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With ad spend up, here’s how agencies are preparing for growth

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By Branwell Johnson 

Gather intel, raise profile, and target carefully: those are Branwell Johnson’s ‘three commandments’ for agencies looking to leverage positive ad spend outlook following optimism from the IPA and the AA/WARC.

‘Cautious optimism’: it might sound tentative, but it’s a phrase to give confidence to agencies of all hues as they focus on the coming year.

Various ad industry barometers are showing some rays of sunshine amid the dark clouds of cost-of-living pressures and a potential ‘shallow recession’. It all helps build morale and resilience at a point when agency leaders are reviewing new business strategies, planning where to invest, and evaluating which potential partners can help develop their pipeline.

The recent IPA Bellwether report produced some uplifting headlines, with UK business revising their budgets up to the strongest levels in almost a decade in Q4, providing an optimistic start for the year. Nearly 45% of Bellwether survey respondents said that they were planning budget expansions for 2024/25 – three times the number planning to restrict spending.

The newly-released Advertising Association/WARC report, meanwhile, shows UK ad spend up 15.9% in Q3, exceeding the £9bn mark for the first time for the quarter, while the credit ratings service S&P Global Ratings gave a boost for those agencies looking to expand into the territory with a forecast that US ad spend will rise 7.6% this year.

To provide balance, Sir Martin Sorrell of S4Capital indicated that he doesn’t see much improvement in the macroeconomic environment “and client caution on marketing spend will likely persist”, so agencies are going to have to be smart on qualifying leads and addressing how they are raising their own profile in a competitive environment.

Ad spend is robust

For agency leaders, it’s a question of gathering intel, staying on top of trends and spotting opportunities. By drilling down into various reports, we find the sub-trends that will have agency antennae twitching. S&P’s projections say that US digital ad spend will see the greatest rise over the course of 2024 and 2025, while “legacy” media will stutter this year.

The AA/WARC report points to search (including retail media) and online display (including social), driving higher than expected ad spend; online retailers increased their ad spend by 156% as competition for customers hotted up.

A deeper dive into the Q4 Bellwether shows that the disciplines that have notably benefited from recent ad spend investment include events and direct marketing. The latter enjoyed its greatest upturn since 2005. Events is expected to have another strong year, with a net balance of +17.8% of marketers boosting their events budgets for 2024/25. Direct marketing (DM) also appears to be an area of focus with a net balance of +16.8% preparing to increase DM spend. Main media has a rebound forecast for strong performance with a net balance of +14.2%.

Agency business development practitioners say the numbers are borne out by their own experiences. Pedro Martins, chief growth officer at Total Media, said: “2023 proved to be our strongest year yet (and that’s saying something given our 42 years). Q4 is always a big quarter for us and this year was equally strong.”

Andrew Rose, VP sales EMEA for StackAdapt, points out that with budgets up to the strongest levels in almost a decade, marketers will want to ensure they’re getting the most value – and looking to optimize campaigns for both efficiency and impact.

Rose said: “This shift presents an opportunity to explore innovative targeting approaches, with a laser focus on data-driven insights while adapting to evolving privacy standards as we enter the post-cookie era.”

Luke Willbourn, managing director UK at Talon, adds that the strong growth in events ties in with people wanting to spend more time outdoors, connecting with the environment and people around them, and experiencing the real world. He says: “This calls for brands to create exciting and inspiring experiences that truly engage and offer something meaningful to be experienced together. This not only builds brand awareness but delivers bottom-funnel results too when combined with programmatic out-of-home campaigns.”

Cameron Russell, head of marketing for Royal Mail Marketreach, comments that it’s heartening to see direct mail with its unique capabilities around capturing attention and targeting in the marketing mix, “being one of the principal drivers of marketing growth this Bellwether.”

What sectors are strong?

What sectors are staying buoyant? Sales prospecting tool Winmo has shared data that reinforces the increase in ad spend in retail and e-commerce, with significant jumps in investment for companies including Temu, Amazon, Argos, Boots, and Dreams – and in entertainment with YouTube, Freenow, and BBC all spending more.

A wider look at the business landscape shows retailers Tesco and Sainsbury’s reporting strong grocery sales over the festive period and raising their profit outlook. Travel is also surging, with the World Tourism Organisation projecting international tourism numbers to exceed pre-pandemic levels this year.

And no one should ignore the boost that elections give to media channels. It’s a near-certainty that it’ll be an election year in the UK, while the US ad spend is predicted to jump by nearly a third over the 2020 election investment according to Group M.

There is plenty for agencies to play for – but they must make sure they can use all the tools (from positive PR to punchy thought leadership) to differentiate themselves and highlight their cultural fit with a potential client.

Feature Image Credit: Andre Taissin via Unsplash

By Branwell Johnson

Sourced from The Drum

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When brand strategy fails: 4 ways to use customer journey mapping for brand alignment

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By Liz Hess 

Known’s Liz Hess describes a world where linear customer journeys have given way to a complex matrix of platforms and routes. Worse, attempts to map them too often fall short with internal misalignment.

In today’s fiercely competitive and optimization-obsessed market, understanding and enhancing the customer journey has emerged as a crucial aspect of success. Customers have come to expect personalized, proactive, and anticipatory experiences. Delivering exceptional customer experiences throughout the entire journey is the key to building strong relationships, fostering loyalty, and driving sustainable growth.

The customer journey has become a pivotal concept that empowers organizations. With marketers embracing the idea that excellent customer experiences can be the best advertisement for a brand, customer journey mapping has become an obligatory aspect of go-to-market planning.

To create the seamless experiences that customers have come to expect, marketers dissect customer needs and aggregate an amalgamation of data: marketing metrics to define the details of how customers have been acquired, user research for a step-by-step analysis of the shopper journey, market research gleaned by interviews with customers and survey data, and details on how a buyer persona uses a product. There’s also a treasure trove that can be gleaned from customer touchpoints including email interactions, social media engagement, abandonment of part-filled shopping carts, returns to the site after abandonment, or chats with sales or support representatives.

Welcome to the matrix

The customer journey, once linear, has been replaced by a complex matrix of touchpoints with the customer at the centre. Somewhere along the way, customer journeys have gotten so fluid that we’ve forgotten who and what we’re serving. Marketers need to strive for a dynamic, collaborative, and socialized customer journey that works harder and smarter.

As brand marketers, we often witness clients invest significant time and resources into (and apply painstaking detail to) defining a brand strategy, only to hit a crossroads when socializing the direction among other departments. They fall in love with a vision but struggle to evangelize colleagues with the same energy, vigour, and inspiration.

For companies to live up to their brand promise and keep up with ever-evolving consumer demands, they need to be aligned and involve each division and department. While completely breaking down silos isn’t realistic, a collective journey map can be an effective bridge to connect teams and disciplines. Still, there are a few principles to position the customer journey as a tool for internal alignment.

