up respon­si­bil­ity for the entire brand or a even great cre­ative agency that merged with an inter­ac­tive one. What­ever the case, there will be less room for tra­di­tional shops that don’t get dig­i­tal or dig­i­tal shops that don’t do brand­ing but I don’t see the death of an entire industry.

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This entry was posted Thursday, February 18th, 2010 at 10:41 am and is filed under advertising, interactive. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.