"Think of an agency as a community. You have to cultivate, encourage and effectively reward those within that community to be successful. Communities are the best way to enable, empower, and rapidly develop ideas and product offerings."
The agency model as it stands currently is slow, outdated and unwieldy. Politics, hubris and an inability to be flexible are slowly crushing the status quo of profitability. Smaller and more nimble agencies are finding holes in the market that could become chasms if not monitored effectively.
Integrated agencies with the ability to create truly all encompassing marketing and PR programs around products and brands are still the model of success. However, it is very rare that an integrated agency truly gets to spread its wings and fly freely. Often a large agency is trying to sneak through a mouse hole to get to a cheese castle. Smaller agencies can move faster and more effectively (.ie they fit through the mouse hole) but almost never are able to implement all the strategies that an integrated house can.
Does this make nimbler agencies more effective then the larger houses? Heck no. Often the nimbler agencies are constrained by money constraints and never end up being able to do all the things that they want to do. The larger agencies can do anything and everything but are expensive and slow to hit a target. Clearly, something has to give.
How do agencies change and evolve? Rely on a community model to find solutions for you. Sound difficult? It's not. All it takes is buy in from the right people and an open mind. Community solutions serve to augment any existing business and take it to another level. With an agency it is no different.
Community acts as a multiplier for your existent brain power in-house. With it you can quickly assess the ideas, products and solutions you come up with. It's a super charged focus group with a mind of its own and that's only the external model of community usage.
Internal collaboration and usage of community models within the inner workings of an agency are going to be revolutionary.
The concept of "no silos" may not work in all businesses. However, in agencies I think they are a necessity. Each hand needs to know what the other is doing in a cohesive (and non-micro-managing manner) to be at their most effective.
Crowdsource internally, capture ideas from anyone and everywhere (.ie let the idea carry merit, not the person) and communicate in a public forum where everyone has an equal voice. Then cross reference your ideas with those of your client and customer base to see if you can do better or augment your existing ideas. I have yet to find one instance where a good idea was NOT discovered through one of these sessions.
If social models are ever going to catch on in a big way, it is going to be in the agency world. The people inside these shops are just too smart not to be able to retrofit this to their own purposes. Getting stuff done has never been easier. Just allow your team to move forward with integrated guidance rather then management...you'll be amazed at how far they go.
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tagged as agency community, augment marketing ideas, cohesive management, community agency, community control, crowdsource projects, hire a community, integrated management
{ 15 comments… read them below or add one }
There's an article on AdAge talking about the same topic and using Minneapolis as an example. Here in MSP, we're seeing a lot of spin-off's and smaller agencies sprout up and take the industry by storm. Why? The reasons you listed above. There'll always be the big agencies, but there's definitely a shift toward the smaller ones – with Fortune 500 companies taking notice.
Another issue that I faced is this: Small agencies simply can't do all the things that a large one can do. But they can do a small amount of things FAR BETTER then larger ones…which allows them to annihilate certain categories of RFPs.
Who are you going with for your social program? An agency devoted to it or one with a retrofitted PR department that had social added to the title yesterday?
What I find interesting is that larger agencies have a larger talent pool to crowdsource from than the smaller agencies, and they still cannot find solutions faster than smaller ones.
Larger agencies still suprise me by how much internal beauocracy they have. Encouraging everyone to be on twitter and getting rid of cubicle walls isn't the final solution. Internal crowdsourcing on a level playing field is what really is going to make a difference.
I think that rather than agency size be your metric, you should consider how nimble thinking, not the number of personnel, is what sets agencies apart. Big agencies (with larger clients and fees) or small boutiques (with start up clients with small budgets) are only as good as what they can accomplish, after all.
It's not that bigger (or smaller) is necessarily better. And in terms of whether big agencies have more layers of bureaucracy and silos, that depends on the shop. Isn't the boutique with the magnetic entrepreneurial leader at the helm just as likely to have followers on staff instead of leaders? (Have you ever asked yourself why so many shops are named after their founder?) Both situations come with their own ups and downs. Many boutiques suffer from the lack of ability to pull off the big ideas that the integrated shops can accomplish with ease. But others can outsource and get it done.
It all boils down to culture. If your company has the ability to adapt to changes as they come (and they're always coming!) it will survive and thrive. If the manager in a position of power is keeping a worker from accomplishing a brilliant idea because “there's no way someone so junior could be right” then that manager should be circumvented. In which case, having the crowd sourcing of an internal social network for sharing ideas is a great way for those in power and those with less to put all ideas on the table.
But, as we all know, ideas are free. The ability to get them from concept to reality is what matters. And if a culture isn't open to ideas from all all outliers, then it will become insular, make enemies, and ultimately kill itself or be killed.
