Do you need another advertising agency? Ask any self-respecting client that question and the answer today is bound to be ?No? or ?Not at the moment? or ?I think we have more than enough already? or ?We don?t have the time to meet more of them – in fact don?t know how to manage the ones we have on board well enough?. And they certainly don?t need just another ‘me-too’ advertising agency.
Disaggregation or rather disintegration of the all-encompassing advertising agency model into multiple small parts with different specializations has meant the proliferation of a lot of little shops for strategy, brand, design, digital, DM, creative services, et al, each fulfilling a small part of the overall whole for building a successful marketing programme. Each such entity specializes in something but does everything.
Advertising agencies then allowed clients and others to reposition them as makers of ad films or one-time press ad campaigns rather than partners who add continuous value to building the client?s brand and business. Couple that with the ?Do your part and get out? attitude and we have low perceived value-add, low partnership value and consequently lower and lower earnings.
The advertising agency had knocked itself off the seat on the business board because it stopped being a strong external partner of the unique kind that a client could reach out to for marketing counsel and advice on how to build the brand and business. The pursuit of creative services as opposed to creative business solutions, in fact, turned it into a fairly inconsequential marketing support partner.
The renewed complexity of the marketing-communication business provides ad agencies with yet another chance to make it back to the reckoning and to move up the value chain. To build a successful brand in today?s context needs a lot more doing than earlier because there are a lot more avenues to touch people. So we need mass advertising, we need brand design, we need a digital programme, we need activation, we need a public relations (PR) plan, we need CRM (customer relation management), we need media planning, we need social media, we need employees to live the brand, we need retail front faces aligned to the brand, we need on-brand customer service and so on. Clients are beginning to find the complexity too much to deal with and are increasingly requesting us to present a single window offering which handles the multiple entities in the back end. This presents a significant opportunity to advertising groups to bring back the value-add. The advertising agency group is the only one with this unique bundle of services and honest-to-goodness on-ground implementation capability and experience. Like they say, an inch of experience is better than 100 feet of theory. A lot of other consultants without the on-ground implementation experience cannot compete with the unique combination of strategy and experience that advertising groups bring in.
Additionally, the increasing focus on ROMI (return on marketing investment) coupled with the growth of digital and the growth of marketing technology are helping the cause significantly. Clients need the support of an advertising group with skills and capabilities in these areas combined with the ability to translate those into marketing communication initiatives. The birth of new forms of research and the growing understanding that the earlier opinion research methodologies often led to fallacious conclusions is one more area where advertising groups can help drive change.
A lot is going to depend on how ad agencies use the opportunities that this new age of marketing presents. If they use this period well they could very easily regain their seat in the boardroom. And many will probably stop being ?yet another advertising agency?. Here?s wishing all of us tenacity to stay the course and the right dose of luck.
The writer is president and head, Rapp India, a part of DDB Mudra
