Features
Why do agencies often struggle to advertise themselves?
Mumbrella's Kalila Welch investigates why so many agencies are missing the mark when it comes to creating their own brands.
For an industry that exists to create and communicate brand messages, agencies themselves often struggle to clearly communicate their own services and positioning.
Over the past year, a flurry of revitalised agency positionings have hit the Australian market, including Half Dome’s “Whole Potential”, Connecting Plot’s “Imagination in every impression”, Keep Left’s “Ideas People Choose”, The Core Agency’s “Punch above”, CX Lavenders “We Make Stuff for People” and Cummins&Partner’s “Micro-network creative consultancy”. That is not to say these agencies specifically have missed the mark.
Image by rawpixel.com via Freepik
Industry veteran, Chris Savage, says it is a “burning issue” in the broader communications industry, particularly given the “explosion” of the independent agency scene.
“It astounds me that, given our industry is based on positioning and marketing and building sales for brands, that we do such a poor job of it ourselves,” he told Mumbrella.
“We have to differentiate, we have to stand for something and offer something that clients can’t get everywhere.
“If it’s rare, it’s valuable. If it’s not rare, it’s not valuable. That’s why the creative agencies that position themselves as creative full-service agencies, as a generalization, don’t make the margins that more specialized businesses make.”
The most valuable of positionings, according to Savage, are those which solve “real and urgent client problems”.
Chris Savage, business growth specialist at The Savage Company
Agencies can pick a small slice of the market, like creative agencies in the healthcare space. Alternatively, a broader niche can be used as a “trojan horse” into higher margin work. Work that is “complicated”, and not “sexy”, is “where the big profits are”.
Creative agency, Big Red has been pinpointed in market for being retail specialists, for example.
“There simply are fewer good competitors, and fewer options for clients,” continues Savage. “This gives agencies what Blair Enns describes as ‘the power’, where the agency’s desirability to clients and prospects is greater than the agency’s desire or need to work with them.”
Dan Monheit’s Hardhat is one such agency that’s managed to find and target its niche, encapsulating the business’ behaviour change proposition under the tag line ‘Built on Behaviour’.
The position speaks to both the agency’s philosophy of approaching every brief as a “behaviour change brief”, as well as its strategic foundations, having built an agency around “two key disciplines of creative comms and digital CX”.
Dan Monheit, founder and CEO, Hardhat
But as to why “we suck at this as an industry”, Monheit has landed on the inherent sacrifice and choice that a defined positioning calls for.
Creative and entrepreneurial types want most to solve a variety of different and challenging problems, and the prospect of niching down to just one type of problem can be “terrifying”.
“I think what we fail to appreciate is that within that one type of problem, there are actually dozens, maybe hundreds, maybe millions of different sub-problems within it,” says Monheit.
Sling&Stone founder Vuki Vujasinovic says the issue of agency positioning is something that has pained him since the earliest years of his career in the industry.
“There are two major camps that the majority of the industry falls into,” asserts Vujasinovic, “those that stand for something, but make decisions that overtime make that position less significant”, and those that “don’t stand for anything” in the first place.
“I think it’s really easy to talk the talk and come out on day one of your agency’s launch, or your rebrand and say, this is what we believe in. These are the types of clients we’ll work with. But bit by bit that devolves.”
For every client that an agency works with that falls slightly outside of the purpose or position of the agency, that agency will slip further and further away from its defined purpose, or expertise.
Vuki Vujasinovic, CEO, Sling&Stone
Echoing Monheit, Vujasinovic says it comes down to “sacrificing short term growth” for the long term gain that comes when a prospective client can understand the “common thread” in the work you do with your clients.
Perhaps even more important, for Vujasinovic, is for the outward positioning to align with the team internally, so that talent are working towards the mission they “signed up for”.
VLMY&R chief strategy officer, Alison Tilling, holds a different perspective on the industry’s positioning problem.
She says that agencies face something of a “catch-22” when it comes to defining their brand, noting that while it is important for agencies to define themselves based on the kinds of work they want to do, the “commercial reality” is that most large agencies need to be able to “appeal to a wide client base”.
While Tilling first struggled with the relatively broad positioning at VMLY&R, “we create connected brands”, she says she has since reimagined it as a “way of going about things”, as opposed to what the agency is “trying to produce”.
“It’s a philosophy of how we undertake our work,” she explains.
Alison Tilling, chief strategy officer, VMLY&R
Like Vujasinovic, Tilling is also skeptical of agencies ability to commit to a narrowed positioning in the long-term.
“I think that one of the real challenges with positioning, particularly like when you have a really strong and interesting positioning like many independent agencies do, is that the moment that someone bigger buys you or you become part of a holding group there is a real danger that that positioning gets watered down or gets changed.”
From all perspectives, it seems the biggest brand challenge for agencies is the fearful prospect of turning away a well-paying job. Ironically, many of those same leaders would quickly tell their own clients that if they’re “for everyone”, they’re “for no one”.
And for this reason, it may be in the best interest of agency leaders to take their own advice and seek an outside perspective when it comes to crafting their position in market, as Half Dome recently did, engaging two agency partners. As the old adage goes, a plumbers pipes are always the leaky ones – as with any profession, ad agencies are no good at examining themselves.
Savage hones in on this point, explaining that when left to their own devices, agency folk will often come up with a positioning that makes sense to them, but not to anyone else.
“We’re best served by getting outside advice to distill what is it about us that’s special and different, ” he says, “and how we can express that in the most powerful way for our clients”.
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