Know thy frenemy. Part 3 of 3. – A brand new Madison Avenue.
June 9, 2015
By Gonzalo López Martí – LMMIAMI.COM
- In the not-so-distant 90s telcos made their money on long distance calls for business & residential land lines.
- That’s where the gravy was at.
- Remember the fax?
- The race to reinvent themselves as internet service providers & mobile operators left many a corpse belly-up by the road.
- Three letters: MCI.
- They got complacent.
- They didn’t see it coming?
- Actually they did but letting go of proven revenue streams was simply too hard for CEOs under pressure from, among others, Wall Street.
- Now let’s uber ourselves a few miles north to Mad Avenue.
- Big ad agencies have the same problem.
- Their antidote is to go on periodic shopping sprees to keep investors happy with pompously worded press releases (wrote a few myself).
- The trick is to buy some company with the key word “digital” attached to it.
- Things is, all agencies are “digital” in 2015.
- Deliberately or not.
- Even the most staunchly backward, reactionary, digital denying & social media-hating ones are digital, whether they know it or not (there are still quite a few out there, believe it or not).
- Your copywriters are pounding away on blood-red Olivetti typewriters?
- Well they are unabashed hipsters.
- Still, nostalgic posturing won’t make them any less digital.
- Making a distinction between traditional and non-traditional shops is kind of futile these days.
- Nevertheless, it is safe to say too that the truly fully digital agency has not really manifested itself yet.
- Or has it?
- More on that a few paragraphs down.
- As I was saying, most digital shops in 2015 are such in the sense that they create “digital” campaigns.
- Their output is digital.
- However, their MO behind closed doors has not changed much since the Don Draper days: the hierarchies, the process, the physical space, the politics.
- From a process POV, the pipeline in most digital agencies is the same as that of old-school traditional agencies.
- You can add an engine to a horse but it won’t become a motorcycle.
- If we really want to reinvent the agency model, retrofitting it will not be enough.
- We must tinker with its very DNA.
- Give it a totally new survival abilities & instincts.
- Make it soar.
- Give it wings.
- Turn the horse into a unicorn.
- How does one evolve from riding a horse to riding a unicorn?
- It is not easy.
- We have to drop our guard, unlearn lots of atavistic, entrenched behaviors.
- Rewrite our agendas.
- Relinquish control.
- Let go.
- Back in the day renting out a room in our home to a stranger and letting him or her spend a night in the family house was unthinkable, a taboo.
- Cut to 2015.
- One word: Airbnb.
- Going back to that ominous quote that’s been circulating on social media lately:
- “In 2015 Uber, the world’s largest taxi company, owns no vehicles.
- Facebook, the world’s most popular media owner, creates no content.
- Alibaba, the most valuable retailer, has no inventory.
- Airbnb, the world’s largest accommodation provider, owns no real estate.”
- The cliché writes itself: the ad agency of the future will not be an agency and will not do ads.
- What can we do to survive?
- We can take a page from the music biz or the taxi racket.
- We can sue, lobby and boycott, making fools of ourselves in the process and smearing the little reputation we’ve got left.
- Or we can adapt.
- Speaking of Uber, agencies could use the AirBnB logic.
- Agencies have excess capacity all the time.
- Let’s put it up to the highest bidder online.
- Take your pick:
- Yandiki.com
- Fiverr.com
- TheIdealists.com
- Jovoto.com
- DesignCrowd.com
- Freelancer.com
- oDesk.com
- elance.com
- YesWeAd.com
- After all, outsourcing is not new.
- Agencies have always used the services of free-lancers.
- But it was mostly an occasional solution to unknot a bottleneck.
- Usually handled hush hush through word of mouth to prevent the client from finding out.
- The reason being that clients do not want their assignments farmed out.
- It supposedly reflects poorly on the agency and rubs clients off the wrong way.
- Really?
- Why?
- For decades we’ve been hearing the mantra that “a good idea is a good idea, no matter where it comes from”.
- The time might have come to put this cute mantra in practice.