Ad Agencies Will Go Extinct If They Don’t Redefine and Reposition Themselves and Their Offerings
When I was a kid, we used to call silly, stupid people “Dodo Birds.” Of course none of us knew anything about Dodo birds it was just a name that sounded silly and stupid and that was good enough for a 7-year-old.
Dodos were flighless birds related to pigeons and doves. They ate fruit and nested on the ground. Dodo birds became extinc in the 17th century and it is commonly thought that human beings are directly responsible for thier extinsion.
So, it was this article on Creative Planners that I received from Siddhartha Banerjee , a senior copywriter with Intermarkets Dubai that made me put Dodo Birds and Ad Agencies in the same sentence. And by that I mean that it really hit a nerve with me.
For over half of my career in corporate marketing, ad agencies were an integral part of our operations. Because if you were responsible for any form of corporate communication, you really couldn’t do anything remotely fancy unless you worked with an ad agency. For example, to merely do a formal presentation to a client or your management team, you needed “slides” (if you have no idea what I’m talking about, follow the link). Making these slides was a major production that required a graphic designer to layout the text and any graphics and some kind of rather large machine that created the slides and put them into the plastic frame thingy. That job alone took a single person an entire day for a basic presentation.
Contrast that with PowerPoint and the power of SlideShare. And this was just the first sign of the upcoming extinction.
As my career progressed, I started noticing that ad agencies were promoting the fact that they do “marketing strategy.” This broke my heart because ad agencies didn’t make money by developing strategy, they made money by selling media and design. Selling strategy made them responsible for knowledge and information only their clients would know. And if their clients didn’t understand their business – (which according to my experience and Siddartha’s article – they often didn’t) the ad agency would take the hit for a failed campaign. This just wasn’t fair.
And so now we see our old friend the ad agency struggling in a DIY Marketing economy where they have slowly but surely become irrelevant and all because of what I would consider to be silly and stupid reasons.
What Can Creative Professionals Do to Become Necessary in a DIY Market?
Help Businesses Manage Multiple Brands in Multiple Channels
Blogs, web sites, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, your job, your friends, your company, your brand. I can go on with this list and every bit of this list points to the fact that all of us now are responsible for managing multiple brand images in our lives. Most of us are clueless about it.
Are you like me? I have a corporate consulting business called Third Force. That’s a brand. I also have this blog, Strategy Stew. That’s a brand. As Ivana Taylor, I’m the book editor and expert on Small Business Trends, I contribute to AMEX Open Forum, QuestionPro, and several other blogs. Then there’s my new venture DIYMarketers.com a subscription site for entrepreneurs who want to do their own marketing. That is a brand.
I am not the only one with this dilema. Just about every small business owner (and there are 27 million of us at last count) has this very same problem.
The increase in communication channels has made consistent on-point communication a real challenge. Independent and smaller ad agencies have a real opportunity in helping small businesses with these identity crises. Because no amount of DIY technology and social media can take the place of knowing how to best structure a look and a message that resonates with your ideal customer.
So if you’re an ad agency listen up! Unless you’re selling media and design to the big guys, start selling cohesive identiy to 27 million small business owners committed to Doing it Themselves.
Ivana – This is a very well thought-out blog post that really hits home the point I think most ad agencies are contemplating: How can they stay viable in today’s world?
With social media, the different communication vehicles are trying to decide where it belongs. Is it advertising? Is it PR? Is it marketing?
I think it’s definitely PR and marketing. We use social media to build our brands, prospect for new business, and recruit talent. We use different messaging, test campaigns daily, and use what works.
Until ad agencies figure out how to monetize the social networks, they’ll continue to become less attractive.
Hi Ivana,
I love this article too. And here’s my take:
We are witnesses to the end of the Advertising Age. That “one-size fits all” method for mass-marketing consumer products has simply come to a close. And with that death is the eventual end of an ideology that started with Henry Ford 100 years ago – create a product demand through mass appeals to a generalized ethos. Translation: make people want stuff they don’t know exists or think they needed.
Today’s demands need to accommodate the multiplicity of medium, plurality of audience, media consumption preferences and, most importantly the psychological self-determinism movement that was initiated from the Boomers and fully realized in the last 20 years with sexy technology. Serving up solutions commodity-style won’t cut the mustard with any of us anymore and so we need to consider the entire paradigm of mass marketing models as woefully outdated.
The next frontiers? Niche competitor models where value creation is targeted to increasingly smaller groups of clients and the support is lockstep. Read The Support Economy (Zubhoff and Maxmin) for more on this (and a considerably sharper recounting of the historical basis that got us here.)
We’re moving in the right direction but the casualties will be agencies, practices (just look at law firms and financial services for a view of “the end”), or other service/product businesses that won’t let go of the old ways to embrace and monetize the new ones.
I think the ad agencies need to start integrating themselves into the same tools the DIY marketers are using. There is a reason the shift is to DIY, and that’s because powerful tools are freely available. Marketers need to figure out where they fit in that space.
Matt
Ivana, this is really a great article. Business of every size hopefully will realize more and more that the rules of the marketing, advertising and PR game have changed and will continue to change. It’s no longer about pushing your message on people. The smart companies will find a way to be more “findable” when the millions of people out there are actually “searching” for info. And with so many other areas of the “Internet world,” we all need to find a way to adjust to the mentality that everyone is going to find a way to do it on their own.
For some reason, I have such a hard time with these darn captcha codes. So glad this place doesnt’ use it! You can hardly read them!
As a digital media agency – we work with quite a few ATL marketing/PR companies and obviously not for our own benefit but do think that the digital side be pushed far more harder.
We will always need print, on-pack and in store activities communications but the digital world is fast becoming a common area to backup the print based solutions whilst giving all Marketing/PR agency clients a full all-round set of services.
From our experience we always hear Twitter, Facebook and I-phone apps commonly used on pitches which are great portals/avenues to go down but to be honest they are aimed at a certain age group or particular audience and 70% of the time they don’t always match-up to the real target audience in which the Marketing agencies are pitching their ideas to.
For Twitter, Facebook and i-phone apps they need to have extremely strong hooks otherwise they will always fall short at the first hurdle.
I always believe in sexy technology but it has to match and meet the clients requirements – especially when you have 12x agencies all pitching for the same business.
Here is my email address is below if you need any digital advice on future projects?
I hope this is of use?
grahambeard@gcreative.co.uk