1. Make it universal

The customer journey shouldn’t live within one department. A customer journey is best used as a tool for building consensus, and a contract between each discipline as to what they’re ultimately working towards.

The map should provide the business with a common language and understanding of how all efforts intersect. All initiatives should stem from the journey by translating customer needs into business rationale.

2. Make it personal

A customer journey map should outline not only how disciplines intersect but also how specific individuals in the company support customers’ needs. This is particularly impactful in healthcare marketing, where it’s been shown that when employees understand how they impact patients’ lives directly, it leads to higher job satisfaction, employee retention, and overall marketing and sales effectiveness. Naming clear roles and responsibilities, escalation protocol, and internal systems creates a sense of collective ownership.

3. Make it actionable

Brand strategies can often fail in implementation. Your brand is everything that you do, so it’s crucial to thread foundational brand elements into the journey. Beyond characterizing your customer, you can also use a journey map to humanize the brand. For instance, we can imagine and define how a brand archetype would behave at critical moments that matter, based on its values and focuses.

4. Make it holistic

Remove the purchase funnel and think about what a customer is really doing before they’re engaging with or thinking about the category. Customers enter and re-enter the funnel at various points, and with different states of mind and needs. Designing these pre-entry points helps us to imagine what motivates a customer, and when.

At times, imagining a category-agnostic customer journey can help widen the aperture to identify moments and touchpoints that can bring a customer into the journey at various stages.

While there are many schools of thought, training courses, and step-by-step guides to creating customer journeys, marketers and brands looking to create a competitive advantage and win need to break convention in favour of utility. Want to create customer journey maps that are enlightening, inspiring, and effective? Flexibility is the key to success.

Feature Image Credit: Amirali Mirhashemian via Unsplash

By Liz Hess 

Sourced from The Drum

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Why agencies need to embrace the new Free Lances

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By Jon Williams

The Liberty Guild’s chief executive responds to Campaign’s analysis on the health of creative agencies.

I read Campaign‘s article about the fallout from WPP’s capital markets day. I’m not sure it’s entirely fair of WPP’s chief executive, Mark Read, to lay the “didn’t reinvent quickly enough” thing at the feet of the creative shops.

It’s clearly true, but as I remember it (as an EMEA chief creative officer of a WPP network), the barrier to reinvention was also the fact that WPP would never sign off any margin relief to do anything. That and the institutional immune system in agencies that tries to attack anything acting differently or entrepreneurially. Anyway. Financial performance has been in decline for years. On that, we agree.

Further down the piece, someone was talking about a supposed “shortage of talent” to capitalise on growth opportunities. We can argue the toss about whether or not there is a shortage in agencies. But in the market there is absolutely no shortage of talent. It’s just that agencies are looking in the wrong place. And if they should happen to find it, they are just not set up to work with the growing global pool of A-list “independent” creatives, strategists, technologists and entrepreneurs that are the key to growth.

There is an incredibly talented crew out there for whom the agency Kool-Aid has curdled. All ages, all genders, all over the world, don’t understand why they need to work all the hours god sends and have zero work/life balance when there is an alternative. There is an exodus to the portfolio career. Some have private clients, some work with a number of agencies, some work directly with brands, some are entrepreneurs, some have personal projects. They flourish.

On the whole, they haven’t been forced to work from the kitchen table by a global pandemic: they made the explicit choice to jump off the burning platform and find sanctuary.

You can find them in the north of Scotland, on the west coast of France, a beach in Indonesia, Crouch End, Goa, Wherever. Technology allows the creative diaspora to go wherever it damn well wants to, in a way that couldn’t happen just five years ago. Technology has changed the game for good. And the pandemic has only expedited this process.

But here’s the rub. As I was leaving my big old network job, I excitedly explained my start-up idea to a European chief creative officer. A mate. Someone I rated.

He raised his eyebrows and said: “Wow, so you’re going to do that with freelancers?” He sort of spat that last word and at the same time left it hanging in the air. That’s the issue there. What is it with the pejorative use of that word?

In a more chivalrous time, when knights wore shining armour and rode white horses, the Free Lances were the elite. A warrior class for hire. Tied to no one. Not your poor plodding foot soldier. Not pawns on the battlefield for a top-down feudal system (bit too obvious for a network analogy?) – but the best and most skilful crew money could buy.

By Jon Williams

Jon Williams is chief executive of The Liberty Guild and the former chief creative officer at Grey Group EMEA.

Sourced from Campaign

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Why network agencies aren’t dead yet

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Despite the demise of network agencies being greatly exaggerated, to thrive in 2021, marketers need to choose their agency partners more carefully than ever.

From cats versus dogs and Blur versus Oasis, to a certain referendum – the specifics of which escape me – we all love a binary debate. Either pick a side and fight to the death or grab some popcorn and watch sparks fly.

And, of course, it’s all good, clean fun – until it’s not. Things turn ugly, livelihoods are lost and families get torn apart. And that’s just over pop music.

So given the ongoing challenges marketers face in 2021, let’s explore another great debate of our age – network agencies versus independents.

Are network agencies obsolete? 

A popular refrain is that indies are agile and networks are slow. It’s certainly true 2020 saw indies snaffle some big-name client wins. In contrast, being publicly listed, the holding companies’ challenging numbers were very visible. It’s been easy to sustain a ‘demise of the networks’ narrative.

But how real is that? And what are the implications for marketers?

My consultancy, Co:definery, teamed up with creative leadership specialists Curve and research agency BAMM to ask marketers how they viewed network and independent agencies. We also spoke to a range of agency CEOs to get their take.

So fetch a cold one, get comfy and let battle commence.

Agency ownership matters

First up, is indie versus network even a thing? After all, no ‘networks’ or ‘indies’ are created equal. And clearly no two holding companies are alike either. Alongside the size difference between, say, Dentsu and Omnicom, the cultural differences are vast too.

At the same time, although all agencies are facing headwinds, perhaps network shops are enduring more resistance. Because they tend to be larger than indies, any decline in retainers will be more disruptive for them. Likewise, the bigger the agency, the more that structure and process become a necessary evil. No wonder unhappy network agency clients often cite scale as a perceived reason for dissatisfaction.

Aside from the relative health of indie and network agencies, our research demonstrates marketers do care about ownership status. Only 15.7% said it wasn’t a factor in agency selection – less than half the amount who said the distinction was critical. And these trends were even more pronounced for higher spenders.

Interesting, right? Let’s unpack why.

Breadth of capability

Network agencies often trade on breadth of service. In response, indies point at competing P&Ls and a thriving, multi-disciplinary freelance market; not least the various ‘collectives’ being formed by top talent exiting big agencies.

