We are Maverick. To live up to the promise we need to find a different way to look at things. That means if we try and predict the future, what can we see and say that you will agree is both insightful and original?
Everyone reading this will almost certainly be familiar with innovation adoption curves. That means if I make a prediction that causes most of you to nod in agreement I’m just talking about something that’s already moving into the mainstream. Which isn’t much of a prediction, at least not an interesting one.
So, I’m going to talk about a development that is barely at the innovation stage, but I think will start to be taken up by the first early adopters over the next 12 to 18 months. It’s about how agencies and clients work together and how the entire agency business model will transform. And no, that’s not because of AI.
It’s no secret that for some years clients have challenged agencies both for the value they add to the business and for how they can create work faster and cheaper (but without reducing quality and performance). Many larger clients who need to produce a high volume of communications have moved to an insourcing model. For smaller clients, and especially for B2B businesses, large and small, this is often not a viable solution.
Many of these clients are happy to pay for the breadth and depth of creative and strategic knowledge and experience that a good agency can deploy. But they’re not prepared to pay for the traditional support structure that agencies historically surround their creative and strategic talent with. They also want flexibility in how much of a project the agency does – sometimes they want the agency to do the ideation but then pass to an internal team to execute.
Traditional agency processes lack the operational flexibility to work this way and their business models lack the commercial flexibility to make money if they try to work this way.
For me this represents a great opportunity for agile agencies to evolve and thrive. It means senior creatives and strategists spending a lot more time on the front line with clients and rolling their sleeves up to spend more time agreeing executional details. It means those individuals being skilled in communications and understanding business strategy and how the client makes money. Above all it means agency and client teams functioning as one, flexing who does what according to both skillset and workload. Hybrid people, hybrid teams, hybrid processes.
I said earlier this prediction wasn’t about AI. But AI can and should be a key tool in facilitating this evolution. Operationally to reduce costs by using it to administer and create summaries of meetings, monitor project scheduling and optimise resource planning; strategically to gather market and competitor intelligence and increasingly, through synthetic research to rapidly develop hypotheses and insights; creatively to both ideate and execute.
What’s key is not just the way we can reduce costs and increase speed to develop ideas and campaigns, it’s the way AI facilitates collaboration and co-creation between client and agency. Strategists collaborating with client marketing to build customer personas and with HR and Talent to build employee personas. Agency creatives producing concepts which client creative teams can execute.
Of course, AI is not a silver bullet, it’s just a tool. You need to train everyone to know how and when to use it. To understand how it should be used, and how it shouldn’t be.
Nor is this way of working going to be easy for many agencies and clients to adopt. It requires a high degree of mutual trust and respect. Above all, it requires clients who are prepared to treat the agency as a genuine business partner, not as a supplier of goods and services to be procured according to ratecard.
For readers old enough to remember agency-client relationships of the 20th century, what I’m describing may seem familiar. But anyone that old will also know there are very few things that are wholly new – they are usually just fundamental truths being rediscovered by a new generation. And there’s a reason we refer to that period as the ‘golden age of advertising’.
