Advertising is no longer about ads. So what does that mean for agencies?
With the media and advertising landscape fragmented Simone Bartley argues the traditional agency model is no longer fit for purpose.
CMO’s have never struggled more with bigger challenges than they are today. New technology and new audience behaviour is one thing; future business strategies and innovation to stay relevant are another.
Meanwhile in ad land there has been an array of new acquisitions and agency models but what has really changed? The majority of media and creative agencies still sell and generate space and ideas for ad formats; TV, print, digital or otherwise.
The fact is advertising is no longer about ads.
Advertising is now about content, participation, conversation, experiences and utility. Based on that agencies need to continue to evolve to deliver to this new definition.
Easier said than done, particularly for agencies that suffer issues of legacy systems and in fact any agency that does not have enough digital pacesetting clients in the mix.
So what should the modern agency look like?
The best place to start is by understanding the challenges of marketers today and into the future.
According to Philip Kotler at the recent World Marketing and Sales Forum in Melbourne, CMOs should be responsible for the following six tasks:
1. Represent the voice of the customer,
2. Monitor changes in the environment,
3. Act as a steward of the brand,
4. Oversee upgrades to technology,
5. Offer an insight into the portfolio, and
6. Measure and account for financial performance.
Kotler also thinks companies have two parts to their marketing departments: one “helping the salesmen sell” dealing with current business, and the other, separately working on strategy to build a future for the company.
That means agencies serious about creating deep partnership with marketer’s today need to rise above the world of communication tactics and think more about what brands and technology mean for business and marketing overall.
To do so requires a level of business and brand acumen as well as integrated teams with creative, media and technology skills working together.
One of the key issues for marketers is that agencies do not have a good history of collaboration or sharing ideas. Competing P&L’s only add to the issue.
The biggest step though may be the need to unlearn the labelling of the past; print, TV, digital and mobile.
These labels were originally created to help identify and understand the ‘new’ channels – Social, mobile etc. But as more channels open will this labelling help or hinder?
At the end of the day marketers need creative, media and technology teams to work together. Whether that is through one or more agencies.
So what are some of the key ingredients for the modern agency?
Everyone is strategic and creative.
Digital skills permeate the team.
The agency operates teams not departments.
The definition of the ‘creative team’ is challenged as teams are customised to the project.
Leadership and structure is allowed to happen more organically.
There is a culture where ideas can flourish.
An excellent example of this is Valve. Valve is a Gaming Company that has been voted one of the most desirable places to work.
Their Handbook cover reads: ‘A fearless adventure in knowing what to do when no one they’re telling you what to do.’ The hierarchy is referred to as Flatland.
For me the modern agency is smaller, with more generalists than specialists that don’t hide behind jargon. There is a bundled offer of creative, media and technology where media and technology people aspire to creative ideals and creative people care equally about the marketer’s business objectives.
Simone Bartley is CEO of agency TogetherCo
Advertising? Getting your message into the heads of most people at the lowest possible cost.
User ID not verified.
Why is it every ‘new agency model’ (and many old ones) seems to want to omit planning?
Perhaps that’s the real problem.
User ID not verified.
Sighting Kotler as having any relevance in the modern marketing, advertising or branding world, doesn’t give great confidence that you are looking to the right people.
PS. you are also saying everything that most people are already doing.
User ID not verified.
Is this a paid advertisement or free PR for TogetherCo because there is certainly no news here. And Eon is right, Kotler was avantgard in the early 80s and history now as any real student of marketing would know.
User ID not verified.
Oops, @really is right
User ID not verified.
@Really? Oh. Dear. Lord! It’s “citing” as in “to cite” – To quote as an authority or example. To mention or bring forward as support, illustration, or proof. To “sight” Kotler, you may well have to be in Chicago. That is all.
User ID not verified.
Why does the birth of something always have to equal the death of something else in this industry? Content, participation, conversation, experiences and utility are no doubt very important, just not sure how that means the death of ads? Until you can deliver the former at the scale and efficiency of the latter then I can’t see many CMO’s scrapping TV just yet for example.
Also couldn’t help thinking that the agency you just described sounds awful lot like the original model for Ikon but full service. Not a surprise with Mr Hardwick involved! Good luck with it though, keeping fighting the good fight.
User ID not verified.
Hi Groucho,
We don’t do paid-for content (if we did it’d be clearly labelled)- this is an opinion piece, not a news article.
Hope that clarifies,
Alex – editor, Mumbrella
What’s really sad about this article is that there is one example of a company in another category that is supposedly really creative.
The rest is a just a grab bag of cliches with no evidence or justification about how this would make a better agency.
Whilst it’s an opinion, it is full of so many errors and loopholes it is just laughable.
User ID not verified.
@Alex I was being sarcastic, sorry I didn’t make it clearer. As the other comments suggest the opinion piece could do with a bit more work, and more convincing opinions.
User ID not verified.
@Alex Hayes my post was intended to be sarcastic when I suggested the piece may have been a paid piece. I should have made it more obvious by being more cutting, but @Really has done it for me, and others will surely follow. Now 83, Philip
would be amused to have the six points quoted to support a conclusion so distant from the 6 points made. Those of us who studied under him would remember how politely sarcastic he would have been commenting on this leap of logic.
User ID not verified.
I understand this is an old argument but it’s fair to say that content marketing brings with it a greater need for technology, creative and media planners/strategists to work together. Develope content that is trending in social or search for example. Develope creative that can give a level of personalised scale! You can’t just give me an add to push broadly anymore! With all the clutter to cut through we have to be smarter if we want to maximise results… but not loose track of what we are trying to achieve. Great stories are only great if they tie back to the brand and increase sales etc.
