No3 challenge: contemporary expertise

Every senior agency team claims to own business expertise and acumen. Sure, you can get it by surveying and auditing, mining into Insights, reading web/SEO/data analytics, and sketching customer journeys, off-and-online. But if you exclude the global agency networks that are doing this strategic in-depth analysis for their tier-1 global brands, who else is investing time in this crucial planning phase? Your agency?

Who is training the agency staff? How? Who’s developing their competence for the new realities of Communication audiences, channels, and behaviours? Can an agency’s Account Manager serve well the Client without talking and planning for Most Wanted Actions, for Own media content, for measurable funnels and Customer journeys off-and-online?

Even if you develop an e-shop, how can you perform without sales-funnel strategizing and product portfolio suggestions to the Client? The need for omnichannel readiness can’t be met easily by service providers. The communications functional roles merge by default. The Brand touchpoints and Communication channels have increased a lot, while the target-audiences diverge.

So, claiming senior business expertise means nothing, if the agency teams don’t own competence of digital channels’ metrics, analytics’ synthesis, UX/UI issues online, PR for consumer journeys. If they aren’t transformed with such new skills and competence, how can they navigate the Advertiser/Client? If the business expertise isn’t bridged with a deep understanding “how the new era works” …the Brands are at risk.

No4 challenge: Brand Navigation

Preparing an Insight Mining & Briefing workshop for a growth-minded Agency, I got at hand two Client briefs to turn them into exercises. The one from a big local market Brand, and the second from a legacy multinational name. Shocking!

Both briefs at the target-audience section were proposing “Adults, 18-35 yrs“. It was like going back in the future! No user profiles. No data cross-relating. Broadly, target them all …or “the agency will fix this, it’s their job“! No, my dear Advertiser/Client, it is your job to give-in an insightful Brief describing your target-audience in a way that makes sense in your business and in real-life… Otherwise, external communication will not live through.

I was lucky to Work on Saatchi & Saatchi Ideas Brief and being part of the innovative team that created the Insight Mining Tool in Lowe Worldwide. Lucky for working with DDB, Edelman, Google partners, and Seventy when drafting the global Ericsson One Campaign. You can’t capture the intensity, time, and effort we were putting in the planning phase. How detailed we were at the target-audience section.

Agencies seem to have abandoned the planning, a service phase that costs a lot of time and resources. Most of the times, it is being done in synoptic format by the agency leaders or the Creative/development team, leaving outside of the process the junior-middle agency staff. Who’s going to bring back the fun in the “Ideas business”? Who’s securing the inquisitive Culture of connecting the dots before the Customer?

Even if I’m right by 50% in what do I argue, then you can imagine that Creativity is a random (by chance) achievement, or that the final communication output is “Client-liked-it“. Now, that’s a KPI… Give it a thought, why the 76% of global Marketers see Content as their No1 challenge.

Haven’t we learned from David Ogilvy?

Ogilvy once said “The business community wants remarkable advertising but turns a cold shoulder to the kind of people who can produce it. That is why most advertisements are so infernally dull…. our business needs massive transfusions of talent. And talent, I believe, is most likely to be found among nonconformists, dissenters, and rebels.”

If I was to return to M&C duties now, I would ask the agency boss to use me as their Human resources specialist. Find the right talent, match personalities with industries and Client, train them 24/7, and raise them to be the best advisor they can be, no matter the channel or speciality.

This is why the communications industry is losing grounds by the PWC, Accenture, IBM and others. It’s called disinvestment in Talent… Don’t get fooled, no matter if you work for a more traditional, a PR, or a digital Brief …the Brands aren’t getting the best of communication talent they should have.

Go and check 4A’s most recent studies

The 4A’s share insights from industry leaders. The biggest challenge the global ad industry (incl. digital) is facing right now is becoming more and more competitive and speciality shops are popping up claiming an expertise in music, sports and entertainment or in web/SEO, social video and AI solutions. You see why your agency should stand-out? It is so easy to get lost in the noise, so find a hole and fill it. Don’t continue the routine of the past.

Go and check Advertising Age’s Agency report 2017

The consolidated networks’ revenue position report shows Accenture in No1 position and then Young & Rubicam, PWC digital, McCann Worldgroup, IBM IX, BBDO Worldwide, Deloitte Digital, Publicis, Dentsu, and DDB Comms Group.

You get the picture. There are agencies that either invest in the digital transformation wave, or those (legacy brands) keeping a robust service with planning & creative mindset and culture practice in all channels and type of activations.

Download the Borromybrain e-Book on Communications ‘hot-issues’

If you want to stay in business, build your next Gen of Leaders

• Humble, responsive, and listening professionals (not the ‘ego’ type).
• Creative and insightful thinkers who can weave a common thread of strategy across all of the channels.
• Experts who can co-create, orchestrate, and propose shared expertise (with other agencies) to the Client.
• Confident and optimists that find and coordinate solutions and projects/campaigns, no matter the challenge at hand
• A diverse but complementary workforce that loves the Ideas work, because they believe that the power of Communications inspires.
• Project (certified) Managers
• Know-how on all-is-digital (not social media-only)

Tough? Yes! But it’s the only route to stay relevant and responsive to the Industries & Digital transformation that (any) Advertiser/Client will undergo. Can’t recruit? If so, then develop from within such Talent, your next generation of agency leaders.

End-note, most important

The Advertiser/Client is facing on-going disruptions in target-audiences, customer journeys, online behaviour, and media channels. They will adapt by force, by market forces. It doesn’t stop here. Agency teams should really help and support. Must add value and be on guard.

Perhaps a bit idealistic, but when I look around the world today – a time of growing polarization, and conflicts – I believe that Communication agencies (no matter the function/channel) can help bridge divides, mend fences and convey ideas that bring people together. We need that now more than ever.

My dear agency CEO, GM, Planner, Account, Creative Director, Content, Community Manager, Media Relations, Media Planner, developer, UX expert, SEO & Web you have a greater market purpose. Don’t simply improve your technical competence, without changing your Service ways of working… all, around the same roundtable.