The ‘ Integrated (Big) Agency Model ’ . Will It Blend?
As each week passes, it seems another large agency (read: holding company-owned, >1000 people) is announcing their plans for 'integration'. This week, it's MindShare, as MediaPost reports.
As MindShare's North American CEO Scott Neslund declared, "We're making a very clear statement that the time has come to break down the silos."
Intentions? Good. But will it blend?
Various other efforts from the large agencies have been announced in the past few weeks and months, with some announcing digital's move to the forefront. Some, like MindShare, have taken the 'media-neutral' stance.
It seems that the rationale for all of this is positioning -- positioning of the media agency as something that is more than reach + frequency buyers of volume. Positioning is one thing. Being able to back that up with legitimate creativity is another.
The problem with all this is that creativity was not a building block of any of these agencies. They were established to plan and buy tons of media (traditional media) back when the fragmentation of television from broadcast to cable made everyone freak out. It was no longer so easy to buy television, print, and outdoor, and more hands needed to be brought on-deck to scale.
To scale.
Scalability has been the foundation for all these agencies' success. When you look at any of the holding companies' balance sheets, the media businesses are the segments driving those profits and revenues.
And then came the web. And infinite fragmentation. As much as big new media tried to lead us down a 'portal' (broadcast) model, the web has mega-fragmented. And that fragmentation is practically infinite.
Ironically,infinite fragmentation has become the undoing of the very agencies that were born out of the 'original' fragmentation of media. What infinite fragmentation should do is force us to re-think the role that agencies play when it comes to scale. And while the uber-large agencies are re-thinking and transforming, it's imperative that they understand their role.
It's very, very difficult (dare I say, impossible) to scale in terms of breadth (of reach) and depth (of experiences) simultaneously.
As the social media explosion continues, we know just how important experiences can be (although not how we can apply metrics -- but I'm working on that). But scaling reach and experiences at the same time is usually an exercise in futility for brands, not to mention their agencies.
So the question is, can big media agencies built upon breadth, deliver depth? Creativity needs to course through the veins of an agency of any size to apply it consistently to both strategy and tangible output.
In the opinion of this blogger and CEO, there's no precedent of retrofitting something that large into what the industry is calling for. Brands need smaller, more nimble, more innovative agencies built as integrated problem solvers from the ground-up -- with creativity as its religion and the ability to deliver experiences (with the results to back it up) as its practice.
The web can still be a reach medium. But as it continues to fragment, it's costing more and more money to deliver that reach. And maybe that's the role of the larger media agencies. If I'm a brand, I've already got my reach through television. I want to use the web to deliver the depth of an experience that brings consumers closer to me.
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