Gen Y Will Change Today's Agency

Today, agencies are hired by companies' marketing departement to advertise -- that's it.

What will happen when Generation Yers will run agencies in a few years?

Here is my take on it:
Increasingly, agencies will have to interact with customers and create a 2-way conversation not good old stuff-it-down-their-throat advertising.
A cartoon that has gone around marketing blogs for a while puts it best:


The New Agency
Let ad agencies play a major part in understanding the customer and having a constructive say in R&D. Agencies will clearly have an interactive element to all their campaigns to help give a face to each company. This dimension will give more responsibility to the agency and force it to really understand who they are dealing with before executing any campaigns.

So what's new? Ad agencies will be responsible for understanding the customer, not the external market research firm. Moreover they will have a seat at the R&D table.

3 comments:

Daniel Oyston said...

For a long time companies have tried hard to break down the silos within their organisation however your post struck me because this is exactly what agencies don’t do. They really just want to do the advertising part … but maybe that is the clients fault as well because they don’t get the agencies involved right from R&D?

Kate Richardson said...

Hi Morgan,

I do think it depends on the agency/client relationship. Some agencies are actively involved in things like NPD but they tend to be planning oriented or specialised agencies.

And against a backdrop of shrinking budgets and a move back to full service offerings, I think agencies are trying to move into new spaces or ones that were of little interest previously.

At the end of the day, clients are becoming less concerned with who does what, and more concerned with the output.

Unknown said...

Hi Morgan,

This is slightly related but still pretty interesting. Its about cleaver ways to market to generation Y. This company called swapit.co.uk is using crowd sourcing to get the public to come up with ideas for their campaign to target kids ($3000 prize for the winner). Swapit is basically an online community where kids can go and trade their second hand toys with each other. Its pretty cool, check it out: http://www.ideabounty.com/

James