Power Panel: The Modern Agency

Moderated by Suzanne Vranica, the Wall Street Journal’s advertising and marketing columnist,the ad:tech brochure’s description of this panel promised to address a raft of unanswered questions, to wit:

Will the industry re-bundle and should it? What will happen to the large, traditional creative shops? How are agencies successfully delivering integrated campaigns? How do agencies evolve their staffing priorities and compensation models? What is the client’s point of view? The entire media and advertising industry is in flux and re-aligning for the future. As this core trend accelerates, how will the agency landscape evolve and what agencies are best positioned to lead world-class brands into a digital future?

To be sure, there was some solid agency muscle on the dais: Richard Guest, Managing Director New York of Tribal DDB Worldwide; Tom Bedecarre, the CEO of AKQA; Nancy Hill, the President and CEO of the American Association of Advertising Agencies; and Sean Finnegan, President and Chief Digital Officer of Starcom MediaVest Group.

I don’t know that they collectively answered any of the questions posed in the brochure, but there was good news to report in this depressing economy: Tom noted that the industry as a whole is trying to hire people faster than there are people available for those positions. Polish up those resumes, people!

If that sounds a bit like a blast from the past, well, deja vu was hovering in the air like a morning fog. Other takeaways included: The line between the traditional agency and the digital agency is blurring. Talented people would rather work for Google or Microsoft than an ad agency. Many traditional agencies are still wedded to the 30-second spot. And so it goes.

An oldtimer might have felt like it was a keynote at a 1998 digital conference, and indeed Suzanne noted that “we’ve been talking about the new agency model for 10 years,” but nothing in the session seemed to suggest that the conversation won’t similarly continue for another 10 years.

The discussion focused on large agencies and integrating digital expertise into the large agency structure. There was talk about bringing young talent into an agency and training them—in other words, the large, structured agency is going to attempt to put a leash on an energetic young (and unstructured) digital lion. Maybe that’s why agencies are having trouble finding and keeping great talent: It’s shouldn’t be about plugging that talent into what Suzanne characterized at one point as “a monstrosity of a division,” it should be be tapping into that talent pool in a new way. The agency needs to change to accommodate the talent, not vice-versa.

Conspicuous by its absence from the discussion was any talk of how mid-sized and smaller agencies have the potential to be smart and nimble enough to create the real new agency model through the smart utilization of the very companies and services that filled three floors of the Hilton with display booths.

As Tom said: “If you haven’t gotten it in the last 10 years, when are you gonna get it?”

Exactly.

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