It’s been some weeks since my last blog post, all I can say for myself is within 2 months my team has doubled in size from 2 to 4 and two more are in the pipeline… So I’ve been busy. Oh, and I’ve started doing some posts at the Visual Jazz Blog.
Back to the point at hand: Can digital agencies LEAD planning & creative?
It’s no new debate, however, I think it’s still unclear how it will all fall. Two opposing articles on AdAge argue for and against the topic.
Jacques-Herve Roubert summarises his views nicely:
Perhaps the synergy and balance between exploitation and exploration is off kilter for digital agencies, but more and more we’re starting to see the agency structure itself change with new hires in technology and social media. And marketers are noticing:
- According to Media magazine, AKQA was named the lead agency for Nike India earlier this year.
- Precor named Ascentium its agency of record in October 2009. According to Forrester’s Q2 2009 Interactive Agency Wave, Ascentium “received the highest client satisfaction scores in this year’s review.” The assignment with Precor includes strategic planning and execution of all offline and online campaigns.
- McAfee hiring Tribal DDB as its agency of record in 2008. This assignment included all TV, print, outdoor, and digital.
Jacques-Herve’s post is in response to the opposing view earlier last year by Ana Andjelic
If digital agencies excel at exploration, traditional agencies thrive on exploitation. A traditional agency is risk-averse, accountable and systematic. It knows its business inside-out. It knows its clients’ businesses and executes campaigns reliably. Its people hang out with the CMOs. A typical traditional agency has decades of experience.
This, too, comes at a cost. A traditional agency, organized around exploitation, ends up doing the same thing over and over again. For every marketing challenge, their solution is “better creativity.” This is not surprising: If an agency spends all its time making sure that everything goes efficiently, that leaves it with little time to experiment. And then, even if it wanted to do things differently, it would be met with its own organizational inertia.
In my opinion they’ve both got valid points, however, having the name Jacques-Herve Roubert makes him sound just that little bit more intelligent.
In all seriousness, I’ve seen media, digital & traditional agencies all work in various magical and wonderful ways together, and sometimes pretty poorly, I believe some traditional agencies will adapt, some digital agencies will become more strategic, media agencies will continue to grow in size and more nimble strategic media agencies will appear on the scene. At the end of the day, the advertiser has a big say in who leads who, sometimes they’ll organise their agencies based on what’s right & logical, sometimes they’ll do it based on what they’ve done before.