Integrating Digital into Traditional Advertising and Marketing Agencies

Marketing and advertising agencies are thinking about how to integrate Digital into their offering, without creating an internal silo.

Agencies who already have a ‘Digital’ department are wondering how they can close them and get the whole agency thinking digitally.

M-i-x.com’s 2008 post on merging a digital marketing agency into a traditional one is still the de facto guide to digital integration. It talks about how traditional agencies must integrate digital or they won’t survive. Digital agencies and traditional agencies have fundamental differences that are very difficult to reconcile, and the traditional agency is the one that has to change. They vastly underestimate the changes and education needed – and it’s all to do with tech. Traditional agencies don’t ‘get’ tech and how important it is to digital, and they don’t know how to work with programmers. Digital teams include both creative and tech, and a creative can’t just ‘dump’ a concept onto tech. There needs to be a bond between these disciplines. Account managers also must have some technical competence. Information architecture is essential. Without this, integration is doomed. Non-digital people who can’t up-skill have no place in the integrated agency. Most important of all: you have to integrate traditional into digital, not digital into traditional. It’s the DIGITAL structures that must prevail. Time and money MUST be invested on learning: digital doesn’t stand still and you need someone in charge of innovation. Integrated agencies need to adopt the digital structure, and misunderstood roles like the SysAdmin are essential to a mature integrated agency.

Matt Howell makes some good points in his post The uncomfortable truth: restructuring can be rewarding: the ad business is behind in its understanding of technology and how it affects consumers. Agencies are changing, but much too slowly. We’re in a post-digital age and digital/interactive departments should be closed. The understanding of technology is a responsibility for the whole agency, not just the techies in the corner. The digital culture needs to be moved over into the advertising culture, not the other way around. We mustn’t make digital thinkers conform to the archaic ad agency culture. Creatives, account managers and planners must understand digital and tech.

Tri-media posted in Feb 2010 about how advertising forms have to change their model. Consumers have changed the way they communicate with each other and get their information, with the focus being the web and the smartphone. Most advertising agencies are now integrating digital into their offering.

It’s worth also looking again at John Dodds’ post from way back in 2006, where he provoked a great debate with his statement “I don’t get Digital“. Not ‘getting’ Digital is an accusation often thrown at people who work outside of our geek-dom. John questioned what a ‘Digital agency’ is, what it does, and why somebody would define their business so narrowly. “All I am interested in is brand engagement and creative persuasion and I don’t give a damn whether its this is analogue, digital or live.” The conversation that ensued is still relevant. Mark Cridge from Glue said that Glue have always called themselves an advertising agency, and “it is the traditional agencies who will have to change in many more ways to adapt to the continuing wave of digitalisation. So in the end it doesn’t really matter where you start from we’re all going to meet in an increasingly muddled, but very exciting middle.” Faris Yakob made the point that sometimes the execution is the idea, and underlines the need for tech not to be seen as mere production, but as an integral part of the creative process. I firmly believe this too. In an age of ever increasing media channels, it’s impossible for a 2-person creative team to work alone. Advertising agencies need to embrace agile, collaborative processes to arrive at killer ideas, something that tech startups have known for a long time.

Mario Gamper interviewed Juan Morales from SapientNitro on his blog Ideas Will Happen. Mario mentioned the term ‘neo-creative’ to mean the sort of people who create ideas in the new integrated advertising world. He makes the insightful point that “I can’t help but think that it’s probably easier to move from a deep understanding of technology into branding than going the opposite way.”Juan says there is a “new kind of creative… their focus [is] on making those digital things really work”. Mario summarises: “At SapientNitro, collaborative skills are… in high demand. To bring science and art together, you need to… be able to forget for a minute ‘whose job is what’.

Andrew Cherwenka discusses the need for interactive leadership in his post
How Full-Service Advertising Agencies Are Becoming Interactive. He knows that the traditional agencies still have the upper hand when it comes to brand building, but they need to embrace Digital as much more than another channel. Strong Digital leadership is needed to spearhead change throughout the agency and Andrew uses the example of Derek Robson to illustrate this.

Derek is a Managing Partner at Goodby Silverstein & Partners, who has shared his experiences of evolving an agency. It’s a fascinating account of how GSP successfully changed the structure and focus of their agency.