Disruptive Digital Agencies

I am going to see Tribal DDB tomorrow to see if we can work together on a project.

Word on the web is that "digital" agencies can come across as a bit cocky these days : all those years suffering in the digital gulags, under paid and under valued .... but since the digital revolution we vill show you who is ze master race now, Tommy, jah!

Just being a lone, plucky Britisher-PR man plodding into the Digital Fatherland (albeit armed with weapons grade analysis tools) it will be an interesting encounter.

The complaint from the Home Guard (example here) seems to be that these digital upstarts/startups think they can do "everything" and don't appreciate the skills that proper (delete as applicable)advertising/production/media/PR agencies bring to digital. A "Tomorrow Belongs to Me" kind of attitude, is hinted at.

(Apologies if a slight undertone of Anglo-German WW2 conflict is running through this post but I did see the film of Atonement over the weekend and its clearly fresh in my mind.  And on a training course the other day - to a group including some Germans - I managed to find myself half way through a joke when  I realised that it ended in the punchline "..but I'm not quite sure about the connection between cereal box designs and Swastikas" so it may be a phase I'm going through.  So apologies if any offence caused to my German readers, but as Basil Fawlty so rightly argued "you started it").

This got me thinking about the old saying of Chris Satterthwaite at Chime (my employers) that Advertising agencies are good at creating content and PR agencies good at distributing content.  Adding in the old strategy/tactics distinction, I came up with this picture of the pre-digital agency scene:

Digital agencies seem to have plonked themselves firmly down  in the middle of this nice cosy set up.  They have disrupted the old empires by saying that they "do it all". No wonder this cuckoo in the nest has ruffled a few feathers:

But annoying as this disruption may seem to the ancien regimes, perhaps they have a point.  They seem to be saying that to do digital you can't just be strategic, you have to be a practitioner too.  You can't just talk about it, you have to do it to be of any use to a client.  Thus being a strategic digital "consultancy" or a "digital production house" is less valuable than being an all round "agency".

Similarly, they are rubbing out the line between making ideas and spreading ideas.  In a world of social media and user generated content this abandonment of the one-way "transmission" mindset of the advertising agencies AND the sometimes mechanical "coverage and freqency model" of media agencies seems right.

So maybe approaching both the big picture AND the detailed implementation; the idea AND the medium that it will inhabit ALL AT THE SAME TIME may seem like multi-tasking (and frankly not that British, old chap) but it might be the way to do it these days.

Anyway it's D-DAY minus one and a long way to Tiperrary so I'll pack up my troubles in my old kit bag and report back when I can.

(Please send food parcels if this all goes wrong)

Comments

[ant]

hiya, interesting to come across your blog - I'm an ex-digital-agency planner, now freelancing in PR, and generally not having any idea what's going on. Anthony