REFUGEES FROM CREATIVITY

Most agencies, who played the wait-and-see game with cyberspace, are inadequately hardwired for the challenges of interactivity. A new brand of creativity is needed. Fast.

This article was published in February 1999

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REFUGEES FROM CREATIVITY

What are poets, programmers, psychologists and urban architects doing in a world once populated by illustrators and writers? You'd be surprised. Advertising Agencies are changing their identity in a bid to survive

It's an old story. Ad agencies are accused of not being 'creative' enough, and they beef up their creative talent only to find clients becoming disillusioned that the agency can only 'make ads' -- rather than solve marketing problems.

What do clients really want?

A lot of agencies are asking themselves this question today. Indeed the soul-searching is fuelled by the wave of new media crashing on the shore, by marketers questioning the traditional fifteen percent commission that agencies thought they 'earned', and the very relevance of the 'full service' agency in a world that is more specialized, saturated and fragmented. It's not fair to give all clients the same label, but going by what they are demanding, it seems as if the honeymoon is over. The signs of this were there nearly a decade ago with the growth of the 'hot shops' that demonstrated they too could come up with big ideas --without the big-agency overhead. When Coca-Cola pulled the plug from its global ad agency and handed it over to a non-Madison Avenue boutique, advertising gurus predicted the experiment would backfire. Not so, proved Coke, which was looking for not just breakthrough advertising, but the stuff that didn't quite look like, well, advertising. But the opposite has also been true. Marketers fearing they were spending too much on too many ad agencies, were also shopping for more 'stewardship'. (Case in point, IBM sacking over 50 agencies in 1994, and giving Ogilvy & Mather the task of rebuilding the brand).

Mixed signals or a shifting of the tectonic plates?

The situation couldn't be more polarized today. But there is a pattern emerging, and at this late stage, some agencies are doing what it takes to regain the confidence of their clients. USA Today recently (Dec 1st 1998) reported that half of the 50 marketers surveyed (P&G, Nike, Citibank and Burger King were among them) believed that 'full service' advertising agencies were obsolete. Obsolete? Shouldn't the agency responsible for the creative product have a better understanding of what media to place those ads in? Today entire media buying responsibility is moving out -- and with it the precious fifteen percent? For ad agencies that once found the all-you-can-eat model a virtue, it is a wake-up call.

NO MORE 'CREATIVE GURU'
It's not only because people like Pepsi marketing chief ("there are other sources that are more creative than ad agencies"), and Martin Sorrel, CEO of the group that owns JWT and O&M ("marketers don't think we're smart enough") say so. It's because marketing people no longer expect advertising to drive sales. Support, yes. Initiate, no. Or to put it another way, Creativity, while extremely important in the marketing clutter, is no longer the magic bullet. Gone are the days when an ad agency's talent was judged by the cars in the parking lot and the awards on the coffee table. Direct marketing, public relations and telecommunications are being redefined at a tremendous pace, and brand building is seen to involve much, much more than storyboards. Richard Branson's dressing up as a bride, or attempting a transatlantic crossing in an air balloon gives more brand recognition than all the full-page ads for Virgin products. A media buy on the web may generate more sales for 'tame' accounts such as bookstores or florists than expensive TV spots, or for that matter, infomercials. Should the client want something more than creative, he can shop around. Take the opposite situation IBM took, appointing 6 different agencies to handle its global web strategy. Needing to centralize its own Enterprise Web Management unit, IBM wrestled the business away from Ogilvy Interactive, a division of O&M International, its agency of record for four years. Confusing, isn't it? Understandably, traditional ad agencies with lots of packaged goods experience and zero E-commerce are now scrambling to cut their teeth on business-to-business marketing, the fastest growing commercial sector on the Internet. Most agencies, who played the wait-and-see game with cyberspace, are inadequately hardwired for the challenges of interactivity. A new brand of creativity is needed. Fast.

Suddenly 'creative' and 'strategy' don't seem to feel comfortable in the same sentence. In the highly fragmented world of brands fighting for niches, the old stereotype of 'creative guru' is growing obsolete too. Marketers are looking for ideas minus the graphics. The old 'outside the box' talent pool cannot afford to sit outside the box of marketing problems. The agency that paid scant regard to training --and retraining --their creatives have been caught off guard. Worse, even though marketers were shifting focus, they continued to hire the same kind of people, expecting the 'internet experiment' to fail. Oops. Today marketers expect an agency to come up with web designers, multi-media designers who can design and press demos into CDs, and all kinds of hybrid art directors and writers. When they don't find them in their full service agency, they find them elsewhere. In the Yellow Pages --often not under 'Advertising'. Agencies that can bring "poets and psychologists" to the table will have the edge, says P&G marketing Chief Bob Wehling. Copywriters and Art Directors must suddenly know what it means to be an endangered species. But all is not doom and gloom in Ad land.

NOMENCLATURE CHANGE
You've got to credit a few multi-national agencies for returning to marketing strategy. DDB Needham (named by Advertising Age as the first ever Global Agency Network of the Year) waking up from nearly losing its coveted Volkswagen account, instituted 'Beyond DDB', bringing in non-traditional advertising disciplines into the fold. McCann Erickson gives us a glimpse of this late shift. In1997 it created an 'online marketing communications company' called Thunderhouse Communications, with its own slew of art directors and strategy folk. In fact, advertising is just one component of the newly restructured McCann Erickson WorldGroup that includes seven marketing communication companies. J Walter Thompson, meanwhile, calls itself a 'global brand communications company' while Leo Burnett has adopted a decidedly marketing slant as well. In 1998 it acquired a top marketing communications firm called TFA which stands for 'Total Focus Approach', and has made some unusual alliances with an urban marketing company, another 'strategic consultancy', and one company that is involved in 'interactive architecture'. If they are disguising the fact that they once made ads, they are certainly doing a good job of it. Refugees from old world creativity, they are not your father's ad agency.

So is the agency product shifting, hiding under the semantics, or losing its identity? No advertising agency (if we may still call them that) would want to dismiss the importance of creativity, the Holy Grail of the business for over a century. Yet no advertising agency can take refuge under that banner anymore and expect to be taken seriously. So of course the agency product is up for refurbishing. It must evolve to a place where poets and programmers may work side by side --not necessarily in adjoining cubicles. It's the digital economy, stupid. The agency as you know it may not disappear, but its intellectual capital won't come to work up the elevator, or in their Porsche's. They'll be telecommuting from some hammock on the beach.

Now wouldn't THAT impress the big boys in marketing!