The Niche Agency: Agile in Ad Land?
An Agency Perspective Part 2
Downtown, away from the high brow shopping strips and the world of Madison Avenue, I head to Chinatown to chat with Opperman Wiess. Just casually their office is in a beautiful loft that happens to have been where the Beastie Boy’s recorded some of their music. Best claim to fame so far.
Enter stage left, Julian Shiff.
Ex-pat Aussie and Group Account Director at a very small, very new and very chic agency.
The purpose of Opperman Wiess is solely focused on brand strategy. Cutting away all distractions and becoming specialists in uncovering key insights of a brand, which will then dictate the way it looks, feels and behaves. They work to detail the personality within the brand.
“We develop what we like to call the brand’s playbook. That’s what we do.”
Here is what I mean by the niche agency. Advertising agency structures have been debated until every industry professional is blue in the face, however a structure like Opperman Wiess? This is something different. They focus on strategy only, that’s their specialty. Why bother being generally good like a full-service agency when you can be the expert?
The spanner in the works is this- the agency is based on hiring high quality creative minds, throwing them together in a room and letting the insights transpire. An incredible weight is placed on the idea, by leaving explosive personalities in the one room in order to produce equally explosive opportunities. This is their method of innovation.
They even get demand clients roll up their sleeves and get their hands dirty.
“We have senior marketers come in and spend hours with us. If they aren’t prepared to do that then we can’t work with them. Except we find that they all love it and are fully prepared to commit.”
Opperman Wiess is an expert in just one aspect of the advertising world, they rely on creatives rather than suits’, and if the client won’t work directly with them it’s game over. When the playbook has been produced the agency morphs into a consultancy/co-ordination type role, heavily involving themselves in any creative production by sourcing creative freelancers to work on the campaigns and briefing other agencies or brand partners as to what the client’s strategy entails.
“You could say we are like a startup as we don’t plan on getting any bigger and we are focused on working with clients while simultaneously allowing for side projects to open up”
The agency is positioning itself to be a nimble and agile body, responding to events around it and in startup terms, taking risks and pivoting when opportunities present themselves.
Having clarity around a brand’s essence is the be all and end of all of effective communications- in a landscape where we have already discovered that consumers are increasingly fragmented, picky and hard to reach, without clarity to communications- without meaning behind the communications, the brand can’t achieve a profitable level of engagement.
Given that Opperman Weiss works with only global clients at this point in time, is a clear testament to the need for a sound brand strategy. A need recognised by the brands that have approached them.
We can’t forget that the nature of modern media and communications facilitated by digital technology is woven together by the Internet. We are global consumers, we expect consistency across markets while also demanding a sense of personalisation- tailored to either individual needs and/or the needs of the cultural society in which the product is consumed.
We demand a bit of everything from brands.
From speaking with Julian, it’s clear that there is an element of agile that has been adopted by advertising agencies in order to give brands the best service they can give. Not only is about being an expert in the industry, but also overwhelming transparency and quality.
Astronauts Wanted *No Experience Necessary
Enter the rockstar:
Nick Shore, founder of a new digital agency Astronauts Wanted No Experience Necessary is a curious new startup on the block.
Sitting in the red velvet theatre at the NY Media Centre co-working space, Nick shed light to two specific things: the forefront of the social media landscape in which younger audiences interact, and the new frontier of content marketing that brands are now facing.
Astronauts Wanted is diving head first into what many perceive as dangerous territory: social media platforms like Vine, Instagram and Snapchat to facilitate branded content between rising teenage stars (fondly known as ‘Insta-stars’) and their picky, flippant and distracted audiences. Yes, we’re talking Gen Z.
“This is the new consumer, it’s what brands need to get used to in order to prepare themselves for the future target audience”
While Nick spoke about the next generation of consumers, I realised that this is was not so much about understanding platforms and how to market through them but understanding the incredible difference between generations- their consumption and their needs. This is first hand evidence that the communications landscape is consumer-centric and lived moment to moment.
Media consumption has become about consuming content across the board, having a consistent form of engagement. This, is storytelling across platforms to an extreme level.
It’s an incredibly diverse and complex pattern of media consumption. Reaching an audience takes effort to distribute content across multiple platforms while also ensuring that the content is both aligned with the brand and aligned with platform. In other words, it has to be real and true to both if it is going to succeed.
“Gen Z are media omnivores- we now live in a trans-media world”
As Nick liked to put it- we are snacking on quick content just as much as we are bingeing on full episodic meals.
The key to content marketing according to Nick is pulling down the wall between the distributor and the audience. Having a sense of intimacy and transparency is what consumers are more partial to, and social media platforms are just that- open and participatory.
“Increasingly, this is amplifying and democratising content and media engagement”
If marketers are sitting there thinking Millennial’s were hard to reach, Gen Z are really going to rock the boat.
So how is this all relevant to agility being adopted into commercial marketing communications?
It is the nature of consumption that is increasingly fleeting, integrated and complex. It is equally the nature of emerging media channels such as social media that requires brands to move fast, or get left behind. This can be seen as a metaphor for the greater struggle in the communications landscape and what brands will be facing in the coming years.
“Essentially, we are applying lean startup to content.”