The Machine In The Middle

Are you operating at a pointy end of the industry?

One of the loudest story arcs to underpin our industry over the last half decade has been the changing nature of agencies; the value that they create for clients, their business models, and where they fit in the modern world.

Advertising agencies aren’t content [forgive the pun] with just making ads anymore, and are clamouring for C-Suite influence. Big consultancies are buying digital agencies. Everyone is ‘doing social’ (really badly for the most part) and the agency networks are trying to become technology companies, or at least own a lot of technology companies.

Planners don’t know if they’re Strategists. Strategists don’t know if they’re Consultants. Consultants can’t figure out Snapchat or Tumblr. UXers are developing product strategy because strategists aren’t billed onto the project beyond the ‘vision’ being created and also because those strategists, for the most part, have no idea when it comes to product strategy. Media folk are still having really nice lunches being bought for them (love you Miltos) and have gotten over the fear of being replaced by programmatic media buying. We’ve all thrown our hands in the air and wondered aloud about going client side but then remembered it would mean we’d have to move to Slough. The rest have buggered off to Sydney and stopped asking existential questions about their role in this machine and are going surfing and generally enjoying their lives instead.

It’s been emotional.

Introducing the NU Agency Landscape model

I’m a fan of simplification. ‘Things’ are generally quite complex. There are details and what-if’s and rules and exceptions. One of the things we try to be good at is to see through the noise and find the signal. We also like naming things, and mnemonics. And puns. So let’s have a peek at how this thing builds (oh yes, it builds).

Fundamentally all businesses exist to meet a need. They know when they are successful when the product or service they have created to cater to a need is used. Use is where value is created, both for the business and the user. Agencies, consultancies and so on all operate within this space. We are all trying to help businesses to make the successful link between need and use. I could wax lyrical at this point about people wanting to buy holes in the wall instead of drills or about Jobs To Be Done, but I won’t. Let’s move on to the next build.

The first pointy end of our industry. People much smarter than I describe it as where to play, and how to win. Business strategy is the subjective decision-making that determines which user needs an organisation will try to cater to and how they’ll do so to achieve success. It’s pretty tricky stuff. It relies on having business leadership that has a vision and is capable of making and acting on decisions with the help of others and data and so on. Acting on decisions is really hard.

Imagine being a hotel chain. You’ve a vision of providing a really comfortable night’s sleep and you’ve decided that if you don’t authentically adhere to this vision, you’ll not be differentiated and so your business will fail. Problem is, your pillows are rubbish. The good news is you can choose to buy new pillows. This will make your vision authentic and will stop you from losing customers that are sensitive to rubbish pillows. The bad news is if you do buy pillows, you can’t afford to create an ad to tell people that instead of spending money on advertising, you’re investing in better pillows — or that you exist at all. Turns out that when you operate 100 hotels, changing pillows costs a few £million.

See what I mean? Acting on decisions is hard. Especially when faced with an investment decision like the above. Think of investment decisions as ‘bets’; bets on if you spend that money, you’ll get it back (and more) relatively soon. Now think about those ‘bets’ when 50 or 20,000 people depend on you for a living. Squeaky bum time.

Okay, so this next bit is about the other pointy end of the agency spectrum, craft. To me, craft is a word that describes the work of an artisan that is passionately invested in the creation of something to a standard that pushes them to and beyond their previous limits. The act of creation is itself a valuable learning experience and is the result of the combined effort of that person up to that point in their lives. For our purposes, it also needs to be couched with:

Craft that is guided by the business strategy and will directly contribute to usage either by impacting user perception of the business or by contributing to the experience they have when using the product in a meaningful way.

You could argue about what deserves to live in this category. Also worth considering that what would live in craft can be variable, depending on the core focus of the client business. Broadly speaking, I believe that any company that makes things, live in this part of the spectrum. I’d argue that a creative brief and those that create them live in here. I’d also argue that businesses that don’t create, but simply transact, don’t live in this space. This leads nicely to the next build.

The defining characteristic of contents of The Machine is that they are neither business strategy or craft. It describes the tasks that keep a lot of people busy and hints at the emotion it evokes in the people that work in it. If you’ve ever spoken to someone that has lamented the feeling of ‘spinning wheels’, ‘churning through it’ or who is forever ‘in meetings’ — then you’ve met someone that works in The Machine. The truth is, most of us are working in it now, or spent most of our careers in it. Other characteristics might include;

• transactional & analytical,
• highly rules driven,
• repetitive,
• rely heavily on data-based optimisation.

To me, this represents a huge proportion of our industry, including; customer research, a large proportion of media planning and buying, the development side of SEO, technology infrastructure, social listening, campaign reporting and analytics. You may have noticed that a lot of these things are either enablers or part of a feedback loop.

There we have it, the NU Agency Landscape Model.

People at the pointy ends, machines in the middle

Once upon a time I was a media buyer. I often didn’t agree with the decisions that had been made upstream or the decisions that were being made downstream. It’s the same story in lots of places — people that operate at one pointy end, usually have strong opinions about the other pointy end. People that operate in the middle usually have strong opinions about both pointy ends. Meanwhile in the The Machine; things that are rule bound, highly analytical and data driven don’t typically set pulses racing.

There’s a happy recipe brewing in this mix that hints at the future. All the things that people aren’t as excited about doing also happen to be things that are rules and data driven. Those tend to be the things that computers are pretty good at. And so I suggest that in the NU Agency Landscape Model, the type of work that lives in the middle is the ripest for automation. Just as we’ve seen in the world of media buying, this doesn’t mean people losing jobs, but rather having their mental resources allocated to more meaningful work. This is potentially a win-win scenario for everyone (until the Matrix or Skynet happens anyway). To make sure it’s a win-win situation for you, it’s worth giving some serious thought to structuring your career development in a way that pushes you increasingly towards one of the pointy ends.

Programmatic media buying, dynamic conversion optimisation, semantic content tagging, automated testing. Machine learning and automation are starting to sprout in our industry. Imagine what the landscape will look like once they’ve bloomed.

I’m a strategy consultant with over 10 years experience in digital and a keen interest in product strategy and business innovation. Ping me a note on here or Twitter to say hi if you’d like to chat.