Full Thinking is replacing Full Service

The business is becoming more and more complex and the change is constantly accelerating. To withstand the pressure, companies must concentrate on their core business and invest continuously in developing their organisation and their employees. They also need partners not trapped in day-to-day business, who can think proactively and work cooperatively on finding effective solutions. Fellows like advertising or creative agencies. In order to be qualified for such a role, full-service must mature into full-thinking.

Cool - Sample & Co's head of marketing invited herself at short notice to a briefing at the agency. She can do this. Firstly, she is a customer and the agency is a service provider, and secondly, her budgets are substantial and the Creatives are dying for awards. The assignment says that Sample & Co wants to recover lost market shares by offering a new product at a sensational bargain price. And to make this happen, the marketing manager needs the hottest idea that the agency's Creatives have ever cooked up for her. The intention is to make so much noise on all channels that consumers flock to the shops in droves to buy the magic stuff.

The era of service providers is coming to an end

Many stories of this or similar kind have taken place in the last decades. They have had a huge impact on agencies, helped them to establish their hierarchical structure and created a gap between creative and non-creative people. The relationship between customer and agency has also grown according to this principle. On the one side assignment and budget, on the other idea for an execution and a whole bunch of services.

But the time is over now. Or at least it's coming to a dangerously steep end. Because the world in which we live and do business is becoming more and more complex. What gave us personally and the companies stability and guidance for years is no longer a matter of course today. The straight line of growth, sometimes flatter, sometimes steeper, is history. With increasing regularity, sharp bends or even abrupt breaks emerge.

Change at record speed

The triggers are manifold. Whether digitalisation, AI, global warming, a pandemic or a geographical shift of forces in business and politics: they all generate fundamental social changes and bring dormant underlying trends to the surface. In their wake, shifts in values are becoming increasingly obvious and triggering further upheavals. On top of all this, there is the growing influence of generations Y and Z, who are moving up in the ranks as consumers, business partners and employers, and are standing up for their particular needs. The generation that is about to be retired continues to insist on its demands to protect the status quo or at least to slow down the speed of change.

In the field of social change, companies and their employees are called upon to perform at their best.

In this environment, companies and their employees are forced to perform at their best. They are obliged to react permanently to these shifts and to adapt wherever possible. But this requires continuous training, building new alliances and adjusting the organisation continuously.

From contractor to thinker

How in heaven's name should the people in charge of brands, marketing and advertising find the time to deal with the changes in markets? Monitoring at the same time how consumer needs are changing or how supply chains of business customers are shifting? Given this reality, who is supposed to find the time to brief an agency properly?

That's simply not possible. And so it's high time for agencies and businesses to start re-defining the way they work together. The relationship of "briefing here, idea there" must be replaced by cooperation. The agency is no longer a service provider that takes a briefing with a defined assignment, hides for three to four weeks in its holy creative halls and then, framed by a brilliant show, presents its genius, award-winning ideas. The agency of the future is a partner on equal footing. Acting like an external unit of the company, it plays an active role in finding the right solutions. The traditional briefing is to be replaced by a jointly formulated definition of the problem to be solved.

Creativity in a more holistic form

This new type of partnership also requires agencies to reinvent themselves. They are challenged to increase their analytical and strategic skills and to broaden and deepen the definition of their creativity. And, more importantly, they are strongly encouraged to democratise creativity. The time of creative and non-creative castes in the agencies is over.

Agencies are challenged to increase their analytical and strategic skills and to democratise their creativity.

To cope with today's complexity, it is no longer adequate to rely on the creativity of a few chosen ones. The problem-solving creativity companies need today calls for diverse teams of minds, approaching a given issue from different directions. Such diversity guarantees the ability to analyse particular situations in different ways and to identify new contexts. On the basis of these partly divergent but always multi-faceted insights, truly new solutions can emerge.

The future belongs to full-thinking

In order to become a creative agency of the future, it is important to break free from the corset of communication. Creativity restricted to a given field is seriously losing its true potential. Only if the agency is unbiased and free of any predetermined directions creativity can unfold its maximum potential. And only then is it possible to create ways and means to overcome the hurdles of complexity and find the right path to customers and consumers.

In the future, businesses won't need full-service but rather full-thinking agencies, as German pitch and marketing consultant Oliver Klein put it so strikingly in an interview. Brands and organisations are also well advised to trust in agencies that have democratised creativity and set it free from its hedonistic end in itself and use it to solve the real business problems.

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More food for thoughts: Interview with Oliver Klein, CEO of cherrypicker, conducted by Kim Alexandra Notz at What's Next Agencies' blog (in German)

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