Natalie Graeme co-founded independent Uncommon Creative Studio after leaving WPP’s Grey. She told me: “Although no agency has a load of people sitting there ready to go, networks like to tell clients they have a ‘man that can’. But that ‘man’ is often just a warm body, rather than the best person for the job. It’s about finding the right talent, not just the most available.”

With brilliant, motivated and well organised teams found in myriad places, you need to choose more wisely than ever.

Sara Tate followed the opposite path, leaving independent creative agency Mother to become CEO at Omnicom’s TBWA in London. She said: “Whether it’s independent or owned by a holding company, no type of agency has the monopoly on assembling the perfect client team; it’s about having the right attitude and process.”

Long-time network agency leader Tim Bonnet is now president at Unlimited, an independent group (albeit private equity-backed) that’s larger than many local network agency offices. He points to a cultural difference: “Network agencies focus on keeping client spend within the company or within the holding company’s current offering, but indies have a culture of looking outside for new innovations.”

Whether essential skills come from inside or out, network agencies’ ability to deliver a breadth of service was endorsed by our research. At 33.2%, this was marketers’ top answer when asked what makes network agencies attractive. In contrast, at 17.6%, breadth of service was only a middle ranking quality of indies.

The role of quality

Regardless of breadth, surely quality and talent are all-important? That’s why agencies love that hackneyed maxim, ‘our people are our most important asset’.

Charlie Rudd, CEO of Publicis-owned Leo Burnett – himself a product of a pre-acquisition BBH – told me: “When you’re running agencies, the only thing you need to worry about is your talent – getting the best people and keeping them motivated, happy and able to do their best work.”

But can network agencies really do this? Larissa Vince suggests not. CEO of independent creative agency Now – having joined from Publicis’ Saatchi & Saatchi – she said: “Being handed arbitrary, multi-market pay freezes stops you from rewarding the people who are nailing it.”

Interestingly, our research showed that “quality of people, thinking and work” was only a middle ranking feature of network agencies’ appeal. And for bigger spending brands, this slipped to less than a third of the importance of breadth of service.

So are network agencies safe and solid one-stop shops? Not necessarily – quality of people, thinking and work was a similarly middling quality in indies too.

Agility and independence 

If marketers place similar importance on talent in networks and indies, then perhaps how people work matters more? After all, ‘agility’ looms large in this debate.

Many indies claim to be more nimble, suggesting that running a network agency can feel like a straitjacket. As Uncommon’s Graeme put it: “Holding companies value predictability, which means less flexibility on models and less commerciality within account management.”

Matthew Saunby is the executive creative director at creative agency 2050London. Having worked at networks and indies from AMV and TBWA to BBH and Forever Beta, he’s well placed to offer a balanced view on hierarchy and flexibility. “There may be extra layers in network agencies but that rigour can also lead to better work. And although the process can feel quicker in indies, it’s sometimes an illusion, especially if you’re throwing dozens of ideas at the client. If you’re not careful, this ‘agility’ becomes over-collaborative and leads to the safest, most familiar work.”

Our research makes a similarly nuanced case. For the biggest spending brands, 38.5% of marketers cited “speed, flexibility and agility” as a compelling quality in network agencies – second only to breadth of service.

In contrast, while speed, flexibility and agility was just as highly prized within indies, it became less valued by higher spenders.

That’s a plot twist, right? Not only is ‘agility’ far from the sole preserve of indies, bigger spending brands find it more often in network agencies.

The leadership factor 

Another trope is that indies get closer to your business than network agencies. Is that real? And is it what you actually want?

While the input of founders is surely a given in small indies, perhaps any sense of ‘closeness’ is heightened by the cachet of the owners working on your account. After all, with other people running IT, HR and their building, a network agency CEO might actually be more available.

Regardless of ownership, maybe this boils down to how important you feel to your agency. Are they focused on making money for you or for themselves?

Former ITV marketer Simon Orpin is now CEO at independent media agency Electric Glue. He said: “Indies can focus more on their people, which improves the client product and in turn drives profit. In network agencies, these priorities sometimes run the other way round.”

In a world where polarised views rarely promote progress, marketers need more nuance and clarity than ever.

Our research revealed management style is marketers’ biggest frustration with both indies and network agencies. However, they describe network agencies as being too hands-on and indies not being hands-on enough.

Who saw that one coming? Nope, me neither.

Rise of the adaptables 

Alongside some nuanced surprises, our research uncovered just as many similarities. After all – newsflash! – difference is relative and preference is subjective. Case in point: as TBWA’s Tate put it, “if we’re competing with Accenture Interactive, then who’s the indie?”

So what’s the bigger picture for marketers right now?

We found that since the onset of Covid-19, the agency qualities that have increased most in importance were pretty consistent across networks and indies – namely ‘sector experience’, ‘quality of thinking and work’, ‘speed, flexibility and agility’ and ‘stability’.

Ultimately, you need innovative solutions to novel problems. So all agencies need to adapt – quickly. And judging by the transformation briefs they’re bringing to Co:definery, they hear you loud and clear – although be a mate and keep saying it, yeah?

Choosing wisely

The anthropologist Margaret Mead famously said: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.” This applies to agency ‘citizens’ within both networks and indies.

In 2021, clearly choosing the right agencies has never been more important. And with brilliant, motivated and well organised teams found in myriad places, you need to choose more wisely than ever. So what should marketers bear in mind?

Once the pandemic passes, maintain the new spirit of partnership. Saatchi & Saatchi London’s managing director Sarah Jenkins said: “Covid-19 has brought us much closer to client problems, so trust and honesty have increased, which has enabled us to be more instinctive.”

Don’t just hire an agency for now. Or as Wunderman Thompson’s UK CEO Pip Hulbert puts it: “Understand how the world and consumers are changing, so treat your agency like a marriage and make sure you can grow together.”

If you need ‘agility’, then self-awareness matters. “Knowing what you want is the best way to access speed. You don’t need to be big or small – on the client or agency side – you just need to be clear.” Wise words from McCann London CEO Sheryl Marjoram.

And having delved into one distinction, here’s one more – from Colenso BBDO chief strategy officer Rob Campbell: “Rather than indie versus network, it’s more a case of whether the agency wants to be at the business end of creativity or the creative end of business. The former is a greater focus on revenue and the latter is a commitment to the power of creativity. Clients just need to understand which kind of agency they want.”

So there you have it. In a world where polarised views rarely promote progress, marketers need more nuance and clarity than ever. Let smart agencies challenge you, then seek out the perfect fit, wherever that may be.

If independence or network ownership is mission critical, then follow your chosen path with confidence. Just don’t be guided by preconceptions.

After all, with any binary choice, your decision only matters when it really matters.

