Agencies and Change: Shifts and Whatnot

Piggybacking Sean’s comments on Charles’ article about what the future of the advertising agency holds, in which Charles essentially asserts is the combination of transmedia planning and the black swan theory, combined with a shitload of experimentation and the acceptance of failure.

(But first, a quick aside on failure. It seems like there are two ideas of what failure should be. First, there’s the shotgun approach with the hope that one actually hits the target and becomes the next big viral win. The second is a more scientific, iterative process. I think some people are little too quick to only push quantity at the possible sacrifice of quality, rather than using failure as a tool to increase future chances of success. It’s why strategic planning is becoming so much more important. Although in reality, good failure is probably a little of both)

As I wrote about in the AOC – I believe our collective fate lies in our ability to adapt. It’s the key to experimentation. If you only have a bunch of people used to making television, the likelihood of actual experimentation over just hedging is pretty low. It’s important that we fill up our agencies with people who easily adapt to new ideas, technologies, audiences, or at least have a pretty strong hunger for new information.

So – the new agency will do three things.

1) Shift from the single idea told multiple ways to broader cross media narratives. 
2) Get better at experimentation. 
3) Employ more adaptable people.

But I would also add a few trends that are forcing these changes:

First, we’re finally making the shift away from a consumer culture back to a more participatory one. Or better said, one of doing things rather than just consuming them.

Clay Shirky described this in his discussion of cognitive surplus (what you do when you have nothing to do). He cites a British historian who described the urbanization of society in London in the late 18th century due to the Industrial Revolution. Essentially, people couldn’t handle the shift, so they collectively chose to get shitfaced on gin for a few years instead. But when they adjusted, when they started to wake up from that stupor, that’s when they got all the good parts of the move to the cities. The public libraries, the museums, public education, etc.

Then we began to make our move away from a wholly manufacturing society. With the inception of the 5 day work week, we got something we had never dealt with before, free time. And television was our gin.

But now, the pendulum is swinging back. We’re going back to doing things with our hands, just this time there’s a keyboard and a mouse in between, not necessarily a shovel or a hammer. We’re waking back up. That’s the first shift.

Secondly, telling these broader transmedia narratives requires an audience that gives a shit. The entirety of the point of the tagline, the 360 degree branding, whatever your agency calls it, is the repetition of a single idea forcing its way into the subconscious of an unengaged receptacle. But now that this isn’t really working anymore, we’ve seen the rise of the very buzzy and very misunderstood engagement metric. Most equate this brief attention with caring, but we all know better.

So the second requirement of the new agency is defining purpose. And selling more of X product generally isn’t enough of a purpose. And there simply aren’t many products like iPod’s that have caring already in the bag, so we have to find ways to make this so. And, gasp, this could actually mean using our influence and our money as a force for social good. Dove is a great example of this. It’s brands finding a rallying cry that makes them matter.

And last thing is the shift from brands as a monolithic thing to brands as a more human entity. I think this is mostly an offshoot of number 2, combined with the growth of corporate blogging, the changing nature of customer service, etc. Either way, we expect brands to behave more human, whether that’s by taking on simple human characteristics like empathy and nuance, or by being defined by the sum of the people who represent it.

So that’s it my sort of long winded version of Charles’ future for agencies.

Brands will begin to get better at transmedia narratives and experimentation by becoming more adaptable. And, I believe these changes are happening because the pendulum is swinging back towards participation, the need to make people care and the requirement of brands to have a few manners.