User ID not verified.
Advertising is no longer about making people want things but rather it’s about making things that people want.
User ID not verified.
Something angry about something that makes me feel intelligent and gives me something to come back and read up on every 15 minutes during my work day.
User ID not verified.
Did advertising die again?
Again?
User ID not verified.
Well,I do agree in a few things, Advertisers need to work more with Marketers and also agencies which don’t have digital knowledge will have a hard time, but in the end is all about the strategy and ideas, they can come from various places.
User ID not verified.
Nice one Simone.
& looks like its bitchy day on Mumbrella again.
Not sure why people have their knickers in a knot – the broader view of what advertising ‘is’, & the role or lack of for agencies, is being defined beyond singular views and pseudonyms.
CMO’s, & yes, CFO’s, have a lot more to consider then the loudest voice on a blog & as an industry we would do well to remember that. My experience on some large accounts, as one of multiple agencies, is that can’t be surprised to see clients moving to the large consultancy shops such (Deloitte, PwC etc) to manage their comms in an increasingly data driven landscape; because with the exception of the back slapping self congratulatory rubbish I see in the comments section, we are not doing it very well as an industry.
& @Eaon, agree that the role of planning needs to be central but I don’t think this piece said it didn’t.
User ID not verified.
I’ve worked in several agencies where the management spout the exact same line of arse. “everyone is creative” they say. ‘Ideas can come from anywhere”, “re-think the creative team”. Utter bollocks. The ideas always end up coming from only one place. The creatives. Because when the deadline has to be met, and there’s nothing else on the table because all the agency wide brainstorms have resulted in a table full of generic, derivative or just plain shit ideas, it’s the creatives who have a relevant, strategic idea. Then they can communicate it, work it up and get the client to believe in it.
There are so many deluded clowns on here [Edited under Mumbrella’s moderation policy] preaching this line, but then you look at the output of their respective agencies and it is appallingly bad. The media landscape is fragmented because people have more ways to avoid advertising but the wheel is turning. Know why? Because a phone in your pocket is just another place to watch TV, and TV ads or content as we now call them are still the only way to reach a mass market.
Big clients across Australia (heard of Lion Nathan?) are slashing their spend on digital and social and putting it all into TV/video and OOH) Agencies like We are social have heard the death knell of a business built around Facebook and twitter and are desperately trying to move into TV production ( exhibit A their recent Adidas campaign that was billed as ‘social’ but was in fact 3 TVCs that ran on Facebook).
People don’t want to have a conversation with a brand, the amount of fucks given about ‘telling their story about how soap powder helps them look after their family’ is zero. Make something funny they can watch on their phone, or at a stretch do, and they will spend 2 minutes doing it or playing it, before moving on to the ‘5 reasons why you need to get your asshole bleached’ item in their newsfeed.
So in conclusion: the new model is actually going to be remarkably similar to the old model. Creatives coming up with ideas, they might be a stunt, a piece of tech that gets filmed or they might be good ole fashioned TV ads that people watch on youtube. But the one thing I can guarantee, the social specialists who think that asking people to share a recipe is an idea, and digital ninjas who know jackshit about how to actually come up with an idea that moves people will be shown the door, as agencies ( and clients) figure out (some faster than others) that the amount of value they are adding is five eights of fuck all.
User ID not verified.
A grown up in a room of children. Bravo.
User ID not verified.
@Full Circle completely agree. This Business is and always has been about getting to a good idea and communicating it in the most engaging and effective way. Currently there is way too much time wasted on half arsed silver bullet solutions supported by voodoo logic
User ID not verified.
Nice one, Nic Halley – I agree with you.
Do people realise they’re addressing other people (it’s not a computer which writes this stuff, you know) when they make such derisive comments? My goodness, make a point but do it with manners!
Thanks for the read Simone.
User ID not verified.
Mr Full Circle is of course (delivery of message aside) completely right.
Assuming your brand is sufficiently large that it needs mass marketing, the problem with ‘content, participation, conversation, experiences and utility’ is that it doesn’t work.
Your target doesn’t want to watch your content, doesn’t want a conversation with you, has no desire to participate with you, and prefers not share experiences with you.
They wish you’d just stop bothering them.
The media you use is up to you and the numbers, but what works creatively hasn’t changed.
Be simple. Be entertaining. Be consistent.
User ID not verified.
Full circle, you had me at “Utter bollocks.” Great comment. Thank you for telling it as it is.
User ID not verified.
Amen Full Circle.
You had me at ‘5 reasons why you need to get your asshole bleached’
User ID not verified.
Can we just copy and paste Full Circle’s comment into all these type of articles. Yes there are fantastic new ways to reach people – often through other people (i.e. social) – but unless there is something interesting to share in the first place we have nothing. The ‘interesting’ bit needs to be invented by ‘Creative people’, what ever name they go by.
User ID not verified.
Is it fair to say that some area’s no longer need paid advertising to sell their product?
A well known, established pop act, as an example, can just post on a few of their social channels and sell out a gig right? (In the past they would have had to pay for advertising…)
????? Any others?
What are the forecasts? Who will be able to sell products without advertising, however who will need it?
Will Murdoch’s reign over the ignorant and naive end too, due to social channels and people power?
User ID not verified.
Another full circle groupie here.
In my experience, it has nearly always been the one who played badly, who volunteered him/herself as pianist at a house party, and the one who has no sense of pitch and/or rhythm who sings loudest. Unfortunately, anyone who can talk, walk and remember a few lines, thinks he/she can act. The one who tells yarns is an author, and the one who can twerk is a dancer.
For good creative ideas, you must have a good creative team. To implement good ideas and create a finished product, you must have team work and trust.
User ID not verified.