Many clients don't need agencies.

Well, not agencies in the traditional sense. Not ones that live in the past.

They don't need a building full of people strapped to desks.

They don't need twelve people from the agency in a meeting to discuss the brief with two people from the client side.

They don't need traditional team structures, especially on the creative side.

They don't need back-and-forth's on that brief for weeks on end.

They don't need endless conversations about what to do.

They don't need to be blowing their budgets on agency overheads.

Most clients/brands should not want any of that. If they do, they are crazy.

What they do need is ideas and creative people to bring those ideas to life. Pretty simple, right?

They don't need to work with an agency that looks and feels more like an accounting firm (let's be honest, that is most big agencies), instead they need to work with creative people, people who love creative work, and love making that work - they need to be working with creators and makers.

It's in our hands.

Today, most of us have a phone in our hand that is capable of making a feature film, Steven Soderbergh just did it (as have some others), so that means making social media content should be accessible to all...it is.

You can of course also shoot photos with a smartphone, quite good photos in fact. You can even shoot billboards with them, the 'Shot on an iPhone' campaign from Apple proves that. Moreover, those images were not shot by professional photographers.

Most people are not film or photography purists. They are not studying the screen on their phones (where the majority consume their media) and saying things like 'Oh, I so don't like this video from (insert brand), they should have shot this on 35mm film for some grain and a much better depth of field'...that just doesn't happen. They are more interested in the content, the story, the entertainment, and the reason to watch.

Influencers with millions of followers can get a lot of eyeballs for a brand with a photo they snapped on their phone. That's one person, with a phone, taking a snapshot. No big camera rigs, no studios, no crews, nothing of the sort. Again, it would be hard to find a consumer and fan of the aforementioned influencer or brand looking at one of these photos and saying 'You know, I would have liked this if the photo was taken on the new Leica'. Again, you wont hear that.

But you don't even have to be one of those mega-influencers to work with a brand, in fact there are stats showing micro-influencers, ones with even as few as 1,000 followers, can get results for brands, especially those with a niche audience.

Last year Elle Australia had one of their covers shot on an iPhone. Shot by a professional photographer, but shot on a phone, yes there would have been a crew there but it is the tool that was used, a phone, that is the point I am getting at. The person on the cover is an influencer on Instagram who works directly with many brands, she doesn't have an agency, she just has herself.

No, not everything needs to be shot on a smartphone, but even a standard affordable DLSR can produce most of the photo and video results you could ever need.

Agencies need more creators and makers as part of their team. But they cannot exist and flourish in a typical creative agency environment, and there is the problem for agencies structured in a traditional sense.

If you're strapped to a desk, day in, day out, from 9 til 5 (or later), attending meaningless meetings, and filling out time sheets, then you're not creating and making content that is needed to feed today's social media machine.

Some agencies will make the mistake of going out and hiring young new media content creators and expect them to work within the confines of corporate culture. Bad move. That's like making a band sit in cubicles and expect them to write songs while also attending meetings, answering emails, having people interrupt them to see if they have done their expense reports. That album is going to suck.

Agencies need to get back to respecting creativity, creators and makers.

The creative agencies and creative individuals who change their game will be the ones that win. But they already have a sea of competitors out there as they left their run a little late. But it's not too late for some.

Client/brands need creators and makers. They need proactive not reactive creative partners. They don't need people at desks, they need people bringing messages and stories to life - constantly.

Ideas and moments mostly happen outside, not in offices.

Traditional agencies built themselves on old school media - television, radio, and print. They had time to think and create as the broadcast or publishing deadlines were known well in advance. That's gone, relegated to history. Brands are now publishers and they can publish daily, multiple times a day on various platforms and channels. Silence on social media is social suicide for a brand today.

Brands can make moments happen and create content around those moments giving themselves a lot of publishable content to spread around. For example take a branded event or pop-up, there are so many ways to make more of that one moment and bring it to life on multiple channels, build stories around it and so on. From the 'making of' to the actual event, the behind the scenes moments, vox pops with people who attend, so on and so forth. One idea can become many digestible pieces of content. Delivering much more bang for your buck than the old school 30-second TV commercial.

Small is the new big.

Today an 'agency' can be just one or two people. People who love to make content for media, tell stories, and who love to collaborate with brands and other creators. Agencies need to adopt that kind of thinking, somehow.

Casey Neistat is a prime example of this, he is basically a one-man media machine and brands such as Samsung, Mercedes-Benz, and others work directly with him. His YouTube channel (as of writing this) has 9.2 Million subscribers and has had 2,153,009,947 views...that's not a typo, yes over 2 Billion views.

Casey built his reputation and career shooting primarily on basic DSLR cameras, ones that cost less than most smartphones. As he has said in one way or another in many of his videos - It's not about the gear or the camera, it's about the story.

Big is the antithesis of creative.

I believe the big holding companies destroyed the creative side of the agency business and now they are paying the price. While many kept hoping for the days of yore to make a comeback others were getting on with the business of now.

Aside from the small creative units, the individual creators and makers, and the influencers you also have media brands such as Highsnobiety, Hypebeast, and others who have managed to cut out the agency middlemen and work directly with brands and create content for those brands targeted at the audiences they know and understand. While so many agencies were napping others were wide awake. You snooze, you lose.

We live in interesting times indeed when it comes to the agency world and the world of creative communications for brands. I for one am excited about what is possible today and what could be possible tomorrow. Hopefully many brands/clients are as well.

Rodd

I'm a Creative Director / Writer / Strategist / Thinker and a bit more. I work with clients/brands directly and with agencies and production companies. I also teach creative thinking and idea generation to groups and individuals. You can read more of my LinkedIn musings here. You can also find me on Twitter,  Instagram and on Facebook. Or drop me an email – [email protected]

Words (aside from credited quotes) Copyright Rodd Chant 2018

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