The creative industry is in crisis. Marketing has gone down on the business agenda priorities. Big creative groups consolidate to protect profit margins while the industry pushes a ‘new normal’ rhetoric to convince businesses to spend more. Truth is, this crisis is not new and has only been brought centerstage by the pandemic.
The Don Draper agency model is now forever gone. Keeping up with how businesses are transforming and how fast new tech is emerging is forcing agencies to rethink what they do and how. Agencies of all types are finding it harder to create a business case for the deep specialisations they’ve spent years perfecting.
There is a new currency fueling agency-client relationships and, dare-I-say, it is not creativity – at least not as we traditionally know it. This is a consequence of how people communicate and consume information today. Traditional means of communication are now replaced by real-time interactions embedded within products and services. Extracting value from these interactions and delivering them to clients in real time has become an exercise in data analytics.
In this world, business decisions will be driven by what I call ‘contextual data’. The rich treasure trove of data is no longer limited to the ‘universe’ of the brand – it is data that spans the entire value chain and provides a complete view of the customer. Analysing sentiment to predict intent and subsequent behaviour can help brands market to a segment of one.
The notion of ‘real-time marketing’ will invariably bring together disciplines that have long been separated, creating a new set of hybrid services that connect..
As a strategist who’s dabbled in advertising, brand strategy, and customer experience, it is clear to me that the value of a ‘creative’ agency stretches both upstream and downstream, driving business outcomes on one hand, and strengthening customer relationships on the other.
This new agency model forces us to change the way we work and hire, but ultimately, it will allow us to better define (and solve) the new problems businesses are facing.
Here’s the catch. The precedent for what the agency of the future looks like has not been established yet, giving every agency the permission to go after it and make it happen. Let the games begin.