who says the future needs an advertising agency?
08 Feb, 2010 • posts i've written • 42 comments
the agency of the future can’t be built by just adding tail fins and Goofy’s nose
A quick disclaimer: the views expressed here are mine alone and do not necessarily reflect the views of my employer.
Apparently there’s a roaring interest in a model for the advertising agency of the future. My aim for this post is to address some of the ideas put forth by others, weigh the usefulness of today’s agency objectively, and make a bit of a prediction myself. There’s little fun in making bold predictions about the future without a debate – so dig in and offer up a point of view in the comments, if you please.
Some smart ideas already presented:
- Joseph Jaffe says the future will be made up of two kinds of agencies: the idea generators and the executors of those ideas.
- Bob Greenberg, who has a considerable interest in his own agency, R/GA, looking like the agency of the future, thinks that the agency of the future will hold court over digital technologies and interactions for the brand.
- Ben Malbon, the nice chap who heads up BBH Labs, a sweet future-y morsel nestled inside BBH, believes that crowdsourcing, or some kind of permeable relationship with creative talent outside the agency, is a necessity for the agency of the future.
- Tim Malbon at Made By Many, who shares some DNA with Ben from BBH Labs, thinks we should be asking what an agile advertising agency looks like.
- Putting some of these ideas to the test – new agency models are already being implemented by IDEO, Agency Nil, and Victor & Spoils just to name a few…
- What about an advertising agency that launches its own brands? Both Coudal Partners in Chicago and Anomaly out of NY and London tinker and toil with this model to varying degrees of success.
- And all of this discussion and activity even has Forrester primed to release a report on the topic soon. It’s sure to be short, expensive, and oft-quoted.
I can’t really argue with any of the points or models above – they’re all insightful and interesting – but they’re pontifications on what agencies should be doing right now. To say these are models for the future is the equivalent of attaching tail fins to a sedan. All of the above examples seem to be creative ways to sidestep current problems with the industry instead of addressing them directly (and to be fair to the authors/creators cited above, I doubt they meant their posts to be that forward looking).
Who says the future needs an agency, anyway?
Advertising agency of the future sounds a bit like horse drawn carriage of the future.
I’m not saying for certain that there won’t be agencies in the future, only that the future doesn’t necessarily need agencies. Just like the future doesn’t need printed news but it needs journalism; the future needs commercial communications, but who creates them, the agency or the brand or someone else, is unwritten.
And though the future of the agency is unwritten, I have real doubts that agencies will survive or should survive: Read more »
vintage books
i’ve been slowly collecting vintage books, and these are my favorite. the album of horses is my favorite because the illustrations are beautiful and i especially love the one of the mischievous shetland pony stealing the hat.
Lulz of the Day: Polish newspaper Gazeta Olsztynska…
Lulz of the Day: Polish newspaper Gazeta Olsztynska inadvertently publishes 4chanish shop of the 2010 Winter Olympics mascots in an article about preparations in Vancouver for the games.
Kitsune Noir Mixcast / No.024
I can’t believe it’s already Friday. This week moved by so quickly and so many great/busy things happened that it flew by. Thankfully I have a couple of huge things to show for it, which hopefully in the next couple months I’ll be able to share.
For this week’s Mixcast I decided to go with a mini-mix format again, so you’ve got …
the groundhog must be made to suffer {the mixcast}
06 Feb, 2010 • posts i've written • No comments
I figured it had been too long since I shared some songs with you, my dear internet.
I spent the morning in Ditmas Park, reading Slaughterhouse Five and enjoying a bagel and coffee. As I waited for the train back to Brooklyn Heights in the freezing cold and falling snow, I figured we could all do with a gentle fuck-you to Winter while he’s still around.
Tracklist:
Gone Man by The Eels
Dictator’s Lament (Neighbors Remix) by The Papercuts
Don’t Look That Way At It by White Denim
Emblem of the World by The Dirty Projectors
Like I Can by The Secret Machines
Trick Pony by Charlotte Gainsbourg
We Gathered in Spring by Midlake
These Habits by The Generationals
Trouble Comes Running by Spoon
More of This by Vetiver
Execution by Pink Mountaintops
Kitsune Noir Mixcast / No.024
I can’t believe it’s already Friday. This week moved by so quickly and so many great/busy things happened that it flew by. Thankfully I have a couple of huge things to show for it, which hopefully in the next couple months I’ll be able to share.
For this week’s Mixcast I decided to go with a mini-mix format again, so you’ve got …
Want to Spread News on Twitter? It’s Who You Know, Not How Many
Some novel research on the social networking phenomenon has turned up a slightly surprising result: The most influential spreaders of news aren’t necessarily those with the greatest number of online friends or followers.
The research is coming from a study made at Boston University, and it’s all about k-shell decomposition in social networks–but more on that later. Until this research, lots of thinkers have concentrated on the idea that the people with …
