Shape up or ship out

The tidal wave is approaching but they are closing their eyes and pretending that it won’t sweep them away. Or they are acting like somebody falling from the 85th floor who feels it’s “so-far-so-good” when they are mid-air. The traditional advertising agency business is in a similar position.

Traditional agencies are reluctant to change as it’s painful. The talent required in the new economy is very different from the talent required in the traditional approach. Everybody is talking about content creation.

The worst people to develop content are traditional creative people from ad agencies. Content is more journalistic and it changes all the time. You need people who have worked for publishers. You cannot have a site with the same story.

The ad agencies take a long time to shoot a TVC and expect it to last for a year — that’s their model. But in the digital age, nobody wants content that lasts for more than 24 hours on their site. The speed at which you need to change, refresh your content, and the quality of content, are very different.

On social media or owned media the content needs to be refreshed, be relevant and topical and move on. Sometimes you have to engage with people and modify what you have created. Even when you create engaging content you need to find a way to evolve it. The creative people from traditional ad agencies do not want others to touch what they create.

They think their work is a piece of art, whereas people from the digital agency practise iteration — they do not wait to be perfect. They launch content, see if it gets traction, get consumers to engage with it, and if it does not create traction, change it. Then you need to accept that it’s the dialogue with people that’s making the content as opposed to the “you listen to what I say” approach of the traditional networks.

The other thing is technology. A lot of companies are looking at changing the platform on which they do their business, be it e-commerce or the marketing cloud. Technology is allowing companies to manage functions such as sales, marketing and supply chain in a very different way.

If you are part of that transformation you are helping companies manage the big data, manage their campaigns in a very different way. Basically, marketing people have direct access as technology makes things much simpler.

Dashboards created by companies such as Adobe or Hybris have made it much easier. You do not need engineers to run it for you. You directly access, you modify content, structure, change the price.

The people in charge are doing it themselves. So it means that as an agency your job is changing and traditional agencies have no answer to that.

You need much more talent and skills now than what you needed 15 years ago. Earlier you could break the agency functions into account planning, creative and production. Now you need supply chain experts, developers, tech architects, media people, editors, content creators, social media experts, search engine optimisation (SEO)and so on.

You cannot have a ‘one size fits all’ approach. You need to decide what to offer the client and you need to have operations that are big enough and all these skills must be available at scale which, by the way, is becoming very difficult. That’s why you need to organise yourself differently. Instead of having all the skills in each market, you need to develop specific skills in each market at scale and get them to work across the world rather than their own domestic markets. For us, India specialises in technological development for the rest of the world on Adobe and Hybris, China specialises in social media and e-commerce, Hong Kong specialises in analytics, and so on. So each market is working on a specific skill set and they collaborate to serve the same client who’s not necessarily situated in the same geography. For Tourism Dubai, we have offices in Hong Kong, Germany, the UK and China working together on some projects. You need to train people to work from a distance and also travel more frequently.

We have created a virtual organisation that buys resources from various offices. This approach need not work only for large accounts. Even smaller accounts can be managed in this fashion by being careful with talent allocation and managed in a streamlined fashion. In the traditional approach you had all the skill sets in all the markets. Everyone wants to reinvent the wheel. Now when you want so many diverse talents, you cannot build scale in each of these everywhere. It’s a sure shot way to go bust.

Vincent Digonnet is Chief Growth and Transformational Officer, International, Razorfish . Next week: The Wrong End of the Stick