Two Takes on The Future of Agencies (Is it Bleak?)
David Rodnitzky
Agency Growth and M&A Advisor/Coach. Grew 3Q Digital from a coffee shop to over 300 people and $2B/yr of media under management. Led M&A transactions totaling more than $500M.
In my most recent posts on my free and awesome newsletter , I look at the prospects for agencies generally and SEM agencies specifically.
The first article, I posit that there are four types of agencies . There's the FOMOs (performance agencies), the FOMUs (fear of messing up - the big agencies), leaders (both FOMO and FOMU) and the muddy middle (too slow to be a FOMO, too small to be a FOMU.
Of course no one wants to be a muddy middle agency, but it happens more often than you'd think. I note: "a brand agency (FOMU) that loves to built crazy, controversial, and creative global campaigns is just not going to get excited about buying an SEO shop and pitching meta-description clean up. A FOMO agency that geeks out on testing 200 ad text headlines a day is never really going to embrace a stadium-naming rights plan with virtually no measurable ROI."
The second article was a modern update on a post I wrote way back in 2016 predicting the demise of SEM agencies. In the updated article. In 2016, I felt that SEM agencies would eventually become replaced by performance agencies and the general value of SEM was declining due to a variety of factors.
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As I look back today, I conclude that I correctly called the end of the SEM agency. What I missed, however, was that performance agencies would also eventually come under threat in the same way that SEM agencies did. "So, yes, the SEM agency is dead. And the digital performance agency is probably en route to the same grim destination. At the end of the day, long term success in the agency space means being able to consistently prove that your agency is objectively better than the competition and in-house alternatives."
One other update: yesterday I posted a highly entertaining podcast interview with Matt Widdoes of MAVEN. Matt is a great marketer, but also a great poker player and backgammon expert. So we covered all that and more on the podcast - listen here !
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