The marketing agency of the future won’t be about conference rooms with little coffee presses, or who has the best selection of Pellegrino on the table at meeting time. The marketing agency of the future will be about integrating technology, consumer wants, data, and design. And it will be about speed.
I had a conversation last summer over a camp trip where a friend was telling me he doesn’t do the work (we were discussing paid search and performance), but he manages the people who do the work. He’s the suited one. There was a time and place in agencies where talent was bookended between layers of management and spreadsheets drove the conversation. Some of you may remember this time. Decisions took longer to be decided, and too much was spent at tradeshows. These were remnants of the dot-com era. This was a time of pre-social media, pre-Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and really most of it, where faxes were sent and paper was stored. I’ve dated myself, but hold tight. That is not where we are now.
We’re ushering in 2019 faster than any of us could have planned for. We see Facebook numbers dropping, and Apple providing phone warnings that we’ve hit our screen time limits on these omnipresent devices because, if they don’t, they run the risk of eyeballs melting and usage declining. We see technology taking to the skies to produce stunning visual content. We see design preferences changing, and the ages and tenures of those driving startups younger than we’ve ever seen before. And we realize that given the amassed change of the last nearly two decades since y2k, the marketing agency of future will resemble less and less like it is today.
The question we ask ourselves is ‘What will the marketing agency of the future look like, and what will it have to do to deliver results?‘
1. Flexibility and Adaptability
The marketing agency of the future will be flexible and adaptable to brands. Also to the customers and markets they support. With the speed of technology and the rate of change we see now and will continue to see, the marketing agency of the future will be able to change course on a dime. They’ll be able to retool and recreate. Part of the challenge will come from the massive amount of infinite data marketers and brands will see. We see it now, and we’ll only continue to see it flood in. A marketing agency will have to intake it, interpret it, create assets from it, and, all the while, keep the talent on hand that’s agile and creative enough to keep up with it in a way that makes sense; and makes users want more.
Marketing data in the hands of brand owners with their day-to-day operations will fall flat. The marketing agency of the future will support brands in a way brands can’t do on their own because they’ve not only used data insights to inform the creative, but they continue to use them in an ongoing loop.
2. Big Ideas and Big Thinking
Marketing components can be seen as commodity-based and idea-based. The commodity-based components include things brands can easily move in-house, like blogging. That is if they have the time to keep up with it. It also includes things like onsite SEO and even data assimilation and management. Idea-based components include big ideas and big thinking that are endemic to the way creative agencies think. The marketing agency of future will know where their rubber hits the road and be able to deliver on that.
3. Agility and Ingenuity
So the marketing agency of the future will play to their strengths, which, for many of them, will be their smaller, more agile size. There’s no competing with the tech giants, and you wouldn’t want to. They’re like the monster-Ralph in Ralph Breaks the Internet. They’ve gotten so big, and their bigness builds upon itself. The agency of the future already understands that consumer preference will swing back from this towards ingenuity, to ideas, and connection.
4. Awareness and ROI
We’ve seen ROI become more about intangible assets; about value and perceptions. Since you can’t view marketing and branding in a vacuum, you, in turn, see it supporting an existing strategy or campaign. In other words, ROI is less about one point of contact or the point that made the sale. Alternatively, it’s a series of touchpoints, or assists, that supports the sale. The essence of the communications built up over time that creates awareness, or awareness ROI.
5. Creativity and Transparency
The marketing agency of the future will not only understand the complexities of marketing AI and things like voice search; they’ll demonstrate mastery over them. They know what it takes to start and have learned that communicating diversity has nothing to do with rainbows or grays. Their initiatives will be transparent because they should be, and because the market expects them to be. One thing’s for sure: there won’t be one right way, but the bar will continue to push upwards while funneling outstanding creative from the marketing agencies of the future.
So, is your brand in search of the marketing agency of the future? Is your agency ready to be one? Tell us about it. We’re listening.
Christina Brown, Certified Google Partner and Creative Director @ Savy Agency, a national digital marketing agency out of Bend, OR and Santa Barbara, CA.