Let's Think About What We Can Paint Next.

Stocks have gone down and people are writing things about where we went wrong, what we missed, what we fell in love with for the wrong reasons, and how this acronym and that technology can provide solutions.

But I don’t want to focus on that.

From August to December 2017 I wrote and with the help of some awesome people edited an essay. It focused on what I believed would be the main marketing trend of 2018: the agency itself.

You can read the entire essay by clicking here.

Or you can continue scrolling through the words on this page. Because what’s to follow is the conclusion of my essay.

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The Wright Brothers had their first successful flight in 1903, proving we could reach into the clouds. One year later, a hot air balloon tycoon was asked about the idea that one day machines would allow us to achieve flight in grander ways. The hot air balloon tycoon replied:

“In the very, very, very, very far future there may be flying machines, but not now, not now.”

Hot air balloon tycoons knew the value of the sky. It’s how they became tycoons. But hot air balloon tycoons missed what was possible within the evolving canvas of the sky itself.

Hot air balloon tycoons missed a market opportunity.

Agencies can never allow their clients to become hot air balloon tycoons. They can never allow their clients to develop frames of reference that hinder their view of what’s coming over the horizon. Allowing this to happen would be allowing opportunities to be missed — for both the client and agency.

But this isn’t a call to arms in the name of always thinking big and living outside the box. That language and approach hasn’t caught on.

This is a call to arms in the name of moving the agency towards what is of high importance for its current and prospective clients, plus the agency itself as an entity: the future.

Now you have the palm of your hand on your face. And you may sound like this:

“That’s a ridiculous statement. Agencies already care about and shape the fucking future!” — Someone That Has Seen Every Episode of Black Mirror Twice.

To that sentiment I have to ask this:

If ad agency folk were so great at seeing and helping to create the future, why was it Steve Jobs and his team at Apple that thought of and created the smartphone and not someone at Chiat/Day?

An answer to that question is people stay in their lanes.

Apple was and is a tech company. That’s one lane.

Chiat/Day and others like them are advertising agencies, responsible for creative communications that portray products and services made by someone else in a particular light that inspires a need. That’s another lane.

The differences between the two is why you see one create one thing and the other create something else.

This brings me to the words of Bob Greenberg, Chairman and CEO of R/GA, with the emphasis being my own:

“At best, we like to think of ourselves as an 80% company because we feel that  if you’re 100% you’d be like the advertising business. That’s what makes the advertising business fall into the deconstruction situation that’s been happening now for a couple of years.  There’s nothing new, particularly, in outbound advertising, marketing communications that needs to be developed. It’s been 50 or 60 years, and they’ve done a wonderful job, but we’re looking for things that we’re 40% into or 50% into. We’re very far from our 80%, and we like to say we’re always a work in progress.”

If you choose to believe nothing is new within agencies, you have to wonder if they’ve been able to grow? Multi-billion dollar holding companies, the longevity of agencies referenced in Mad Men, and lavish parties in the French Riviera each year would lead many to an affirmative answer.

But a more detailed answer exists within numbers referenced in an essay by Gareth Price entitled, ThinkLong:

“Since the 1920s, the US advertising industry has averaged 1.29% of GDP, falling between a narrow range of 1 and 1.4%. A similar pattern occurs globally.”

“New media has never increased budgets, merely shifting how existing money is split, with the ratio of sales to adspend remaining “stubbornly flat” at 3.5% for nearly 100 years.”

Agencies compete in this scenario:

Rather than competing in this scenario:

Agencies need to expand their kitchen and fall in love with (and sell through) new ingredients. Because current recipes appear to be eating away at things.

So what shall we make?

Advertising and media agencies provide skills, knowledge, and understanding that are meant to be applied to client problems so the solution fosters positive outcomes the most important being an increase in profit.

What else generates profit? Investments.

Investment is a word agencies should be using more to detail the value they bring to the brands they work on.

Fees and commissions are words that elicit a potential one and done mentality. How are agencies to build partnerships for the future with words a client can relate to their last car salesperson?

While so many of us scream about the need for long-term planning, agencies will never be where they want if the words used to describe their value equate more with short-term mentalities — like cutting costs in order to pad current margins. Let us be gone with those words.

Then there is digital.

We have digital thinkers, digital landscapes, and digital transformations. But why? Digital is not new. Digital is expected. Preaching digital should never mean you deserve a cookie.

If we’re going to preach about 360 capabilities we must never come into things with a 90 degree view that only addresses the fact that the sky seems like a cool place when viewed on an Instagram feed. We must address the sky from every possible angle, wonder, dream, and ask what sort of great, long lasting thing could we create within that sky?

Answering that question requires vantage points into and understandings of each potential angle. And that can be a lot to look at. That’s why we call these many angles something else that slides off the tongue and makes us sound in the know: Big Data.

There is a trap within Big Data. It sits there in the rows and columns, among the dashboards and visualizations, hidden within the functionality of the Marketing Tech stack like a truck on a back road with its lights off waiting for the outline of a buck. When the trap takes hold of brands and their agencies nothing is visible beyond tomorrow.

