Operating an agency in today’s world
Valuing fluidity over defined outputs
The last few weeks has seen a lot of chatter about us agencies, our future, and what we’re doing — even for a January time period usually rife of predictions and statements on the year ahead. (I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve seen that 2016 is the year of mobile, for what feels like the fifth year in a row.)
The ubiquity of digital, and how that affects our output seems to be the current hot topic — we’ve had agencies drop digital from job titles and the way they package work; rebranding specifically designed to communicate how you deal with the modern, digital world; even we’ve reconfigured over the last few months to address the ever-changing needs of our current and future clients.
At least, that’s the message that it’s wrapped up in, and it’s mainly true. But there’s an undercurrent alongside all of this — the modern consumer and their consumption of media has outpaced the way we make things for them to consume. They’re fickle, multi-screened, with shorter and shorter attention spans — it’s made our task of building brands even harder. Equally, we know that there’s an increasing trend — even if it’s only a small subset of our total audience at the moment — whom are choosing to block ads from appearing online. The task of communicating to them is more difficult than ever, and requires cleverness in choices.
That’s why I can’t comprehend why, with all of the challenges inherent, we’re still insisting on organizing around what we produce. I’m the first proponent of dropping ‘digital’ from what we do (especially in the communication space, where often the only thing that makes something digital is the fact that the content is accessed on a computer/tablet/mobile), but you’re not actually making any changes if you’re just replacing or rebadging it as being a part of an output area of your agency.
The future, instead, needs to be much more fluid. We — as both consumers and creatives — have so many choices about where we can consume our media. Trying to do something that lives in all of them, all the time, just isn’t feasible, particularly in today’s market conditions. But neither is having a one-size-fits-all approach. This means that a modern agency, regardless of its current structure, has to be constantly able to configure itself to be able to use creativity — our driving force and cause of our best successes — in the application of solving problems regardless of the platform or output. It means that production departments need to be flexible enough to handle any type of requirement that comes their way — either via in-house staff or by using partnerships to extend capabilities. (James Britton sums up the relationship required between creative and production perfectly.) And it meant that the strength in what we do lies in the thinking we bring to the table, not just the things we know how to make.
And that’s what we’re doing here at Leo Burnett. Sure, a lot of the work we currently produce is the premium moving image work that we’ve been known for, and as a result we have some of the best people in town here doing that work. But that’s a result of the problems we’re currently solving for our clients, not one forced upon us by the teams we have. We’re set up and operating to remove those boundaries, and apply creativity to its fullest to solve the problems in the best possible way — embedding specialists in areas to cross-pollenate the rest of the business. It’s changing the way we work together, and with our clients, to address this ever-changing set of needs. But it’s absolutely necessary, no matter how difficult the journey may
be. Because, if we just centred around the outputs, we’ll already be obsolete.
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