What Is The Unique Service An Agency Really Offers?

Advertising strategy has largely been ruled by creativity in the agency world. We talked a good game about strategy, but ultimately strategy has been reduced to bullet points in a brief and a media plan. The real focus was the creative and whether or not the ad resonated with consumers. Strategy was just a means of making sure the creative accomplished some key goals. It was a support position.

But going forward, creativity is becoming more and more a commodity. Between crowdsourcing of ideas to the fracturing of communication channels, great creative is no longer the exclusive province of the agency. Creativity is still important and can greatly affect campaign outcomes, but agencies are losing ground in the battle to prove that they hold the keys to the creative kingdom. And as they lose ground, they are losing their unique selling proposition.

So if we were to look forward, where do agencies need to stake their USP? What makes the agency of the future valuable?

My own thought is that the one thing that can't be commoditized is insight and direction. A re-invigoration of the strategy disciplines is necessary so that this wealth of creative resources remains focused and effective. I envision a role somewhere between Planner and ECD, that is tasked with focusing insight, then using this to guide the diversified resources of content generation and creative output coming from many different sources.

The interesting thing about what I'm describing above is that it's not a model that agencies will be adopting. I fully believe that this change will happen organically because this is what clients are starting to force on their agency partnerships now.

Love to hear what you think.