At a panel this morning at the advertising and marketing conference OMMA Global in San Francisco, agency folks sought to show how they’re actually getting with the program while struggling with tech shifts on one side and conservative marketers on the other.
Besides moderator Tim Hanlon, CEO and managing director of the boutique investment and advisory firm Vertere Group, on the panel are Joe Harrington, global business director at Tribal DDB; Christine Chen, director of communication strategy at Goodby, Silverstein & Partners; Alle Aufderhaar, SVP and general manager at Organic; and Adam Kleinberg, CEO of Traction. Here are some highlights of the discussion:
Q: Are we too siloed into specialties, or is that the nature of the beast?
Chen: We have a lot of clients coming to us looking for siloed experiences. Like Nike recently asked us what they should be doing with Instagram. We try to think more holistically about the whole ecosystem, how all those pieces fit together for brands.
Kleinberg: Everything should be integrated. Ten years ago, digital was put off in a corner. And today, social media is put off into a corner. Recently had a conversation with Kraft, which is looking for agencies that can tell stories across media, and let them bring in partners to do that. Pepsi just consolidated its agencies. Kraft too.
Harrington: If our clients are siloed, it’s hard to drive integration across a client’s marketing.
Q: So is it the clients doing siloed marketing, or is it the agencies’ business models that’s making integration tougher?
Kleinberg: Agency departments do compete with each other. That’s silly. Look at Apple vs. Sony. One is a great company, the other is a fractured mess. Apple creates products from the top down. As agencies, we still need to think about how do we create great companies. We’re making our own bed.
Aufderhaar: We’ve gone away from separate departments, such as for social media. It is part and parcel of advertising in general.
Q: Social has been a huge wrench in the works for agencies, because it goes beyond marketing to other functions. How important is social to clients and how much are they doing themselves vs. letting agencies handle it?
Kleinberg: Social gets lumped into a silo where it doesn’t belong. It involves customer services, marketing. Social is now permeating everything that we’re doing.
Aufderhaar: Some clients are outsourcing that to us. Some are handling it themselves. But in the last year, we’ve seen a big shift in how they’re valuing social media–quantifying how to tie a tweet to a customer action.
Q: The dirty little secret is that digital can be more labor-intensive. Is that a short-term or long-term issue? How does an agency survive given that reality, and how do you retain talent?
Kleinberg: I’m competing with Google and Zynga for talent. We compete on culture–everyone’s guaranteed time off for Burning Man, for instance. Also: We’re applying agile software techniques to ad creative to be more efficient.
Aufderhaar: Great storytelling and great engineering are not divorced from each other. They’re strands on the same DNA string.
Chen: It’s no longer a couple of people who are the beacons of digital. It has to be everybody, everyone who comes in the door.
Q: What areas are nascent and exciting that you’re gravitating toward?
Kleinberg: There is this [renewed] appreciation for creating brand experiences. The whole app revolution has set a new bar for consumer experiences. That’s a really powerful opportunity.
Aufderhaar: One is the evolving definition of the nexus point of commerce and digital: How do I create digital brand experiences when customers are in the aisle? The second is integrating the product and the marketing world.
Chen: Consumers have such a high expectation of what content should do. They don’t really want what we do.
Harrington: Over the past few years, we’ve gone back to the fundamentals in marketing and communications–a movement to come back to the core of storytelling. The technology is just a means to that end.
Q: Heading into the broadcast upfront season, how do you view that event?
Kleinberg: Every major buy [in traditional media] is going to have some digital component to it. There are parts of what we do that are commoditized (data) and there are parts that aren’t (creative). The agencies’ value is going to continue to be how we think holistically about our brands.
Hanlon: The traditional sellers [publishers and broadcasters] are shedding their skin and become multiple platforms.
Q: Agencies and marketers are no longer in sole control of the consumer marketing experience. Today the user controls the story. How can you prepare for that?
Kleinberg: It’s a beautiful thing when a consumer creates their own TV spot supporting the brand. That lack of control isn’t something we want to walk away from. I see that as a great opportunity. We need to create a platform for stories to be told. We think of ourselves as initiating a story and incentivizing participation and there are different currencies to drive that, like social currency.
Source: How Ad Agencies Are Morphing From Mad Men to Web Wizards - Forbes
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