Thanks Michael. I've been on both sides of the fence and in the smaller boutique, in-house and now the integrated agency. Ideas truly are free, otherwise I would probably make a lot more money
.
I definitely agree about breaking down the insular nature of any institution, but think that these days death comes slowly (especially to companies not tied directly to specific institutions). An agency could linger for 20+ years before falling apart imo.
Enemy making is never good. Unless they are the right ones to make
It's not the size of the talent pool that matters. It's the leadership and ability to implement strategies in a meritocracy based system.
Check out Michael's comment below.
Spot on.
This is such a phenomenal post – and the comments are great…
Stuart, your idea that death for an agency could take 20 years has a ton of merit. Once an agency gets past that “boutique” stage and has sustainable numbers, like high six figures, then it can easily take forever to figure out that stagnation is continual without embracing new stuff.
I've watched a couple die this death by a thousand cuts, it's PAINFUL to witness.
One of the great things about small shops is that, to some extent, everyone does everything. There's a level of cross training that doesn't happen in large agencies, if simply by virtue of there being fewer people in closer contact. That makes a smaller agency more flexible and it also helps break down walls. Large agencies can emulate this with better internal communications structure (i.e. using Twitter or similar to encourage chatter between disciplines and levels) and serious educational efforts. Like, if you even want to TOUCH a digital project you should have to go through some sort of boot camp. This seems obvious to me, yet I constantly see stagnation due to lack of information. And that's when a smaller, nimbler shop strikes without the burden of dead weight.
This is such a phenomenal post – and the comments are great…
Stuart, your idea that death for an agency could take 20 years has a ton of merit. Once an agency gets past that “boutique” stage and has sustainable numbers, like high six figures, then it can easily take forever to figure out that stagnation is continual without embracing new stuff.
I've watched a couple die this death by a thousand cuts, it's PAINFUL to witness.
One of the great things about small shops is that, to some extent, everyone does everything. There's a level of cross training that doesn't happen in large agencies, if simply by virtue of there being fewer people in closer contact. That makes a smaller agency more flexible and it also helps break down walls. Large agencies can emulate this with better internal communications structure (i.e. using Twitter or similar to encourage chatter between disciplines and levels) and serious educational efforts. Like, if you even want to TOUCH a digital project you should have to go through some sort of boot camp. This seems obvious to me, yet I constantly see stagnation due to lack of information. And that's when a smaller, nimbler shop strikes without the burden of dead weight.
One of the great things about small shops is that, to some extent, everyone does everything. There's a level of cross training that doesn't happen in large agencies, if simply by virtue of there being fewer people in closer contact. That makes a smaller agency more flexible and it also helps break down walls. Large agencies can emulate this with better internal communications structure (i.e. using Twitter or similar to encourage chatter between disciplines and levels) and serious educational efforts. Like, if you even want to TOUCH a digital project you should have to go through some sort of boot camp. This seems obvious to me, yet I constantly see stagnation due to lack of information. And that's when a smaller, nimbler shop strikes without the burden of dead weight.
One of the great things about small shops is that, to some extent, everyone does everything. There's a level of cross training that doesn't happen in large agencies, if simply by virtue of there being fewer people in closer contact. That makes a smaller agency more flexible and it also helps break down walls. Large agencies can emulate this with better internal communications structure (i.e. using Twitter or similar to encourage chatter between disciplines and levels) and serious educational efforts. Like, if you even want to TOUCH a digital project you should have to go through some sort of boot camp. This seems obvious to me, yet I constantly see stagnation due to lack of information. And that's when a smaller, nimbler shop strikes without the burden of dead weight.
This is such a phenomenal post – and the comments are great…
Stuart, your idea that death for an agency could take 20 years has a ton of merit. Once an agency gets past that “boutique” stage and has sustainable numbers, like high six figures, then it can easily take forever to figure out that stagnation is continual without embracing new stuff.
I've watched a couple die this death by a thousand cuts, it's PAINFUL to witness.
One of the great things about small shops is that, to some extent, everyone does everything. There's a level of cross training that doesn't happen in large agencies, if simply by virtue of there being fewer people in closer contact. That makes a smaller agency more flexible and it also helps break down walls. Large agencies can emulate this with better internal communications structure (i.e. using Twitter or similar to encourage chatter between disciplines and levels) and serious educational efforts. Like, if you even want to TOUCH a digital project you should have to go through some sort of boot camp. This seems obvious to me, yet I constantly see stagnation due to lack of information. And that's when a smaller, nimbler shop strikes without the burden of dead weight.
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