And for the record, it’s Blur by a mile. ‘Roll With It’ sounded like the theme tune to Only Fools and Horses. Don’t @ me.

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Robin Bonn is the founder of agency management consultancy Co:definery.

Sourced from www.marketingweek.com

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When it comes to agencies, brands care more about cost than transparency

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By Seb Joseph

Price, not transparency or partnerships, remains the priority for clients when it comes to their agencies.

Last year, agencies pitching for the $1.7 billion global ad account for GlaxoSmithKline were asked to make upfront guarantees on the cost of media, despite it being widely acknowledged that those guarantees can’t be made for digital media, according to an executive who was on one of the pitch teams. Most, of course, complied.

The pitch had gone on for six months and was managed and audited by ID Comms and Ebiquity. It gradually morphed into negotiations over cost savings once the procurement team took over. Before that happened, GSK’s marketers had scrutinized each agency’s operating model and probed how they would provide full transparency into the money made on the media bought.

But the longer those discussions went on, fewer business KPIs and strategic relationships came up. Finally, agency executives found themselves in a corporate box overlooking a rugby pitch, giving GSK procurement team an overview of the savings they could make, said the agency executive.

Following those talks, Publicis won the account. “GSK reviews our media agency arrangements based on a number of criteria including strategic thinking and differentiation, understanding of our business, systems and reporting, quality of talent, the cost of media and contractual terms,” said a spokesperson from GSK, when asked for comment.

Savings often trumps all else if there is no clear winner on other criteria, and even then the numbers need to be highly competitive. It can create a race to fulfill those guarantees with cheap impressions that may not be safe, viewable or real.

Consultant education
Sources said that lack of education by pitch consultants –and agencies refusing to push back on invalid processes or decisions — makes matters worse.

“Running a tender for an agency or technology partner is not the same as procuring steel or glass,” said Ruben Schreurs, managing partner at digital media consulting firm Digital Decisions. “There is so much in-depth nuance in cost structures, and even more so when you go into operating models and strategic fit, that it is simply insane to apply too much weight to the bottom-line pricing in the decision process.”

It’s the standard trajectory of how many big media accounts are handled now. Transparency issues are the reason many advertisers go to pitch, but cost pressures are often what decides the outcome. According to data from Ebiquity, out of the 100 pitches it conducted last year, 54 percent said the top criterion used was cost improvement, and 34 percent said it was “strategic vision and expertise.”

At Adidas, which had a pitch for its $300 million media budget last year, the brand spent six months planning an operating model that went to agencies in the pitch document. The pitch, which was managed by MediaSense, was won by Mediacom. Sources said it was because the agency offered good price guarantees, although the company says the decision was more layered than that.

Progressive advertisers want fair remuneration, but there is still a disconnect between the marketing and procurement teams.

“The dynamic is changing, but I don’t think we are where are we should be,” said Laetitia Zinetti, managing principal for media management at media analytics specialist Ebiquity. “It can be difficult for an advertiser to differentiate between agencies on their strategic capabilities, so they look at how efficient they’re going to be — not just on the media costs but on the remuneration and technology costs too.”

The problem is advertisers are struggling to know what they don’t know about online media, and the pitch consultants are scrambling to fill in the blanks.

“The field of pitch consultants is growing fast, and levels of expertise are not everywhere,” said the media director at a luxury advertiser on condition of anonymity. “For remuneration, we use full-time equivalent payments and an incentive element. We want our partners to be profitable, but ideally at the same rate as we are. We do, however, see a shift in the market toward outcome or performance-based remuneration.”

Clients may even respect when agencies push back: “I worked on a pitch recently where a major agency declined to pitch in a major market because they felt they couldn’t compete on price,” said the marketing procurement director for a global CPG advertiser. “I was surprised, and it was a bit inconvenient for us, but ultimately I respected their honesty — and they saved their people a lot of work for likely little reward.”

This marketer said price guarantees are still useful criteria to judge an agency’s ability to buy digital but insisted the primary focus should be on the effectiveness of that media. “Pitch consultants continue to struggle in this area,” said the marketing procurement director, who is part of a broader push at the advertiser to take both pitch management and media management in-house.

“The KPIs on which we judge agency performance in online clearly need to include price, but should be much broader and encompass how well that agency fits with our strategic priorities such as reach versus quality, viewability or value chain transparency,” said the marketing procurement director. “I have yet to see a structured approach to this from pitch consultants that doesn’t ignore pricing but enables comparison on these broader ‘softer’ metrics.”

New models
Advertisers continue to use price guarantees to award media agencies because the cost of media is easier to determine than its effectiveness. Absolut, BT and L’Oreal have all tried to adopt newer ways of paying agencies in recent years. Whether it’s driving sales, customer loyalty or selling a car, measuring the effectiveness of these outputs is still subjective, which makes it hard to see the value. Few advertisers and agencies can get to the balance of risk and reward.

When Volkswagen ran its media pitch in 2016, one agency on the account proposed a cost-per-car remuneration model, according to one executive on the pitch. The carmaker declined. It’s hard for an advertiser to commit to outcome-based models like a cost per car when advertising is one of several factors that could impact sales, and subsequently hard to attribute a value to it. Scrapping the more traditional commission-based remuneration models like price guarantees is not a simple process.

“There is often a tension in media agency reviews between strategic marketing objectives and the need to demonstrate efficiencies,” said Nick Manning, svp at consulting business MediaLink. “Bluntly put, marketing wants innovation, and procurement wants lower costs for the same media. Digital has to be handled differently. It’s about effectiveness and value, not price, and performance has to be tracked differently. You can’t benchmark digital in the same way as TV.”

By Seb Joseph

Sourced from DIGIDAY UK

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How To Decide If You Should Keep Your Agency

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By  Avi Dan

This is the Age of Disruption and the marketing ecosystem is being transformed daily by technology and disintermediation. Marketers and agencies are trying to adjust to the new forces that shape the marketplace, but transformation is not easy. The future is about marrying data-based creativity with technology, entertainment, and influencer marketing, which means marketers will have to make sure they have staff on board that can handle it. Data is no longer the by-product of innovation but is the innovation itself. Ad agencies are especially inadequately prepared for the realities of what’s coming and continue to cling to their TV commercials.

When it comes to hiring an agency, I believe that the traditional model is obsolete. Agencies today need to update their skills and develop up-to-the-minute expertise. Any Procurement and Marketing team, or a search consultant worth their salt should ask the following questions….

How tech literate are you?

Gaps in technology services and skillsets leave agencies less than fully relevant. Have they developed platforms that bring business, brand, design, operations and technology together which and create a seamless omnichannel experiences? Most agencies ignore investment in this, creating a vacuum that is happily occupied by the consulting firm.

Are you a cross-channel data expert?

