Rewriting the brand-agency relationship codes

Has the digital media environment relegated the full-service creative agency to a relic of the past?

Having ‘professionally’ grown up in an environment where agency partners were equal stakeholders in business’ brands, I have always been a firm believer that all custodians must ‘sit on the same side of the table.’ A table that was full of ideas, packed with passion and which drove brand momentum. Ideas that came pooled in from ‘Creative’, ‘Planning’ and ‘Account Management’ teams. Ideas which while soon got owned collectively, but still had individuals responsible for their performance and impact. Those are some of my fond memories of how full-service creative agencies operated back in the days. Thankfully some do even today – but those too only in the conventional media and communication ecosystem.

But times, and with it, media ecosystems are changing. Changing at a pace which is faster than the speed at which people are comprehending those changes, leave alone being prepared for it. While this holds true for brands and their agency partners alike, it is especially ominous for the agency who were always the marketer’s first port of call to ‘crack something’ that they could not by themselves.

In today’s times where the digital & social media ecosystem drives large parts of brand’s engagement with its customers, I have (and with some pain), found the very concept of full-service creative agency being challenged. While most conventional media creative agencies continue to claim with unabashed passion on how they have reinvented and re-tooled themselves for current times, I have found the proof to be missing almost every time I tasted the pudding!

As I see it, these times and emergent media environments require single-minded resolve for any creative agency to build itself around 4 critical knowledge pillars if it even hopes to lay a genuine claim of being a full-service creative partner to a brand. Those pillars, what I call the 4 Cs, are: (1) Content Creation, (2) Content Management, (3) Content Publishing (which includes media), and, (4) Content Performance. Each requires sustained intellectual investments to be made into – one that leads to specialized skill set anchored in the knowledge of platforms and their performance metrics. And therein lies the problem.

While the creative agencies of the former times were seldom pushed by their clients into really upgrading their skill sets, today for these same agencies to be continued to be recognized as genuine partners, they must (and often pre-empting their client’s knowledge) be ahead of the curve! Like in former times, the full-service agency must take lead on the creative thought, how it could be produced, where it could be communicated & finally how could its impact be measured across the platforms where it was executed. For the relationship to foster, it is imperative for the creative partner to take on this mantle, in total and not only in parts, for this new media ecosystem our brands and us inhabit.

That is where I find the challenge. Having worked across multiple categories, with multiple audience segments and of course with even a greater multiple of creative and communication partners, I haven’t found even one, despite all claims being made, has been able to aces all of the 4 Cs.

And maybe it is here, in this context that we have seen the birth of the ‘network’ – one that aims to challenge the concept of the full-service agency! I think it is pretty evident to all to see: ‘networks’ are seeking to replace what could now be considered an idiom of yester years, and at a pace more aggressive than ever before. The ‘network’ succeeds where the full-service agency fails: in putting together (mostly through acquisitions) a set of individual sub-agencies with their own un-homogenized sub-cultures and specialist skill-sets, offering comprehensive capability to a client that isn’t being offered by a full-service agency any more. Just like the full-service agency of the yester years, they too offer a ‘single account servicing manager/team’ who would the only person you need to deal with irrespective of your multitude needs (a promise that always had to be taken with not a pinch but a dollop of salt!). One client servicing manager to front all engagements internally with creative, planning & design. But admittedly, while that formulae may have still worked to a certain extent within the agency, the equivalent of it in the ‘network’ environment does not. Starting with different (and equally ambitious) balance sheets, each agency in the ‘network’ also has different culture and sets of people who lead it often turning an advantage at one level on to its head when it comes to cross-team functioning!

Therefore, where does all of this leave a brand as a client today? Well shopping for individual ‘hot-shops’ and ‘boutique’ agencies which may or may not have real estate on the high-streets of the ‘networks’. Remember how the very same labels, not very long ago, had threatened the traditional full-service agency albeit in s slightly different context? Well, it appears they have come back to haunt them once more! It is now another debate whether the ‘network’ is the new ‘full-service agency’ and the one that we had known by that name for the longest time in now truly a relic of the past, given the new digitized media ecosystems we live in.

#BolderMarketing

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