From an Ad Age article entitled, Is Efficiency Killing Brands:

“With digital and big data came tighter targeting and a razor-sharp focus on short-term ROI. Yet, ROI increases are an addictive drug, one that’s hollowing out the brand and leaving an empty carcass.”

The types of big data sets gained through digital can be astounding — as in you can sit back in your chair and say, “I’m astounded by the fact there are 4,786,321 rows in my Excel spreadsheet.” But big data is a lot to look at. And remember: we don’t always spend our time in the wisest ways.

When there is so much data to look at, astounding becomes overwhelming in a matter of minutes when the chime of an email and the splash of a Slack chat notification go off. So we go after the easy results, the ones that align with a short term KPI. We do this without asking questions. And this is a fail. This is how value is lost.

Questions need to be where we show up.

Questions need to be what excites us.

Questions need to be how we push things forward.

We must push things forward, past tomorrow into next year and five years from now. We must look at the 4,786,321 rows and ask more of it than the short term KPI asks us to. We must wonder and ask what may have started to change and seek out the outline of that shift so the future is not a surprise but an opportunity. As the stoic philosopher, Seneca, said:

“The man who has anticipated the coming of troubles takes away their power when they arrive.”

So we must grow, sharpen, fine tune our powers of anticipation. This will create value. But as we do so we must also think before we speak.

From the Oxford Dictionary:

Disruption (noun): disturbance or problems which interrupt an event, activity, or process

Innovation (noun):the action or process of innovating; a new method, idea, product, etc.

Dynamic banners are not a disruptive form of communication. They are a means of communication made possible by those who have helped technology evolve.

VR is not an innovation thought up within an agency over a game of ping pong and craft beer. It is a new, potential realm for communications made possible by people in tech labs that would never think working at an ad agency was the best idea.

Providing the world hyperloop transportation capabilities is a disruption. Creating a vaccine is an innovation. People in agencies do not produce in such a way. We implement what has been produced elsewhere.

Realizing this might be difficult. But it’s a realization that has to happen and become common. Because have you ever heard how jargon and buzzwords sound coming out of someone’s mouth who lacks the full understanding of what they’re saying? That’s us. In agencies. A lot of the time.

At coffee bars and on couches with our laptops perched in our laps, in boardrooms and elevators, over lunches and dinners, sitting or participating in conferences we hear things discussed: the transformational power of blockchain technology in an agile minded landscape where transparency is king, the need for AI infused optimization strategies built within multi-tiered marketing technology platforms that put the audience first, or reaching cost efficient scale through exclusive predictive algorithms that pinpoint purchase funnel-specific activities and the sites that align with them.

What. The. Sweet. Fuck.

Do you understand what I just wrote? I don’t. And I doubt you do. That’s a major issue we need to overcome. Because as Strategy Director of WCRS, Olivia Stubbings, writes in her essay, The Late Radicals:

“Empirical evidence shows that many board’s members already view advertising as trivial. We perpetuate this by trumpeting and trivialising every new initiative as a revolution. This undermines our credibility with the board, the gatekeepers of the gestalt brand.”

Lack of understanding passed along as an insightful next move is how we breed doubt in clients who have others they can turn to: consultants.

The topic of consultancies has surfaced this year like the year of mobile surfaced from 2008–2012. Consultancies are acquiring agencies and making time for interviews in industry publications to talk about what they’re going to do next. In our industry. Because consultancies think they can. They think this because as Stubbings goes on to write:

“As the credibility gap grows between agency and senior clients, management consultants creep in. While advertising grows at 3% y-o-y, management consultancy has grown by nearly 10% every year since 2013.”

As we know, a brands ability to spend reflects in its ability to compete.

So how are agencies to compete? How will we reinforce our position as the key resource upon the brand battlefield when our war chest is smaller than the invading army’s?

Agencies must embrace and respect history. Print, radio, TV — none of these mediums killed off the other and they are still standing today, evolving as our world does. Valuable lessons exist within our historical evolution. We must be willing and open to learning them.

So we must make time to learn, learn again, then learn more. Learning is productive. Far more productive than reading, replying, saving, and ensuring the inbox is taken care of. We must stop getting in our own way of what can be accomplished. We must strive more than ever to generate value.

But providing the type of value that wins and wins often requires a dedication to rigour directed towards many things: understanding and empathizing with what clients need to overcome in the office and the boardroom and in life, the creation of agency processes that heighten accountability and challenge what we deem to be a “big idea,” and embracing the fact a problem needs to be solved from a variety of angles. From this we can head into the future.

In that future agencies will be aiming for more pies to take more shares from. They will do this by not falling in love with terms, lingo, and jargon. Instead, they will fall in love with knowledge, understanding, thinking, and the application of all three so solutions sore with the pace and possibility of a supersonic jet flying out of Edwards Air Force Base during the 1950s and 1960s — when the sky had been conquered and what the world looked towards next was the grandness of the universe itself.

By doing all of the above agencies will show they matter more than ever. And as change happens and business problems surface they will increase their client’s value more so than they did before.

The future of the agency is out there.

Let’s go get it.