Agencies: 15 Risks You Can’t Afford Not to Take
Viewpoint: Forget the Recession, This Is No Time to Ignore Changes to the Agency Business Model

By  Tim Williams founder of Ignition, a consultancy that works with marketing communications firms to help them create and capture more value.

(excerpts from the  full article, linked to above,  arereproduced here for your convenience)

…As every informed agency executive knows, we’re at the nexus of the Great Recession and the Great Transformation of Marketing. In circumstances like these, a strategy of “just try harder” won’t take you very far.

Economists are always talking about types of risks you can afford and the kinds you can’t afford to take. For those of us in the agency business, the latter bucket of risks is mostly about failing to adapt to the dramatic changes affecting the agency business model.

Here are 15 things agencies can’t afford to risk.

1. A skill set built mostly around interruption instead of engagement. Agencies are used to delivering exposure for their client’s brand messages, measured by things such as reach, frequency and cost per impression. With the consumer firmly in control of his or her media-viewing choices and habits, no amount of exposure matters if nobody’s paying attention. What agencies sell — or should sell, anyway — is engagement. The metrics of engagement are completely different from the traditional media measurements of the past, including attentiveness, receptivity and buzz potential. Exposure is about efficiency. Engagement is about effectiveness.

… 3. Core competencies focused on “one to many” instead of “one to one.” Lots of agency professionals have an irrational fear of data and databases, even though the future of marketing clearly revolves around understanding how to leverage that information. Thanks mostly to the internet, mass audiences can now be identified and targeted in ways that make much better use of marketers’ money. Agencies need to move from mass messaging to mass customization. Agencies know broadcasting, but must now learn narrowcasting.

4. Creating brand-to-consumer communications at the expense of consumer-to-consumer communications. The agencies that grew up in an era of controlled communications now have to learn how to serve their clients in a world of open conversations. This requires a very different skill-set and service offering. It also means moving beyond consumers as audience to consumers as media.

…6. Production systems that are linear instead of organic. Most agencies still have a straight-line approach to production, based on a legacy system of trafficking work out the door and then moving on to the next job. But in the digital world, most jobs never die. A website is never done. Online campaigns can be constantly monitored and optimized. Agencies must adjust both their workflow and compensation systems to accommodate production work in real time.

7. Developing media plans instead of channel plans. The view of progressive media professionals is that everything is a channel, and what’s really needed in place of the conventional media plan is a holistic channel plan that potentially includes all three major forms of communications channels: bought (paid media), earned (non-paid channels such as viral videos) and owned (channels owned by the brand itself, such as online properties, employees, stores, etc).

8. Placing media instead of creating media. Quick, name a headline created by Crispin Porter & Bogusky? Chances are you can’t, but this firm is considered a creative leader because they take such an inventive approach to where the message appears, not just what it says. The real opportunity for agencies isn’t in buying existing media channels, but rather creating channels that never existed before.

9. Creating brand transactions instead of brand relationships. We’ve all heard agency executives say to clients, “Our job is to get the consumer to buy the product once. It’s your job to take it from there.” Agencies have historically been focused on helping to make the sale. But in a marketplace where the actual experience with the brand forms strong customer opinions that get circulated worldwide at the touch of a button, agencies have a big opportunity to help clients create and maintain positive brand relationships from consideration to purchase to ownership.

10. Focusing on “the big idea” instead of “big multichannel ideas.”The days of a writer or art director holed up in a room to come up with the “big idea” for a broadcast campaign are over. No doubt brands still need powerful creative ideas to win in the marketplace, but what’s needed in place of one big, strategic TV-centric idea is a lot of smaller tactical ideas that can live in a number of channels. It’s surprising how many agency creative teams still lack this perspective.

11. Traditional production staff instead of “producers.” No longer does production just mean press checks and TV shoots. As agencies execute in channels ranging from sidewalks to iPhone apps, the production professional must become a real “producer” with the flexible skills and resources found in branded-entertainment companies.