For most agencies, data-driven marketing is tactical rather than strategic and transformative. You’d like to know how they leverage data from myriad sources across paid, owned and earned channels, and also be able at creating real-time dynamic ads, delivered through hyper-relevant targeting.

Do you think beyond screens?

By 2020, 30% of web browsing will be done without screens, and these interactions will be controlled by voice, gesture, or neural prosthetics. Some 100 million consumers will shop via AR. Context will take center stage and will have to be integrated seamlessly with real-world locations 3D modelling and game design.

Do you collaborate with machines?

Now that micro targeting is becoming more common, the need for content has exploded. As machines are increasingly used to generate and place assets, the roles of agencies need to evolve from just concepting, to including curating and iterating. Advertisers should be looking for agency partners that can create personalized marketing.

Do you understand eCommerce?

As more brands, both B2C and B2B, put emphasis on selling their products and services online, commercialization and the branding model of communications is evolving. There is more emphasis on customer lifetime value model and subscriptions for meals, clothes, cars or razor blades.

Do you create branded Entertainment?

As audiences migrate to commercial-free streaming platforms, more brands are looking to engage customers with original programming. This requires a fundamental reboot from traditional marketing and content marketing. Whereas traditional brands focus on positioning their brands in the minds of their customers, entertainment positions brands in the lives of their customers.

Do you understand influencer marketing?

As traditional advertising is becoming less impactful, and social media becomes prime platforms, always-on influencer campaigns are evolving from a tactic to a mainstay of the brand’s marketing strategy. But the growth of influencer marketing requires agencies must learn how to measure ROI of these campaigns.

Are you blockchain-enabled?

Kidding and over-hyping aside, blockchain is around the corner. Ad-blocking software has over 200 million users and counting, but blockchain technology could make these tools obsolete. Blockchain will allow consumers to decide what to watch, and hopefully, give advertisers a modern, sophisticated means to producing high quality leads.

Are you ready for the Amazon disruption?

If Google disrupted discovery, Facebook disrupted social, and Amazon’s data-enabled dynamic pricing is the biggest disruption ever in the marketing ecosystem. It threatens every brand and can commoditize markets at will. Brands will need to adopt custom-tailored strategies specifically applied for this fast moving, algorithm-enhanced and complex platform.

An agency that is not is not the solution is an agency that is the problem. Historically, smart agencies always used new platforms, from radio to TV, to change consumer behavior. As these platforms are becoming more complex, marketers I speak are becoming more frustrated that many agencies haven’t adapted and are falling behind as innovative resource.

Feature Image Credit: Getty

By Avi Dan

I am the founder of agency search consulting firm, Avidan Strategies. I have more than 30 years of leadership experience with Madison Avenue agencies, managing iconic brands for companies like Procter & Gamble, Kraft Foods, Bristol-Myers, General Motors, Pfizer, Mars, Th…MORE

Avi Dan is CEO of Avidan Strategies. It improves agency partnerships, and manage agency search and compensation

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Recession reinvention: 5 ways to find the upside in a downturn

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“I was taught to never waste a good recession,” Angela Ahrendts remarked during her tenure as the CEO of global luxury fashion house Burberry. Although recessionary cycles present difficult challenges for almost everyone, many leaders capitalize on them as unconventional times for becoming more innovative, more competitive and more relevant, setting a strategic course for sunnier days.

We’ve been living in an unprecedented period of economic expansion by historical terms, which means a downturn could be around the corner. Here are five practical and actionable things that could help you survive challenging market conditions and stay relevant, differentiated and indispensable.

Look, listen, learn

Start by rallying your team by reassuring them of your commitment to living out your organization’s mission, vision and values. Once you’ve doubled-down on what works, affirming the things that make you uniquely you, take steps to refine even further. In 2009, after a number of troubling years and diminishing sales, Domino’s publicly acknowledged customer feedback and announced it would change—and improve—its signature recipe. Since then, Domino’s has reinvented its name and place in the market—not only drastically raising the price of its stock but also growing to become the largest pizza chain in the world.

So take a good, hard look, but stop short of having an existential crisis. Now is also an ideal time to invest in research, change management and training, which are sometimes overlooked in busier cycles, and to re-evaluate team structure to align talent with opportunities on the horizon.

Work as a team

Within every organization, brand marketers and sales teams often share the responsibility of driving performance, brand engagement and revenue. During recessionary environments, however, these teams must fully align to deliver a 360-degree perspective of the shifts in customer behavior, the competitive landscape and market conditions.

Sales and marketing teams are often considered bellwethers who are able to see the first signs of a downturn. They are the frontlines in conveying the most immediate needs of customers working with tightened belts. Having access to all of these important economic and consumer insights is critical for any organization and can be a competitive advantage for most.

Focus your strengths

For brand marketers, there is no better time to review your brand and product portfolio. Scrutinize products and services that may be redundant, poorly aligned with market needs or offer little to no performance. Review and realign investment spend to those areas that offer the greatest near-term profitability and longer-term growth. If these areas are one and the same, all the better. While born out of company-wide turmoil rather than an economic recession, there is perhaps no greater testament to radical housecleaning than Apple. With the return of Steve Jobs as CEO, the company reduced the number of products to a focused core, thus focusing efforts on quality and innovation.

Small changes contribute to incremental revenue, profit and share while larger revisions can help reposition brands and entire companies, transforming them from a customer perspective and possibly filling a market void that will drive even greater revenues.

Find new markets

New economic conditions can provide the best and most immediate encouragement to evaluate new markets, categories and segments. In down cycles, it’s important to fish where the fish are. Launching in November 2008, Groupon quickly became a platform for dozens of companies to reach consumers with easily accessed promotions and deals. Successfully filling a white space for both consumer and business needs, Groupon effectively created a new category by seizing on a cultural and economic flashpoint, which resulted in one of the largest public offerings at the time.

The wisdom of targeting counter-cyclicals is also good advice. Start there, then explore other territories that you may never have considered, which could include adjacent categories or even launching new products and services. Look for opportunities to realize new revenue streams, gain new efficiencies and develop new competencies.

Innovate

Dips in the market can be great times to innovate and to incubate new products and services. In 2009 and the depth of the Great Recession, Amazon’s sales grew by 28 percent by innovating with products, specifically in their line of Kindle products, expanding market share and securing their place as a provider of quality, low-cost products. Amazon’s incredible momentum and unprecedented success can provide some valuable lessons: don’t be afraid to try an iterative approach, testing new ideas with untapped customer segments. Let them know that their input is critical to creating offerings that best serve them. This is a great way to build more collaborative relationships with new or existing audiences.

The slack in demand can decrease the cost of required resources for research and development and marketing. As the tide ebbs, marketers can also see the rocks—or barriers—that times of higher growth once hit. Use this opportunity to innovate better processes and better products that deliver on your vision.

