The Modern Agency Session: Agencies Continue to Evolve
Working at an agency, e-Storm International, with long and old digital roots - the issue of defining the modern agency is a personal one for me. In last year’s session, I found myself with more questions than answers…
What is a modern agency? How does analytics change the nature of agencies? How can an agency be effective when so much of media is now fragmented? Can you “just” be marketing or creative agency and be effective partner for the client?
The panel included a strong selection of diverse backgrounds and known players in the interactive space: Neo@Ogilvy, Enfatico, Agency.com and Crispin Porter + Bogusky. This year’s panel proved very illuminating. Discussions were not so much defining what the “Modern Agency” is, but rather the external forces that are forcing agencies to change:
- Analytics required part of a company’s DNA
- Analytics enables the measurement of “return of objective”, not just ROI
- Creative and media integration, also requires alignment with technology
- Challenge is more than integrating offline and online media, online media is the most fragmented media
The full discussion points from the panel are found below:
The Advertising Space
Torrence Boone kicked off the session by outlining the current environment in which advertising agencies operate: 1) Media Fragmentation; 2) Digital Media (I think he meant the digitalization of Media); 3) Consumer Empowerment; and 4) Globalization.
Boone stated that Enfatico embraces these challenges by focusing on being an agency that is founded on being cross-channel and cross-discipline under a single P&L. Indeed, throughout the session he stressed the need to treat all channels as a unified experience for the audience and thus under a single P&L (informed by multi-channel analytics). Boone also noted that globalization allowed Enfatico to leverage their global offices to provide cost savings to their clients.
Winston Binch of Crispin Porter + Bogusky took the discussion of the state of advertising to a different direction, declaring flatly: “Advertising. Not a big fan of it.” He added that there is a need to do brand advocacy, not advertising. Binch admired companies like Zappos and Amazon, which linked the brand to the multiple customer touchpoints in the company experience. Binch admitted, however, that while many agencies are advancing the need for integration, clients can still be siloed (e.g. “let’s talk to that search marketing agency”, “we have a branding agency” etc).
Integrating Media: How About Integrating Digital Media?
Across the board, all of the panelists agreed that while there’s been a lot of discussions on the need to “integrate offline & online” worlds, this ignores the even more immediate challenge: integrating digital media itself. There now exist search marketing agencies, social media agencies, digital creative agencies and so on. Digital media seems to fragment more day by day. So the topic is no longer about “how do we integrated offline and online”, but rather how do we integrated disparate channels, disciplines, tactics around a set strategy and outlined goals?
The Great Re-Bundling
As I’ve seen in last year’s session, there were continuing questions of how creative and media should work together. There was general agreement, led by Sharon Gallacher from Neo@Ogilvy , that creative and media do need to work together, but many of the panel have not seen it executed well.
Jordan Warren of Agency.com stressed that technology needed to be added to the creative/media discussion. A lot of the possibilities of digital creative and media are afforded by technology. Creative and Media shops need to be united with their technology teams to take advantage of the digital space.
ROI & Analytics
When it came to analytics, Torrence Boone of Enfatico seemed very strong on the issue declaring that Enfatico embraced an international footprint (which can help keep cost low, e.g. offices in Bangladesh) and analytics. He brought up not only their reliance on analytics, but is also the first agency person I’ve seen talk about employing “agent-based modeling” to create media mix models for their clients. Agent-based Modeling is a new field being employed from the likes of Boeing to military strategist. Boone was very strong on the issue of analytics and media mix modeling, stating that anything less leads to inaccurate ROI metrics and sub-optimal campaign optimization.
Jordan Warren, of Agency.com, added that analytics is not just for ROI, but also for “Return on Objective.” A great answer considering that answers can help measure engagement, branding, and experience. Identifying sales ROI metrics appears straightforward issue when compared to defining metrics for branding, engagement and other advertising objectives.
Winston Binch of Crispin Porter + Bogusky added that he’s seeing client-agency relationships where CP+B brings up the issue of defining the ROI for a particular campaign and where the client sets the targets. The overall message is that agencies need to take partnership role in helping defining the targeted ROI with the clients.
New Talent: Innovation versus Strategy
Sharon Gallacher of Neo@Ogilvy stressed the point to bring in new talent who are “digital natives” and able to contribute new approaches and new ideas to the agency culture. Torrence Boone of Enfatico stressed that while new talent can bring innovation, an experience old hand is needed to translate those ideas into strategies that can be sold to the client.
