The future of the digital agency (or digital is dead; long live

digital) Dan Hocking

Managing Partner, Holler Group Digital Operations Director, Leo Burnett

ME (@danhocking)

Digital agencies are in trouble.

Context: The definition of ‘digital’ has changed over the

years

And it’s overtaken TV in (nearly) all markets

Source: Millward Brown AdReaction

That’s a good thing for digital agencies,

right?

Not exactly. We’re not helping our

own cause.

There are 5 key reasons why.

1. These days, for most,

digital = content

But everyone is trying to do content.

And I mean everyone.

ATL/Integrated agencies, media agencies, PR agencies, production

agencies…

Content has become the answer to the question

nobody is asking.

Because nobody says ‘I’m going to go visit my favourite

brand channel’ when they wake up.

And the things we’re making… aren’t

always good.

At scale, we can’t compete in the long term with integrated

agencies who can offer ‘content’ as an add-on to their existing

work.

And by trying to do so cheaply/quickly, we’re making it worse.

2. We’re still an add-on, despite our ‘best

efforts.’

We get invited to the brand planning table

now (that’s good!)

But digital agencies are still mostly challenged

with making a campaign bigger

Rather than making the campaign.

There’s a big reason for that:

3. We’re obsessed with measuring things

that don’t matter.

Likes, comments, shares, engagement, retweets, page visits,

time on site, app downloads

So what?

Our clients are in the business of selling products, and we build brands in order

to help do so.

But none of the digital measures evaluate either of

those.

Advertising’s dirty secret is that many of our communication

measures are scientifically dubious.

We’ve got lots of data that we can assess to see what people actually do and assess a real long-term

impact.

We just waste it on measuring content

performance instead.

4. We’ve let publishers and tech

platforms define mobile advertising,

not us.

Mobile is the dominant way people access the internet,

worldwide.

This is so ubiquitous, it doesn’t even need a source

anymore.

We’ve tried to treat mobile the same way

we treated the desktop (or worse, as ‘desktop

light’).

And we’ve taken the same principles to

advertising and applied them to the smaller

screen.

That didn’t exactly impress the creator of the banner ad.

‘It’s tough for me to see the banner paradigm being the main unit. The fact that it’s migrated from Prodigy to the Internet to the cell

phone is a joke. The creativity is disappointing at best.’ -G.M O’Connell, Founder of Modem Media (creator of the first banner ad), in a 2013 interview

with Digiday

And it’s made it even more something we

just ignore.

5. We largely use digital as a means of

distribution

Digital has leveled the playing field in so many industries.

It allows people to create, broadcast and

interact in ways not possible previously.

People are using it to make new and clever

things every day.

But we’re more obsessed with clever ways we can

push out content at people in a way that

doesn’t feel like we’re pushing.

We see digital as a communications channel solely.

As a vertical which we

need to fill.

All around us, people are changing the way they interact everyday and

creating new businesses from nothing.

And we’re queueing up our

next preroll campaign.

All sounds quite troubling, doesn’t it?

It’s up to us to change, so that it’s not.

And we’re more than capable

of doing so.

We know digital behaviour as well as

anyone does – we study it and apply it in many

different ways.

As digital practitioners, we should be looking at digital as a horizontal,

not a vertical.

If you took a business problem and applied

that thinking to it, what would that be?

The answer won’t always be

communications – and that’s no bad

thing.

How can we apply what we know to help our clients

change their businesses to be more relevant and more

successful?

And how do we help make that happen for

them? (because change is hard and scary.)

In order for us to play a valuable role, we need to get more upstream in businesses;

solving business problems rather than just

communications ones.

Which, actually, gets back to advertising’s

roots in the first place.

The answer might still involve communications.

But it could also involve

something like creating a new way for consumers to

purchase the brand, or a different expression of what

the product is.

So, the next brief you get that asks for a bunch of social

content, ask ‘why?’

Try to get to the bottom of what the business problem is.

And if there’s a different solution than what they asked

for, be bold and share it.

We need to help our clients invent new ways

to address problems their consumers are

facing.

Because if we don’t carry ourselves that way, our

clients will never look at us that way.

It’s on us to change how we do things.

Thank you! @danhocking