Although economic history teaches us that recessions may be predictable and inevitable, the way that we choose to use these times doesn’t need to be. Great leaders—and great marketers—can learn to find opportunity and growth in even the depths of the market and plant the seeds for the days and years of growth to come.

Feature Credit Image: Credit: Illustration by Ad Age, Composite images Kimberly White/Bloomberg

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Jim Misener is the President at 50,000feet, a Chicago-based creative agency

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KPMG Australia steps up the battle of the consultancies with launch of CMO advisory business

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By Danielle Long

KPMG Australia has become the latest management consultancy to launch a specialist marketing advisory team targeting chief marketing officers.

KPMG has appointed Carmen Bekker as a partner to launch its CMO advisory team, which is part of the firm’s customer, brand & marketing advisory business.

Bekker brings 20 years experience working on leading international brands in the UK, Europe and Australia. Her previous roles include management partner and European marketing director for J Walter Thomson London as well as business director at Saatchi & Saatchi in London and Sydney.

Bekker said her role was to help CMOs and brand leaders to grow their businesses by providing new perspectives and leveraging best international practice, however, she also plans to focus on championing diversity.

“CMOs and brand leaders have a huge responsibility to consistently deliver and innovate for their organisations in today’s rapidly changing environment. They face challenges from global trends as they navigate the new world, including media transparency, marketing spend accountability, and creating meaningful customer engagement.

“I will champion diversity within the wider industry with a focus on female leadership, and also on diversity in the work that brands create when marketing to customers. Australia has all the ingredients to be an innovative leader within the global marketing sector, and I look forward to playing a role in this at KPMG,” she added.

Bekker is the latest senior hire to join KPMG’s customer, brand & marketing advisory business, which launched in June following the firm’s acquisition of research company Acuity Research and Insights.

The division also includes former Google industry leader for mobile and new business development Lisa Bora, ex-Virgin Australia chief customer officer Mark Hassell and former Telstra GM of Business to Business IT Melanie Evans.

Paul Howes, partner in charge of KPMG’s customer, brand & marketing advisory, said the division had experienced “rapid growth” since launching. “Our practice has proven there is increasing demand for new approaches in Australia’s marketing landscape. The launch of a new CMO Advisory practice under Carmen will take our business to the next level as we move into 2018.”

Consultancy companies have been ramping up their marketing divisions across APAC this year. PwC has appointed a host of former advertising executives to its CMO advisory including former Network Ten executive general manager Russel Howcroft who joined as chief creative officer in 2016. It also follows Accenture’s acquisition of creative hotshop The Monkeys earlier this year.

By Danielle Long

Sourced from THEDRUM

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The reverse Vice: Why agencies are becoming media companies

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By Shareen Pathak

In late June, a bright, neon yellow digital billboard appeared on 33rd Street and Seventh Avenue in New York, right outside Madison Square Garden. It read “Don’t Trade Porzingis,” beseeching then-Knicks president Phil Jackson to keep the Latvian basketball player at all costs.

“We’re not affiliated with Porzingis. We just want him to stay,” the billboard read in smaller letters. Below that, a picture of the Instagram logo and the logo of Cycle Media appeared.

For Cycle Media, which took out the billboard, it was the best way to announce itself — to the world at large, but also to the media industry: We’ve arrived; we are a brand.

It was necessary: Cycle Media grew out of Laundry Service, the social media shop that has for years created creative content for brands like Beats by Dre and Bud Light. In 2014, CEO and founder Jason Stein established a media business called Cycle focused on Instagram content and influencers.

Today, Cycle Media is an “umbrella” organization that includes Laundry Service, and has pivoted into being a media company that creates video content and sells ads alongside it. It’s focused on quality, according to Stein, and not reach, recognizing reach as a commodity. Stein argues that the company can do a lot more — from creation to distribution — for less, under one roof.

It will soon also include more media brands. In June, it got $150 million from sports marketing firm Wasserman, which has a controlling stake in the company — cash that Stein wants to spend on making more media company acquisitions.

It’s a new and fractured trend in the agency world. Even as publishers have barreled toward building out agency capabilities, agencies are starting to dip a toe in media.

“Everyone wants to be a media company,” said Ezra Kucharz, a consultant and the former president of digital media at CBS. “People are looking for initiatives by scale. A production company or agency does not scale.”

This is beyond the typical business arrangement, in which agencies, usually through holding companies, invest in media companies (like WPP’s investment in Vice). Agencies, like Laundry Service, are building out media operations. (The two remain separate: Agency client data doesn’t inform content strategy.)

“Operationally, Laundry Service has always been a media business, creating and distributing a high volume of high-quality branded entertainment for global audiences,” said Stein. “Today, whether it’s Laundry Service content on our brand partner channels, or Cycle content on our own media property channels or our talents’ channels, it’s all the same business operation to us, across different business entities.”

For Stein, this was always the plan. A few years ago, the company created an original series featuring Nicole Richie, and that was when Stein said he realized he could start building and scaling his own media properties on the side.

“It’s been a fascinating experience,” said Ryan Harwood, the founder of PureWow, which got bought by the parent company of another social agency, VaynerMedia, a couple of months ago. “Candidly, as a media company, you don’t know all the facts of an agency. It’s been an experience.”

 

The idea is that VaynerMedia can provide resources and cash to help PureWow do more. Bought for an undisclosed amount, PureWow is the first media company owned by The Gallery, a new sister company of VaynerMedia’s that Harwood said will house a portfolio of media brands.

Why more agencies don’t buy media brands is because of money, said Harwood. Media companies typically sell for three to five times revenue — a lot for the agency business, where margins are thin.

The big internal change for an agency is knowing how to fill its ranks. Agencies are typically heavier with production staff and creatives. The big difference, said Stein, was Cycle needed to build a dedicated editorial team that knows media. Its current team is 20 people, with veteran ad tech executive Jason Kelly as chief strategy officer.

“An agency is so people-intensive,” said Stein. “In my experience, agency-side businesses are a better way to build media companies, but media companies scale better because they are less people-intensive.”

Pivot to video
The media world’s pivot to video has helped. From Mashable to MTV News, publishers have put their eggs firmly in the video basket, recognizing the frayed market for display ads — and brands’ and Facebook’s love for video.

For many of these agency-media companies, video is part of what they always did. Cycle and PureWow both recognize video is the big driver. Cycle only does video, and PureWow plans to use VaynerMedia’s new 50,000-square-foot video production facility in Long Island City. “We’ve been known historically for short video,” said Harwood. “The big reason — one big reason — for the deal was being able to use the Vayner Productions team to do more long form.”

