That the business sphere is in the midst of an unrelenting,
technology-driven change is accepted fact. But that is of little comfort
to advertising agencies as they grapple with their position in the new
world order.
For decades, their place at the centre of the strategic communications
planning process was undisputed. Then came the internet and media
explosion which eroded their role, while media and other specialist
agencies, once relegated to the last minutes of a pitch presentation,
have found their star rising. A case in point is the recent appointment
of direct agency 141 instead of parent Bates to handle the core brand
strategy work of Allied Domecq.
Agencies apparently aren't taking the changes lying down. At the AdAsia
conference in Taipei late last month, ad agency chiefs spelled out plans
for a fight-back.
They started by defining what they thought the future would look
like.
In Keith Reinhard's vision of the future, personal digital assistants
talked to their owners - advising them on what to buy and where to go
based on their personal lifestyle interests and brand profile - and in
which FMCG companies produced dramas and sitcoms that run on their
websites.
DDB's worldwide chairman and chief executive says interactivity of this
level is important because consumers are being empowered by technology
to block advertising."In order to be chosen, advertisers must have three
things in their message: timely information, interactive entertainment
and brand-embedded content." Reinhard adds that advertisers must,
therefore, create a total brand experience to get consumers to "buy-in".
Underlining the sea change to come, he predicts "creative director of
the future may be called experience directors".
But too much change leads to disorientation, even among the
tech-literate people, says Leo Burnett regional managing director
Richard Pinder. "Now more than ever before, the brands you feel
comfortable with are becoming increasingly important," he says.
Advertisers, he adds, shouldn't lose sight of the fact that brands are
made up of three components: core drivers, which are the essence of a
brand's existence in people's lives, lifestyle trends and transient
cultural cues. "Brands must satisfy all three if they are to survive in
the long-term. Most dotcoms turned into dotbombs because they missed out
the core driver components of the equation," says Pinder.
However, because of the increasingly complex marketplace and a more
'me-centric' consumer, traditional advertising agencies are finding
themselves pushed off centre stage and into the role of supplier, while
media agencies and a bewildering array of consultancies - branding,
marketing, even management - take on plum assignments such as
strategy.
Gautam Rakshit, the managing director of Mumbai-based Advertising
Avenues and the vice-chairman of the Asian Federation of Advertising
Associations, says that full service agencies are facing a bleak future.
Blaming specialists for the decline, he says: "One by one,
revenue-earning parts of the full service agency are being plucked away
and, very soon, it will be left with crumbs while the specialists take
the cream."
The only way out, he says, is for the traditional agency to reposition
itself as a provider of strategic solutions and knowledge, in terms of
consumers, markets, and new business and product opportunities. The idea
is to put the agency back onto centre stage, with specialists becoming
the suppliers. "Right now, when we go and see the client, we are only
welcome at the brand manager's table. What we should aim to achieve is
to be welcome at the chairman's table."
However, Bates Asia president and Hong Kong 4As chairman Jeffrey Yu
describes such a repositioning as radical. "We cannot up our roots and
become business consultants. Our core competency is communications and
this is where we should be focusing on."
Rakshit also questioned the rationale behind clients chopping budgets in
a recession. "The reason is that we are not addressing the key issues -
the future health of the business category the company is in, and new
markets and products. What is worse, we don't want to accept
responsibility for the success or failure of a brand campaign."
