So as something of an exercise I find myself thinking about company vision and positioning.
Of course, right now I think I know exactly the type of agency I’d like to be working for. It’d have to be Blue Ant, William Gibson’s fictional “high-speed, low-drag life-form in an advertising ecology of lumbering herbivores.”
Any agency that can be associated with a magazine both influential and non-existent is of course guaranteed to appeal to me (long story…)
But that’s for the future, and to paraphrase Gibson writing elsewhere, if that future’s here then it hasn’t been distributed in my direction yet.
The phrase I keep coming back to is Bob Greenberg’s line for his deeply admirable agency R/GA – “The agency for the digital age.” It’s a line I’d love to appropriate, and in fact I’m toying with exactly that right now.
Why? Because “We’re not an agency, we’re an agency for the digital age” is a line I’m hearing more regularly from mouths that aren’t just R/GA’s and I think that as a rallying call for enhanced definition it should be more widely adopted.
But how to move the term from 21st century advertising shibboleth to a clear positioning in reality?
Obviously, sitting as a media neutral lead agency at the heart of any communication – digital or not – has got to be part of this. Look at the work of CP+B in the US or at a lot of the work that AKQA does (for Nike in particular) in the UK. Look at the way that a digital agency such as Glue can make it to the shortlist stage for a major “traditional” advertising brief, or the way that traditional offline agencies are rushing into a second digital renaissance.
But then there’s surely more to it than just the development of campaign communications ideas appropriate for this maturing “digital age.” There’s a need for a robust technical development capability. A need for deep understanding the measurement and metrics necessary to drive success. A need for “getting” the nuts and bolts of e-commerce as well as you get the rich media technologies that contribute to immersive brand experiences online.
So, you can’t be quite as small as Blue Ant’s rhetoric suggests (“Relatively tiny in terms of permanent staff, globally distributed, more post-geographic than multinational…”)
More than anything though, “an agency for the digital age” needs to be one that gets back to the earlier less buttoned-down thinking of the likes of Ogilvy and Bernbach. An agency whose role is to solve clients’ problems. And if these solutions, as an output of informed analysis, require the design and development of new products and services rather than just communications then this is what the agency needs to be able to deliver.
The ‘lumbering herbivores’ heading for extinction are those who either can’t see this or who just don’t have the skills to deliver on the promise.
So – want to join the “agencies for the digital age” party? Go for it – be unashamed about taking up the tag line, as long as it helps you crystallise what you need to do to get there.