One way that has materialized is a recent project PureWow did with GE Home Appliances for an episodic video series. (GE has been a longtime VaynerMedia client, but Harwood said it has worked with PureWow before as well.) “The resources or equipment we are getting to do so, it accelerates this,” he said.

It works because it doesn’t force agencies to protect some sort of legacy TV business — and also from an infrastructure standpoint. There doesn’t have to be a big restructuring, and it’s relatively seamless to slide into.

But there are holdouts — and traditional approaches — even to this. Ian Schafer, the founder of Deep Focus and now the chief experience officer at Engine Group, which inked a deal with Dash Radio to create sponsored video content for Dash’s music service, said the world of content is “ripe for turnover,” paving the way for everyone — including agencies — to become publishers.

“The traditional content creation business was upended by the platforms,” he said.

Schafer said he chose not to buy a media company because they’re too expensive, instead choosing to partner. “At worst, we can be empathetic to how publishers operate,” he said. “At best, we can build a service offering that works well with them.”

The agency has worked with four publishers last year as clients, including About.com for its rebrand to Dotdash. Unlike Cycle Media, which is in the audience business, Schafer doesn’t want to get into that. “I don’t see us creating content that would be an audience play,” Schafer said. “We don’t want to be on that treadmill. That’s not our business model.”

Anyone can make a viral video once in a while, said Keith Hernandez, svp of revenue at Bleacher Report, who heads the company’s branded content studio and has built similar ones at BuzzFeed and Slate. What’s hard in media, day in and day out, is consistency and the right talent.

“How [any publisher] will build a great brand is to build great videos. They need to, at a consistent clip, put out videos that hit and capture an audience and build a culture,” said Hernandez. “We’re an industry that used to sell on real estate. Now, we are selling on our point of view of the world. That’s what brand clients are after.”

By Shareen Pathak

Sourced from DIGIDAY

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Will marketing agencies always be nothing but sweatshops?

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By Samuel Scott.

There are so many slaves in the marketing industry that we should create an underground railroad beneath all our office buildings.

Following the recent news that the Japanese advertising firm Dentsu has been charged in the suicide of an illegally overworked employee, I collected stories from my own personal experiences, what I have read in the press, and what others have told me or posted online. Identifying specifics and situations have been removed. The anecdotes are from several countries.

But first, I will present data that compares agency and in-house salaries in the PR, advertising, and digital worlds in the UK, US, and Canada. (For those who want more information, the UK recruitment agency Major Players partnered with The Drum to release this 2017 salary report as well.)

The salaries

Public relations

The Works PR and communications recruitment agency in the UK conducts a salary survey every year. Here is part of the 2016 findings:

For the US, I pulled data from PayScale. The chart in the top left corner shows the median nationwide salaries for various job titles at PR agencies. The other boxes are in-house salary details of some of those listed agency jobs:

For Canada, I used the latest data from The Creative Group:

Advertising

For the UK, I could not find side-by-side comparisons of agency and in-house salaries. But I did find the following two data sets for agency positions in the Major Players 2017 salary report:

Here is the corresponding US data from PayScale. The chart in the top left corner shows the median nationwide salaries for various job titles at ad agencies. The other boxes are in-house salary details of some of those listed agency jobs:

A comparison for Canada:

Digital

For the UK, I used a report from The Candidate staffing firm:

US and Canada:

I could not find such side-by-side salary comparisons for digital agencies and in-house jobs in the United States and Canada, but I did find this 2016 agency survey conducted by Moz cofounder Rand Fishkin that includes both countries:

What it means

For most positions in all three countries, the salaries at marketing agencies are moderately to significantly lower than those for in-house positions – especially at the inexperienced end of the spectrum. The ‘gap between the rich and poor’ also seems to be larger within agencies.

However, I can attest from personal experience and stories from others that many agencies effectively give even less than these figures – and that they do it with a straight face.

Public relations

In the PR world, many agencies consist of a few well-paid strategic executives and an army of low-level, underpaid publicists who make countless phone calls and write untold numbers of emails to get as much news coverage as possible. Most are salaried but work so much overtime that they are effectively paid only a couple of pounds, dollars, or euros per hour. Many are students or recent university graduates who are officially – and often illegally – unpaid “interns” who are there only to “learn” and not work.

It’s a huge problem that no one is acknowledging – because the old have always taken advantage of the young.

Agency stress is also higher. Companies take weeks or months to hire and fire in-house staff, but many clients feel that they can change agencies within days. As a result, agency staff are under constant pressure to respond at all hours to multiple ‘bosses’. The young are on the first line of communication from clients and bear the brunt of the workload.

In a case that rattled the entertainment industry and beyond, the US studio Fox Searchlight settled a lawsuit last year from an unpaid intern who argued that he had learned nothing from his work on the film Black Swan and was essentially free labour. (For those in America who think that their rights have been violated, the Huffington Post published a list of tips on how unfairly unpaid interns can get their due wages. Here are the US Department of Labor’s specific rules.)

When any agency advertises openings for interns, the business goal is almost always to get cheap labour. No agency makes money by altruistically devoting time to teaching something to someone who will leave in six months.

Still, the problem does not stop with interns.

Advertising

Take a look at this archived Reddit thread from 2015 on “Why agency people are so unhappy.” Two of the comments summarise the problem well:

“The money just doesn’t make sense to me at this point for the amount of time you have to work sometimes… Most of my peers look at it as more of a long-term game. Low pay up front, but bust your ass long enough, and with a little luck, you’ll never have to worry about money again. That’s a little unrealistic for most of us, but the few optimists I know look at it that way.”

Here is more:

  • An anonymous advertising industry blogger simply called agencies “white collar sweatshops”.
  • MGH Advertising itself once placed an ad in The Wall Street Journal claiming that the ad industry was full of sweatshops (see main image).
  • “Goodvertising” author Thomas Kolster wrote in a column for The Drum that the industry needs to stop the overworking culture and make it fun and worthwhile instead.

The Twitter satire account Adweak, which is as funny as it is truthful, put it perfectly:

Digital

On the digital side of things, the situation is a little different. Online marketers should not be surprised at the low salaries at agencies. People who routinely proclaim that they know multitudes of quick and easy ‘hacks’ have only themselves to blame when their retainers and salaries are hacked down as well. Why should anyone pay a lot of money for someone to do hacks?

Instead of creating long-term, integrated campaigns, digital marketers all too often suffer from short-termism and think about numbers of social media followers, blog spam, and rankings of keywords – and those activities occur with high turnover rates that lead to lower retainers. Of course, the good agencies know that true SEO is a complicated, long-term process – but the constant promotion of ‘hacks’ by hacks is not doing anyone any favours.

So, between ad agencies and digital ones, guess which ones are paid more? Companies often choose to go with digital agencies when they need something done quickly and cheaply.

