Can traditional ad agencies stop making people want things and instead make things people want?
Or are they doomed to eke out a sad, non-innovative living til start-ups and service design firms and agile young collectives with nonsense names and bearded 20 year old CEOs finally crush them for good?
Three good posts and a long comment have reignited the debate over “saving” ad agencies this week.
First, an optimistic post by @josiedbrown on how the ad agency, with a little magic, is the best incubator for driving innovation and new culture around:
I get it. There are overheads to be paid. But that doesn’t keep an agency from evolving and coming up with its own way to optimize, inspire, and contribute to society (or just have some fun). Putting aside funding for internal projects, hackathons and ownable IP with specific incentive to pitch and bid for investment is something some agencies are now putting into practice… It’s the art of bringing people together for a product that takes on any form (the physical, digital, hyper-real, analogue, mobile, paper, experiential, cinematic, interactive…) that an agency can do better than any start-up or tech company.
Likewise, service design and innovation consultant Matt Edgar believes agencies are now uniquely placed to make good and useful stuff, arguing that Ad agencies are discovering product like Columbus discovered America.
…advertising people understand, more than any other tribe, that needs do not have to be rational. In the pursuit of Making People Want Things, any fragment of culture, art or fashion is fair game. They understand that sometimes fast and different beats slow and better. While the product tribe labour methodically towards feature-based superiority, their counterparts in advertising throw so much mud at the wall that sooner or later some of it must stick. Superior access to rapid funding, boldness in exploiting adjacencies, a willingness to try lots of stuff – all of these are supremely transferrable to the iterative, customer-centred practice of Making Things People Want.
But he finishes with a warning: “Making things is hard, especially things to last, things that people will find useful in their everyday lives.” It requires long term support, very different to the normal campaign-based cycles of agencies.
Then cold water was splashed on the debate in this long comment by Jules Ehrhardt, partner of design studio ustwo, who doubts agencies can get ever their acts together to genuinely make stuff, aside from in rare cases like Nike Plus.
There is close to zero chance to any of the big guns [agencies] pulling ‘product’ off without completely gutting and refitting themselves, which would take till 2020 if it was even possible, by which time their model will begin its extinction cycle. Ad agencies are dinosaurs in terms of size, agility and long term prospects. They had a blast in the Triassic (50′s to 80′s), a boom in the Jurassic (90′s to 00′s) and now we are at the start of the Cretaceous (2010 to 20??). We are witnessing them lumbering towards extinction as the environment around them changes and slowly starves them of food.
His entire comment is worth reading because it’s fluent, harsh and funny.
But overall it felt like reading something from 2009.
Do people still believe that ad agencies are “dying”? It feels like the term “traditional” agency is thrown around a lot, even now, but what precisely are we talking about when we mock them?
And even if an agency is traditional (has surnames in its name?/has a foyer full of print campaigns?/not everyone has a beard?/their specs have actual prescription lenses?), these days its ranks are being filled with people who are anything but. Josie Brown writes of the young people coming to work in advertising:
When it comes to being at the helm for the next big thing, today’s new talent has huge role to play. They don’t remember their first email address or mobiles and they don’t recall their family’s first PC – these grads have innovation built in. They inherently turn to it, they aren’t intimidated by it and they definitely do not consider there to be a difference in new media to mass media.
Now it’s 2013, it seems silly to talk about “agencies” like this in the abstract, and still more silly to pronounce their death.
Anyway, the last post we wanted to link to is by Phil Whitehouse from DT. Called A platform for adaptation, in it he reframes the debate as not as the silly and extreme “how can agencies survive,” but rather “how can agencies can adapt and thrive?”
What’s needed is a structural platform for adaptation; the ability for organisations to anticipate trends and spot groundbreaking new technology, and develop capabilities to respond quicker than the competition. What’s needed is the resources, the processes and the attitude that can deliver for this new era.
Smart and simple, we recommend you read this whole thing.