James Archer

Digital Agencies: Snack or Main Course?

In his post Wake Up Agencies: Digital Shops = Trojan Horse, Jason Baer of Convince & Convert makes some good points about digital agencies (and mentions Forty as an example).

At the end of the post, he asks, “Any digital agencies want to admit to their master plan?”

I’ve always been happy to share our master plan: We’re driving traditional agencies out of business. It’s going to take several more years, obviously, but we’ve had good success so far, and plan to keep plugging away at it until the job is done.

By their nature, most high-quality digital agencies have to be on top of things, whereas most traditional agencies have a comfortable enough cash flow that they can coast on their outdated approaches to marketing.

By the time a big-shot ad exec reads about something (Web 2.0, social media, Twitter, etc.) in Fast Company, the digital agencies have already been doing it for a couple of years, and have often moved on to the next big thing. These new agencies are used to that, since everything else in digital moves that fast as well. They reinvent themselves every quarter year, not quarter century.

Knowing you have a problem is half of the solution, but it’s not something most ad agencies are willing to admit. In the spirit of collaboration, we’ve tried in the past to help ad agencies get themselves up to date, only to find (repeatedly) that they just fall right back into their old patterns of thinking.

I think the combination of a solid ad agency and a solid digital agency can be a profoundly powerful thing, but too often the traditional agencies approach it as a “plug and play” situation in which they just buy out a small firm and call it done, when the reality is that the digital agency needs to come in as at least an equal. It’s not a snack; it’s the main course.

Forty is turning the usual plan on its head. We’ve considered offers to be bought out by traditional agencies, but instead we’re now opting to put the digital at the forefront, and then bring in the traditional as needed underneath it. (Rather than being bought, we plan to do the buying.)

The new marketing isn’t a nifty add-on to traditional marketing. It is marketing now. Rather than yearning for acceptance, digital agencies are now just waiting for the old guard to step out of the way.

If you’re an exec at a traditional agency, heed Jason’s advice to pay serious attention to digital as more than a novelty. Those nimble little firms are fully equipped to put your agency out of business in coming years. Look around, and you’ll believe it, too.