It’s interesting to see the difference between digital people and advertising people right now. There’s a whole lot of smugness going on. Ad people are smuggly going “we’ve got the clients” ears (hopefully not in boxes in a gangster way, but you never know), we’ve got the budgets, we’ve got the big ideas, we’ve got the best creative talent, we’ve got deep pockets”, which all sounds pretty good. But there’s a something in their confidence that make you wonder if they’re actually just a little bit scared…
On the other hand digital people are smugly sitting there saying “you don’t get it, you’ll never get it”.
Both are wrong and arrogant. And I do wonder who’s got the most to lose. I’m guessing that because ad agencies have got the bigger budgets they’ve got more to lose. But I suppose little agencies could lose everything if the game goes against them…
But let’s hope that no-one has to lose out out and everyone gets to do the stuff they love. Maybe together, maybe not.
An interesting ‘moment’ in online advertising. BBH win Lynx digital account. To my mind Dare have done some really amazing online advertising for Lynx (Feather and Blow to name but two), and I’m really surprised that the account has gone elsewhere (if the story is to be believed).
In principle I agree with this quote from the article:
John O’Keeffe, executive creative director of BBH London, said: “A couple of years ago, we might have been at a disadvantage in a pitch like this, simply for lack of having the digital craft skills in-house. We now have that capability: whereupon this, and any other digital pitch for that matter, comes down to the same question that decides any such process: who has the best idea?”
But at the same time I wonder if this is really true.
Is it always down to the best idea winning out? Not really. Do BBH have great ideas? Undoubtedly. Do they have outstanding ‘salespeople’? Almost certainly better then most digital agencies.
I’m not trying to put forward the case for ‘digital agencies’ (interesting how I’m now feeling more and more compelled to use inverted commas around various parts of the term digital agency) particularly. However, something I’ve noticed recently is that the nature of our clients is changing. Whereas previously we used to sell our ideas into digital people, we’re now increasingly up in front of a mixture of digital and advertising people.
The way in which you pitch your ideas to these two groups are massively different. Online people typically want to see more of the ‘how we’re going to do it’, where as advertising people take that stuff for granted. You see an idea, it gets made. They’ve never been through the pain of cross-browser testing a complicated website. And they don’t care how it gets done. And maybe that’s the way it should be (for advertising).
My prediction is that we’re going to see a fragmentation of how brands operate online, there’ll be a bunch of people competing to do online advertising. And a bunch of people doing ‘other stuff’.
