A Blank Sheet of Paper
During a coffee with Adam Morgan late last year, he posed an interesting question to me: If you were to start a media and communications business today, what would it look like?
Whilst there are some exceptions to the rule, by and large, media has historically been a game of scale. The biggest buying operation securing the biggest discounts for clients. The largest geographic footprint underpinning the biggest networks. The biggest buildings housing the biggest and broadest set of services and capabilities. One could reasonably assume therefore, that size, has been solved. And perhaps any new agency operation starting today would need to create competitive advantage in a new and differentiated way. This choice, would impact that style of services offered. Buying, for example, might not be central to the new propositon.
Aside from scale, what other factors would the founder of a new agency need to consider? You need look further no further than some of the usual suspects. Namely:
We’re seeing a continued challenge with the the increasing complexity and fragmentation of the media landscape. That the size and shape of the ‘ideas’ required to win in this landscape and assets associated to these ideas are becoming more and more diverse.
Media isn’t just fragmenting on the ‘supply side’ but the ‘demand side’ too. In-housed capability within client organisations is more and more prevalent. Nearly all clients manage some part of the media planning and buying process internally, whereas in the past the might have outsourced everything to an agency. Additionally, management of many elements of the ‘4Ps’ now reside outside of the marketing function or the CMO’s responsibility. These factors are changing the size, shape and duration of client engagement for agencies.
Per Amara’s Law, we’re only really just at the beginning our journey with Generative AI. That whilst tools such as Chat GPT and Midjourney are already changing how we can produce work, we’ve yet to fully grasp the regulatory and legal challenges that these tools and their usage is going to create. For early examples, look to the New York Times’ legal case against Open AI for their use of copywrited material to train LLMs and the recent Taylor Swift Deepfake episode. Even more recently, we’ve seen the launch of Sora and Open AI’s Sam Altman has claimed that 95% of the tasks marketers use agencies for will be completed by AI in the future. The impact of AI based technologies on all areas of the marketing and communications supply change will be significant.
New forms of media channel will also bring new legal hurdles for advertisers to deal with in the form of issues around rights, usage, ownership, storage and distribution in relation to IP, Data and Privacy. My working hunch is that legal capability will become far more central to the core communications planning business than it ever has been to date (unless of course, you’re from a PR background, as Yelland and Lewis like to tell us).
It’s one of the weird quirks of our business that we’ve not seen many new ‘shapes’ emerge. Similarly, I still find it almost entirely unbelievable that we still use a simple gannt chart to represent the media plan - and we have done for decades - in spite of the fact that there is not only a great deal more complexity in the landscape they are trying represent, but also a great deal more connectivity between the various ‘nodes’ of the landscape too.
Naked was perhaps one good example of a creative communications business which launched with a different shape and modus operandi. As are, to some extent, the specialist agencies such as Brainlabs that set up to service particular parts of the supply chain. Invariably though, we strive for scale: we add layers and layers of new speciality to the agency org and very quickly, we’re left with big amorphous organisations. Rarely do we take stuff away or sunset specific services. More is nearly always more.
As industry veteran John Farrell says in this video, it’s perhaps unusual that the process by which most agencies work has remained largely unchanged in nearly forty years - especially when on the demand side, client organisations are evolving quickly to meet the changing needs of their consumer.
So with that in mind, and if I had a blank sheet of paper - free from the constraint of a legacy business (and with no cost of failure) along with some seed capital and a founding client - what might a new agency model look like? At least conceptually. The sketch in my notes that I keep coming back to looks like this:
There are four main components to call out here:
A lightweight consulting arm consisting of some ‘generalist’ communications planning experts, able to think a brand and the business it services ‘in the round’, supported by some specialists in areas of significant importance to modern brand communications. Specifically, UX, Retail Media and Martech. This team manages the engagements with clients as well as providing strategic advise.
A team consisting of technology and data specialists. Crucially, Legal is within this section of the org - helping advise and navigate the potential issues that may be encountered when building and developing new tools, services or applications for clients.
A ‘production’ arm: A team who are responsible for building scopes of work and defining delivery in partnership with the consulting division. The entire thought behind this model is it is flexible where people are concerned given client in-housing. Therefore - the production team is also essentially a super-charged HR function - they are responsible for cultivating a network of freelancers and engaging them when the projects in the system require specialist talent.
There are a number of hunches that inform the structure of this ‘model’ - namely, that the type of stuff comms businesses produce is changing. That these changes require some constant talent and a load of fluid talent/ capacity. That the areas where clients are looking for advice (vs. where they want help executing) is changing. That technology and data and content will create bigger and legal challenges for clients and agencies. And these problems are barely understood today.
Questions which can help us imagine and articulate an alternate future for agencies, rather than continue down the road of adding new layers incrementally to one another as we might construct a papier-mache model. I have no idea if this is right. I have no idea if this would ‘sell’. But, it feels like given all of the structural changes in the industry the time to at least consider what a new agency model looks like is now. Getting it right is really not the point. The point, if there is one, is to borrow again from Adam Morgan - and ask some propelling questions.
