‘Agencies are failing to solve actual business problems?’ No kidding!

In order to fully benefit their clients, agencies need to start solving actual business problems rather than simply doing some “fancy photoshopping”, writes agency director Tyson Carr.

At the recent Mumbrella360 conference, a panel of former big brand marketers warned agencies that they might be nailing briefs but they are failing to solve actual business problems. To that, I say: no kidding. The truth of the matter is most traditional above-the-line agencies haven’t a clue how to solve challenges that encompass departments within their client’s businesses beyond the marketing team. 

Traditional agencies are set up to market to consumers, plain and simple. But business challenges go far beyond that to include a range of audiences from internal stakeholders to B2B audiences and even shareholders. In a lot of cases, traditional agencies don’t have the experience or expertise to work with these types of audiences because they’ve never done so. The reality is, audiences beyond the consumer have a very different involvement or investment in the business than a consumer does so, obviously, they need to be treated differently.

The sad thing is, agencies have the skills to nail all sorts of issues clients are facing. The industry is abuzz with the value of strategy, creativity and data and how they all work together to solve marketing challenges. I’d argue strategy, creativity and data are not tools exclusively available to marketing departments. An approach that uses strategy and creativity informed by analytics is effectively the same no matter what department a problem stems from.

The CMO’s responsibility

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