At the second installment of the Venice Media Festival, one of the big questions discussed was that in today's media world where media planning and creative are so tightly intertwined, should media agencies be re-united with their creative brethren from which they were spun off some 15 years ago? The answer was a resounding...maybe. In fact, only a third of media leaders held steadfast to their independence.
So maybe they should be put back together.
But perhaps there's another possible future. We could see a future where media stars break off from their buying agencies and form creative media hotshops, much like many creatives (including ours truly) have. They could then offer advertisers the high-value thinking and creative media approaches, while outsourcing the commoditized buying function to the large buying agencies.
At HQvB, we work in a flat, multi-disciplinary "brain trust" model. The idea is to allow clients to focus their resources on a senior, high-value team, that includes creative, media and planning as equal partners in the development of ideas that get people involved in bands. The lower-value execution and buying is then either outsourced, as in the case of media buying, or handled by HQvB, but only at cost.
No matter what the future has in store for media agencies, or creative agencies for that matter, we see the future in terms of focusing on high-value delivery. Sadly today, far too much of most clients' fees are consumed by low-value execution and administration.
Maybe it's time to to rethink this.
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