I do not want to name names, but I know the owner of a digital agency in a certain country with global, well-known clients. I respected the person greatly – until I found out that the owner was paying gross salaries of $18,000 per year to young employees in the agency’s large, metropolitan and expensive city.

A friend of mine who once worked at a ‘content agency’ in a certain country told me this:

“At my content agency, they defended the rights of the client at the expense of the employee. We had very stringent goals on a monthly basis which were impossible to meet. At one point, I had almost 30 blog articles I had to write in one month, many of which were extremely technical and required 2,000 words.

“Days off were allowed, but it was known that they give a really hard time and try to make you work on vacation days. I took off in April to be home with my family. I took one week off after being there almost a year and never even taking a sick day.

“About a week before the vacation, I get called in for a meeting: ‘Congratulations! You have a new client! They only require 12 more articles a month – starting now.’ I was furious. I had told them about my vacation and they never even took it into consideration.

“This is the situation in many agencies. More work is more money and employees are expected to go to all lengths to to get the work done without being included in the conversation in the first place and saying whether or not it’s possible to even accomplish.”

Sweatshops kill agencies

Among my circle of friends in marketing, most of us agree that agencies are places to learn early in one’s career – but that everyone should leave as quickly as possible. Those with talent and ability eventually end up in-house. (Many of us have also sworn never to work for agencies again following the bad experiences.) It’s why sweatshop conditions lead to short-term gain but long-term pain for owners – everyone ends up leaving.

And the agencies have no one but themselves to blame.

In 2016, Farmer & Company chief executive Michael Farmer, a 25-year advertising veteran, published ‘Madison Avenue Manslaughter: An Inside View of Fee-Cutting Clients, Profit-Hungry Owners and Declining Ad Agencies‘, a book that Keenan Beasley summarises in Forbes with this question: “How did America’s darling Mad Men go from rolling in it to barely holding on?”

The answer, according to Farmer, is a combination of outdated compensation models, an inability to measure results, and the pressure to spread themselves too thin. In the Forbes interview, he also says:

“Executives at these large agencies somehow continue to eke out profits through these sweatshop conditions, and they get huge bonuses for doing so. They’re all just praying they retire before the whole system blows up.”

The timer might already be ticking. Two years ago, marketing consultant Mark W. Schaefer cited reports from the Association of National Advertisers and the Society of Digital Agencies to show in the Harvard Business Review that companies are bringing more and more marketing in-house. In the first half of 2017, an increasing number of brands purchased agencies themselves.

Gerry Moira, the retired chairman and UK director of creativity at Havas London, put it more bluntly:

“If I were starting out now, I’d much rather be client-side. It’s the future… Agencies have had their day. They are sweatshops whose output has become so much more prosaic because of social media.”

So, what’s the answer?

Of course, not every agency is like the underground work camp in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Most bosses are not going to rip out hearts and wheel people down into lakes of lava – unless perhaps you work for Meryl Streep’s Anna Wintour-inspired character in The Devil Wears Prada.

But far too many agencies are, in fact, sweatshops.

Agencies typically compete with other agencies and in-house alternatives with either their expertises or their pricing. In other words, they market themselves by saying that they are either better or cheaper. Those that compete based on price are usually sweatshops that deserve to implode more quickly than Lindsey Lohan’s acting career.

Once the sweatshops close, the marketing agencies that remain will deserve to remain and will be those that focus on the one thing that differentiates them: creativity. Agencies need to reassert the value of creativity to get higher fees, and agency employees need to do the same to justify higher salaries.

Creative people get bored easily. It’s why agencies have typically delivered the best ad campaigns. (Just remember that the doomed Kendall Jenner Pepsi spot was created by an in-house ‘content creation arm’, a fact that reveals the results when marketers who do not know advertising are the ones creating the ads.) People who work on a single brand will eventually run out of ideas. The ability to work on multiple accounts keeps the creative juices flowing.

As I discuss as a frequent marketing speaker, the problem is that creativity is being increasingly devalued in the marketing world today. Marketers think more and more about data, automation, and analytics – and, therefore, what typically results in direct-response campaigns.

Just read this eye-rolling column from Jesse Williams of Mindbox Studios:

“Marketing is no longer design, it’s no longer messaging, it’s no longer SEO, or social, or branding. It’s data –  and the rock stars of modern marketing are the ones who can find and interpret that data.”

Unfortunately, this pile of malarkey is what drives a lot of discussion today. Too many people think that they can merely press a couple buttons, insert a few keywords into website metadata, target and track the best individuals, spread blogspam, or write a social media post in a certain way and then the sales will start pouring in.

In response to such drivel, creative staff need to communicate that direct response campaigns are only one tool of many and that a lot of the data is completely wrong anyway.

Creativity can save agencies

Creativity is something that the tech world will never replace – and that creativity is what builds brands and can be used in areas ranging from television to print to social media to email. Creativity is the only advantage that premium agencies can offer because all of the others compete on price and therefore offer a value proposition that is not viable over the long term.

But I guarantee you that some martech person somewhere will soon develop something he will call ‘AI-powered content marketing’. It will purport to use artificial intelligence and real-time analysis of one thing or another to create instant blog posts designed for goals such as ranking in Google search results or maximising conversion rates.

And the posts will be loads of tosh because they will be more boring than Daft Punk’s autotuned-to-death song One More Time. They will do nothing to build brands. Creatives need to remind people that at the end of the day, the brand is the most important thing. It’s the only way that agencies – and the people who work for them – will survive.

Creative agencies of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your existence. Come together to advocate for brand advertising and against the hacks the dominate modern marketing. Show the world the benefits of creativity. Demand higher fees, not lower ones. Pay your workers more, not less.

But will all of this work? I admit that I’m skeptical. As conditions will either remain the same or worsen, I think that we will instead see more unionising along the lines of what boutique consultancy Modern Craft co-founder Randy Siu recently saw in Canada:

Unless agencies can raise their fees to cover the higher salaries that workers deserve, such unionising will merely slow down the approaching agency extinction rather than prevent it.

So, in the meantime, will marketing agencies really ever stop being sweatshops by another name? Sadly, it’s as likely as a bloke building a time machine, going back to the year 2000, and dating all three members of Atomic Kitten at the same time.

But please prove me wrong.

The Promotion Fix is an exclusive biweekly column for The Drum contributed by Samuel Scott, a global marketing speaker who is a former journalist, newspaper editor, and director of marketing and communications in the high-tech industry. Follow him on Twitter and Facebook. Scott is based out of Tel Aviv, Israel.

By Samuel Scott

The Promotion Fix is a​n ​exclusive biweekly column for The Drum from Samuel Scott, a global keynote marketing speaker who is a former journalist, newspaper editor, and director of marketing and communications in the high-tech industry. Follow him @samueljscott.

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