Sunday, April 6, 2008

Building The Perfect Beast (err, Agency)

This link to iMedia has a bunch of people telling you what they think the perfect ad agency would look like. I have a feeling that if we drew it out, it would be well organized and efficient but if we were to draw out the current agency, it might look like pure chaos. If we gave it a face, the perfect agency would be like the two guys on the Mac commercials. Clean, yet argumentative.

2 comments:

BOB HOFFMAN said...

These people are remarkably inarticulate. Just the same cliches about "integration" we've been hearing for 10 years. If these are the marketing leaders of their companies, no wonder they're having problems developing "cohesive strategies." They don't have cohesive thoughts.

Particularly awful is the guy who's so proud that he gets the creatives and media people together twice a year. Twice a year? Why the hell aren't they together every day?

How are agencies supposed to do good work when they have to take orders from non-entities like these?

James Hipkin said...

I'm not sure "agency" is a valid term today. The industry is trying to force a round peg, developed in the 1950s into a square hole created in the 1990s.

If a client is looking for an integrated solution they will be better served if they drive the solution from the strategy. Then have the strategy group draw in experts to solve the execution problem. This way they can control the output while using vertical expertise.