…13. Continuing to allocate client budgets to media instead of creative. Consider this:

Q: How much does it cost to reach a million people on a major television network?
A: Around $60,000.
Q: How much does it cost to reach a million people on YouTube?
A: $0.

In a world where many of the most powerful media have a cost of $0, ideas are the real currency of marketing, not money.

…As Peter Drucker once said, “You can’t manage change; you can only be ahead of it.” Agencies, no matter how smart or resourceful, won’t be able to manage their way out of these disruptive changes in the marketplace. They can, however, devote their considerable creativity to staying one step ahead.

Behind Closed Doors: What’s On the Mind Of Chief Marketing Officers

(the article linked to above is reproduced here for your convenience)

We attended the Forbes CMO Summit in sunny Palm Beach, to learn what’s on the minds of executive marketing leaders. The conversation from this group regarding social was more sophisticated, which Charlene and I don’t think is reflective of most chief marketing groups we speak with. What’s unique about these Forbes CMOs? Perhaps they are more progressive, well read, and tuned into the rapid changes coming.

In consideration to attendees of this event, I won’t be giving any specific individual quotes, (this wasn’t a media event) but instead, I’ll focus on the insights related to emerging technologies, overall budgets and market economics.

The Dialog on Social Marketing Has Elevated:

CMOs on a holding pattern for growth. Our host, Steve Forbes kicked off the first evening, telling us why he believes we got into this financial spiral. He gave a broad economic lecture covering mortgage, congress, the weakened dollar and compared the current situation to other global and historical incidents. Although the theme of the event was “Preparing for Growth”, I didn’t get the sense that marketers had increased their budgets or were preparing for a marketing upswing. Yet despite decreased marketing budgets, the opportunity to innovate with inexpensive channels were discussed.

CMOs admitted they were losing power to the empowered consumer. A few years ago, the conversation may have been one of resistance, argument or fear of these changes. Yet this group had moved on, accepted the changes, and had already put into place programs to benefit from market changes. I liked Greg Walsh’s quotes, one of the opening moderators (I just reviewed his book) he openly admitted that power was shifting to the empowered consumers. He gave the analogy that previously marketers were used to ‘Bowling’, where marketers could easily throw a message down the aisle and hit the pins with great confidence. Now, he eloquently describe, it was more like ‘Pinball’ where a marketer could load the message up, shoot it out, but have no idea where it will end up.

Social was on the lips of nearly everyone. Although not all the panels and speeches were focused on social, it was noted by speakers and moderators it was a recurring theme among the day. Charlene Li (who invited me to attend, thanks) lead a panel with executives from the Ritz-Carlton, Porsche, and HP. This wasn’t the usual social rhetoric of the 101 questions, but the overall group asked sophisticated questions around the change in influence, reputation management, and integration with existing programs. For example, the Ritz, has already woven in social to their experience, each hotel manager spend over an hour reviewing the online conversation (even Tweets) at their location before walking the grounds each morning.

Social is difficult to measure –yet marketers know they must be there. One of the Forbes moderators gave a stat that they polled the Forbes CMO group to find that “Over 70% of the CMOs polled will do more in the social space this coming year”. Yet, when asked “How do you measure success?” there wasn’t a clear answer, it’s still baffling. Although social marketing is easier to measure than real world ‘analog’ ads, it’s more difficult to measure than web based digital ads. Similar to the difficulties measuring analog marketing, they’re ok with not being able to measure everything in social –they now see the value.

Beyond monitoring, insight from the social sphere is untapped. Social media monitoring is just the first baby step, most companies haven’t tapped into what the data actually means. I sat next to the CEO of Autonomy who’s mission is to organize customer and market data and make sense of it for companies. We were both nodding to each other seeing the opportunities to mine, understand, and make sense out of the vast unstructured social data sets and develop richer customer profiles and map out relationships.

In private conversations, I asked a few if they think the pace of technology change is increasing, and they said “yes”, interesting times ahead. Finally, I’d like to thank Forbes for inviting me to attend and participate, they graciously paid for my travel and hotel.