Seth on the Future of Ad Agencies

Seth always gets to the heart of the matter.

“What ad agencies ought to do, in my opinion, is not focus on selling ads anymore. And instead, focus on getting in deeper within the clients, and help the clients make products that people want to talk about.”

“The problem is that ad agencies have defined themselves as the people who take the mediocre products and add interesting ads to them, and washed their hands and say, we can’t do anything about what the factory brings us. And my answer is, of course you can, and the clients actually want you to, you’re just not working hard enough to get that piece of business.”

“Style and fashion spread through the ad agency business really fast. But they’re very bad at changing what they do for a living, they’re very bad at any form of new media, they’re bad at pushing clients to really dramatically, fundamentally reinvent themselves. What they’re very good at is adopting a new slogan or a new look or a new image. That’s deckchair re-arranging.”

“The way to get promoted in an ad agency is to get a new client who spends lots of money on television. Well, if that’s the way you get promoted, what do you think people are going to do all day?”

Comments

[GrahamHill]

John

You just have to agree with Seth. I have lost count of the number of times the advertising of mediocre products (and particularly their wrap-around services) hugely over-promised only to be disappointed when the products didn't deliver. I do not appear to be alone in this score.

But I would disagree with Seth's implied suggestion that Ad Agencies should be the ones that drive businesses to reinvent themselves. In my experience, Ad Agencies are very poor at understanding how business really works. Much of the time they don't seem all that interested either. They make awful strategic advisors because of these two things: a lack of understanding and a lack of interest.

Businesses need to reinvent themselves, without external advisors (like myself). They need to understand their customers and what they want. They need to understand what they are good at. They need to understand how they make money. And they need to understand how these three things come together to create the customer experience, which in turn becomes the brand (in the mind of the customer).

Graham Hill
Independent Marketing Consultant