The Agency Newsroom

 

We have a problem in that we are clearly ill-equipped to handle creating content at the speed that will be required as more and more companies become their own media platforms. It may be slightly counter-intuitive, but maybe we should look to a struggling medium to solve the problem.

I've been nibbling the idea of the agency newsroom for the past few days. So as we're creating more content strategies and more clients need more content, we're usually not talking about long-view - big strategy, rounds of creative approvals, then big production, focus groups, etc. - sort of stuff. But more fast, hopefully interesting, and low consequence content that has big upside and little risk, the kind of stuff we're set up horribly to actually pull off in practice.

So instead of playing the strategic role of understanding a customer, then feeding the creatives with that understanding, we should be hiring content folks who are immersed in an interest group that also happens to be beneficial to a client. While strategists and creative leads still need broader long-cycle planning and development, these interest specialists cover their area of passion like entertainment and politics reporters cover theirs, with the creative leads acting more as editor than anything else.

Sort of reminds me of the NBC web strategy of creating content likely to be fertile ground for certain advertisers. So as more brands become media conglomerates themselves - why wouldn't we employ a hybrid model that takes that into account?

Or said another way - the whole argument about generalists vs. specialists sort of missed the point. Advertising agencies are based entirely on the interest generalist when what we need is a hybrid of creative and strategic generalists with interest specialists.

photo via theonlymagicleftisart