Know thy frenemy. Part 3 of 3. – A brand new Madison Avenue.

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.