This is pretty much a completely lifted article by Sean Carton posted on ClickZ.com, but I just thought it was so well put that I wanted to paste it across. I have taken the liberty of amending it in a few places to make it more UK recruitment industry relevant (talking about TV ads isn't really us), but I think the parallels are so striking overall it holds up. See what you think (oh - and there are some great posts linked to from the article too - so give yourself 15 minutes, get a coffee and have a good read).
The end of Advertising agencies as we know them
Do we really need advertising agencies anymore? Are we witnessing
the great "reboot" of the advertising industry hastened (but not
caused) by the current recession?
It's pretty obvious to any reasonable person watching the tens of thousands of layoffs
in the industry along with the simultaneous implosion of the newspaper
industry that the ad biz as we know it is in serious trouble. Couple
that with the ongoing decrease in advertising spending along with new studies (such as this one from Microsoft)
that predict that the Internet will overtake TV in 2010, and it's clear
that advertising as we've all grown to know it is on the way out.
I'm not predicting
the death of advertising. That's baloney. If anything, we're witnessing
the rebirth of an entire industry that's going to expand in ways we've
never thought of before -- especially if we expand our concept of what
advertising means. And we'd better. Before we blow it like the newspaper industry has.
To understand the tectonic shift we're in the midst of now, it's helpful to remember where ad agencies came from. Originally advertising agencies
were "agents" for newspapers, placing ads produced by clients in
newspapers. In 1877, the J. Walter Thompson Co. figured out it could
sell more advertising space if it created the ads instead of relying on
clients to create ads. The modern agency was born.
As new media developed, the advertising agency adapted. Radio and TV
required new creative skills and new people. Agencies kept growing and
adding more overhead. Agencies became more unwieldy, more rigid, and
more set in their ways.
Then along came the Internet and all that changed.
It took a while, but today advertising is less about the big colourful press ad campaigns and more about producing
measurable results across a host of media and channels. Social media,
search marketing, and online direct response (with its associated need
for candidate-relationship management and other data-handling
technologies) have required new skills and and a new way of thinking.
And that's the crux of the issue. Advertising as we've known it has
always been about an "interrupt" model that requires candidates to pay
for content by sifting through pages of classified
print ads. It's been about grabbing and holding attention in a linear
way because that's how media worked.
It doesn't work that way anymore. And neither does the advertising agency as we know it.
Why? The full-service monolithic agency model worked fine in a world
where there were a small number of national newspapers, a local/regional champion or two and perhaps a niche industry magasine too. It doesn't work when
you have to deal with dozens of media channels and a plethora of options within each that change on a nearly
daily basis. New technologies pop up (social networking, Twitter,
online video, etc.) and new skills and new thinking are needed to deal
with them. Large organizations with large payrolls, hierarchical
structures, and well-defined (and well-defended) areas of expertise
can't possibly hope to make any money when they have to staff
themselves with a constantly expanding cast of experts to deal with new
media challenges. Add to that a compensation model based on a world
that's long gone (retainers and media commissions) and the agency model
we've all grown up with starts to look like a relic of the past.
Turmoil in the industry provides proof.
So what to do? Simple: explode the idea of the monolithic agency.
Get rid of the concept that only an agency that does everything can
possibly create and manage large campaigns. Look for more flexible and
fluid models that expand and contract as needed, bringing in new
expertise when needed and ditching it when it's not. Think distributed,
not centralized. Think "collective," not "company."
As more people get laid off and can't find jobs at other agencies (who are also laying people off), more people hanging up their shingle
and do whatever it is that they do best, creating an explosion of
entrepreneurs and experts who (without the overhead of a big company)
can do things cheaper, faster, and more flexibly than their
counterparts at big companies.
If this sounds suspiciously like the "free agent" and "new economy"
predictions we heard eight years ago, it kind of is. But there's one
big difference: now we have the (free!) tools to actually make it
happen. Social networking, collaborative tools such as Google Docs, and
advances in mobile technologies make it possible to create a
distributed team that doesn't need to be in the same place to work
effectively.
So what's the agency of the future going to look like? Probably a
lot smaller and focused on strategy, account/project management,
creative leadership (but not execution), and media strategy (but not
planning and buying). Most agencies will revolve around these hubs if
they're honest with themselves. Agencies will exist to provide
high-level strategic guidance that clients need in a media-chaotic
environment. Agencies will expand or contract as needed or will explore
radical solutions such as crowdsourcing to get work done for less money.
Whether this scenario turns out to be completely accurate or not
remains to be seen. But nobody can look at what's going on today and
say that the agency of tomorrow is going to look much like the agency
of today or yesterday.
So what do you think? Has Sean hit the nail on the head - or am I just part of that "explosion of entrepreneurs and experts" and therefore my judgment is clouded by desperately hoping that the new world that Sean talks of is to become the new reality?
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