The future of the digital agency (or digital is dead; long live digital) Dan Hocking Managing Partner, Holler Group Digital Operations Director, Leo Burnett
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The future of the digital agency (or digital is dead; long live
digital) Dan Hocking
Managing Partner, Holler Group Digital Operations Director, Leo Burnett
ME (@danhocking)
Digital agencies are in trouble.
Context: The definition of ‘digital’ has changed over the
years
And it’s overtaken TV in (nearly) all markets
Source: Millward Brown AdReaction
That’s a good thing for digital agencies,
right?
Not exactly. We’re not helping our
own cause.
There are 5 key reasons why.
1. These days, for most,
digital = content
But everyone is trying to do content.
And I mean everyone.
ATL/Integrated agencies, media agencies, PR agencies, production
agencies…
Content has become the answer to the question
nobody is asking.
Because nobody says ‘I’m going to go visit my favourite
brand channel’ when they wake up.
And the things we’re making… aren’t
always good.
At scale, we can’t compete in the long term with integrated
agencies who can offer ‘content’ as an add-on to their existing
work.
And by trying to do so cheaply/quickly, we’re making it worse.
Our clients are in the business of selling products, and we build brands in order
to help do so.
But none of the digital measures evaluate either of
those.
Advertising’s dirty secret is that many of our communication
measures are scientifically dubious.
We’ve got lots of data that we can assess to see what people actually do and assess a real long-term
impact.
We just waste it on measuring content
performance instead.
4. We’ve let publishers and tech
platforms define mobile advertising,
not us.
Mobile is the dominant way people access the internet,
worldwide.
This is so ubiquitous, it doesn’t even need a source
anymore.
We’ve tried to treat mobile the same way
we treated the desktop (or worse, as ‘desktop
light’).
And we’ve taken the same principles to
advertising and applied them to the smaller
screen.
That didn’t exactly impress the creator of the banner ad.
‘It’s tough for me to see the banner paradigm being the main unit. The fact that it’s migrated from Prodigy to the Internet to the cell
phone is a joke. The creativity is disappointing at best.’ -G.M O’Connell, Founder of Modem Media (creator of the first banner ad), in a 2013 interview
with Digiday
And it’s made it even more something we
just ignore.
5. We largely use digital as a means of
distribution
Digital has leveled the playing field in so many industries.
It allows people to create, broadcast and
interact in ways not possible previously.
People are using it to make new and clever
things every day.
But we’re more obsessed with clever ways we can
push out content at people in a way that
doesn’t feel like we’re pushing.
We see digital as a communications channel solely.
As a vertical which we
need to fill.
All around us, people are changing the way they interact everyday and
creating new businesses from nothing.
And we’re queueing up our
next preroll campaign.
All sounds quite troubling, doesn’t it?
It’s up to us to change, so that it’s not.
And we’re more than capable
of doing so.
We know digital behaviour as well as
anyone does – we study it and apply it in many
different ways.
As digital practitioners, we should be looking at digital as a horizontal,
not a vertical.
If you took a business problem and applied
that thinking to it, what would that be?
The answer won’t always be
communications – and that’s no bad
thing.
How can we apply what we know to help our clients
change their businesses to be more relevant and more
successful?
And how do we help make that happen for
them? (because change is hard and scary.)
In order for us to play a valuable role, we need to get more upstream in businesses;
solving business problems rather than just
communications ones.
Which, actually, gets back to advertising’s
roots in the first place.
The answer might still involve communications.
But it could also involve
something like creating a new way for consumers to
purchase the brand, or a different expression of what
the product is.
So, the next brief you get that asks for a bunch of social
content, ask ‘why?’
Try to get to the bottom of what the business problem is.
And if there’s a different solution than what they asked