The 5 Strengths of the New Agency

Times are hard in the marketing and advertising world and there
seems to be consensus that things won’t be getting easier. The old
agency model is on the road to extinction, but no on seems quite sure
how to survive. There is agreement that agencies need to adapt and
transform from “integrated ad agencies,” to some new type of
organization that is defined by broad thinking, flexibility and a more
strategic approach to problem solving. The problem is that this sort of
thing is easier to talk about than to achieve. Becoming skilled in
conversation marketing, insights generation and digital marketing
requires more than the addition of new skill sets inside the agency, it
requires a fundamental shift in how we think and operate. Whether
you are an agency trying to reinvent yourself or a company in search
of a more effective vendor, it is more important than ever to think
about how you will promote your brand in a meaningful, sustainable
way.

Doing that means working less on a one-sided story and more on

creating experiences. Experiences invite participation and engages
people on emotional, rational, and cultural levels. They inspire people
to drag their friends along and share the experience with the world.
Experiences can exist as a webpage or phone app. But doing this
requires a different kind of thinking and an agency that is willing to
throw off its typical processes and embrace something new. So what
are agencies to do?

1. Change the structure of the team

You can hand off elements of an engagement from team to team, but
the result will be a continuation of the same old thing. If you want to
conceive and execute powerful customer experiences, you need the
researchers, creatives, strategists, and interactive designers working
hand in hand throughout the entire process. Hand-offs result in
muddied interpretations and siloed thinking. Getting teams to work
together and share ideas in an iterative way is absolutely essential.
This means developing teams based less on function and more on their
passions, flexibility, and willingness to communicate in an ongoing
way. This means getting everyone involved from the start. It used to
be that everyone waited until the creative team emerged from
isolation with the ”big” idea (the message, the spot, the tagline.) If
you get everyone working together from the day one the solution will
be more than an ad, it will transcend any one medium.

2. Be genuinely interdisciplinary
Having a broad set of skills on which to draw does not make an agency
interdisciplinary. Not everyone needs to be an expert in every
discipline, but they need to understand the basics. More importantly,
people need to feel comfortable sharing thoughts and ideas without
fear of being dismissed by others. They need to be encouraged to have
a voice. One simple way to do this is to have client team members sit
and work near each other, not in departmental sections of the office.
Don’t isolate departments. Another way to encourage this is to have a
shared work space, such as a wall, devoted to sharing ideas and
insights. This encourages people to engage in a discussion rather than
falling back on the old, familiar way of doing things.

3. Start with the user

It may sound obvious, but putting the user at the heart of the solution
is crucial. This is easier said than done and it is easy to forget who the
user is when we work in isolation. Anything we create, be it a product,
an experience, a campaign, or a business strategy, starts and ends
with the user. This means understanding a customer’s relationship
with more than the brand. It means understanding how they view the
world, the multiple reasons behind why they shop, what their social
networks are, etc. In other words, start with what is important to the
user in the broadest sense and create according to how your brand fits
in with their identity and cultural norms.

4. Re-think the creative brief

The creative brief is a relic. With the exception of a few tweaks here
and there it has remained unchanged for years. It clarifies the
question, “What do we want to say?” but it rarely asks why we want to
say it or what the consumer wants and needs. It is better to answer
questions like, “How will we create brand advocacy?” “What things
does the customer need to hear from their point of view?” “How do we
get people to participate?” “What does the brand mean in the context
in which it will be used?” Asking those sorts of questions moves the
end product from simply being clever to being smart and relevant.

5. Become a learning organization

While human beings are hardwired to explore and learn, we also have
a tendency toward complacency. We get in a pattern once we learn
how to do something and tend not to deviate. But with the
proliferation of technology and social media networks, increased
globalization, and the pace at which access to information is
expanding, it is imperative that everyone in an organization always be
in a learning mode. This means cultivating a mindset that fosters and
rewards learning and going outside individual comfort zones. Create a
library, take creative fieldtrips, get the organization to explore the
world instead of sitting in an office. The result is more collaboration,
fresh thinking, and greater engagement by the members of the team.
What it all means

In the past, audiences were fairly captive. They were largely passive
consumers of advertising as they read the paper, watched television,
etc. The model was simple: buy attention and you will eventually
convert someone into a consumer of your brand. But in a postmodern
world of global branding and social media, companies can no longer
simply buy attention. The best crafted brand stories may be
memorable, but only if someone hears them. You may create a
commercial that creates a truly phenomenal amount of buzz, but it
means nothing if that buzz isn’t relevant and doesn’t produce revenue
growth. As consumers become more inclined to co-create the brand
through speaking, blogging, sharing ideas, and adopting brands as
part of their public identities, we need to move from simply telling
stories and hoping the audience will listen to getting others to engage
with the brand and telling the stories for us. In other words, we need
to engage our audience in a much more interactive, discursive way.

For agencies that will thrive in the emerging market, gone are days
when you gave the creative team surface-level research findings (or
simply a clever idea), wrote up a brief and hoped for something
revolutionary. Many beautiful campaigns were developed, to be sure,
but that didn’t mean they were relevant. This is even more true today.
Today, agencies have a wide range of disciplines on any given team
(anthropologists, illustrators, interactive gurus, strategists, etc.), but
this broad set of skills and perspectives means little if they don’t know
how to work together in a way that departs from past processes.