Aaron Bateman's year-long project to explore what the Agency of the future might look like.

1. AGENCY FUTURE
AGENCY FUTURE

2. AGENCY FUTURE
I won a travel grant awarded annually by the
Danish Association of Ad Agencies. I called the
project ’Agency Future’ – it would be an inves-
CHAMPAGNE tigation of emerging business models in the ad
industry. I’ll get back to the project in a second
& OYSTERS! but first a bit about me…

3. AGENCY FUTURE
As a former journalist, I seem drawn to industries
beset by massive change brought about by the In-
ternet! Although just a lowly reporter on a weekly
newspaper with a small circulation, I wasn’t blind
to the quiet urgency exhibited by the suits in the
organization. I discovered Jeff Jarvis’ Buzzma-
chine blog and I began to take an interest in the
fundamental dynamics of the newspaper indus-
try. It fascinated me that something as crude
as Craigslist could decimate classified revenue,
effectively pulling the rug from under the legs of
the industry. I began to take a macro view.
I had always assumed that I’d be in newspapers
for the rest of my career, that newspapers were
too big to die, and that their function was too
entrenched in society to be usurped. But when
Newsquest (the publishers of my newspaper)
began cutting costs and replacing more and more
editorial space with ad space, I could see the
writing on the wall.
But then came a woman, and Denmark, and
Copenhagen and no more journalism. But I’ve
retained that macro fascination with the waxing
and waning of industries. I studied History at uni-
versity, which furnished me with a greater sense
OUT OF THE of perspective, and the realisation that everything
is subject to the same constant forces of trans-
FRYING PAN, mutation.
INTO THE FIRE But Agency Future – what exactly was my pitch?

4. AGENCY FUTURE
In essence, this: ‘Half documentary, half social media exper-
iment, my ultimate ambition is to produce a snapshot of an
industry in flux, while also showcasing the collaborative and
transformative power of the tools powering the upheavals.’
When I entered the world of advertising about four years ago,
I realised immediately that it was undergoing many of the
same disruptive changes as the newspaper industry. It had
taken a few years to catch up but advertising too was now
being forced to fundamentally re-examine its practices in
order to stay profitable and relevant. In ways I was only just
dimly becoming aware of, the Internet was once again the
dread force at work – disintermediating, disrupting, destroy-
ing.
My arrival in advertising also coincided roughly with the
credit crisis which in turn precipitated a huge downturn in ad
spend. The fortunes of the big four networks WPP, Omni-
com, Publicis and Interpublic appeared to be on the wane. In
September 2009, Sir Martin Sorrell, the chairman of WPP,
announced that his organisation ‘couldn’t fire people fast
enough to keep up with the downturn in ads’.
Digital agencies had never been sexier and seemed to prom-
ise a smarter way to connect to consumers while eschewing
the production-heavy models of the big agencies. Leaner,
more agile agencies began to emerge, with a proposition of
making their clients’ money work harder.
AN INDUSTRY http://www.businessinsider.com/henry-blodget-wpps-sor-
rell-we-cant-fire-people-fast-enough-to-keep-up-with-the-
IN FLUX collapse-in-ads-2009-9

5. AGENCY FUTURE
What does
that mean?

6. AGENCY FUTURE
The project would represent the changes be-
setting the industry – it would symbolise the
disruptive forces that have denuded advertising
agencies and media buyers of so much of their
strategic advantage. Specifically it would use so-
cial media to raise awareness, and it would adopt
the principles of crowdsourcing in order to tap
people’s wisdom about who they thought I should
speak to.
I also wanted the project to reflect the open, col-
laborative spirit of the internet as I understood it.
I took the standpoint of a relatively inexperienced
copywriter who knew little about the fundamen-
tals of the business of advertising but would use
the internet to talk to people who did.
But most importantly, I wanted the project to be
a living document of the changes besetting the
industry. Although I would have to present my
findings after a year (the presentation you are
reading now), I realised that agencies would not
stop evolving and that those findings would prob-
The project would be ably be irrelevant before too long. As I write, my
agency – Advance – has agreed that the project
a ‘disruption example’ should continue.

7. AGENCY FUTURE
So the project is a blog and the content
is the interviews with the people shaping
the changes affecting the industry
(or at least reacting to them quickest):
http://www.agencyfuture.com/

8. AGENCY FUTURE
I talked to people at a diverse range of agencies
– trad, digital, new model. What they had in com-
mon was a determination to evolve, and to shape
the future of the industry. Preserving the status
quo is not an option for these agencies.

9. AGENCY FUTURE
The project is a Twitter feed with over 800 followers.
Twitter has been crucial in terms of crowdsour-
cing ideas, and gathering suggestions as to who
I should interview. Twitter has also been far more
effective than email in reaching out to people,
forging a connection and getting them to agree to
contribute to the project.
http://twitter.com/#!/agencyfuture

10. AGENCY FUTURE
The project is also a resource with over 100 links
tagged #agencyfuture and publically viewable on
my Delicious:
http://www.delicious.com/Aaron78/agencyfuture

11. AGENCY FUTURE
All the agencies I spoke to agreed that advertising
had changed fundamentally and that the days in
WHAT HAVE I LEARNED? which advertisers just needed to be able to shout
louder than their competitors were gone forever.
Some key quotes:
‘Anomaly started with a few people who were
essentially all marketing refugees. The core was
and is creative thinking. I think a lot of us had
become frustrated with the environments we were
in. In my case I was in an advertising agency. One
day the realisation came that we had 200 people
in a building killing themselves to produce a bad
short movie that wasn’t going to be the answer to
the client’s problem.’ – Johnny Vulkan, Anomaly
‘Agencies need to offer much more value to their
clients than ever before but it’s precisely because
they’re so big that they’re so slow to change.
The genie is well and truly out the bottle now. You
• Yes, new business models are emerging need to be able to adapt in real time, and you need
to test your thinking as your producing it. Clients
(crowdsourcing and owned IPs) already want to work in a more nimble way.
People’s attention is so fragmented and clients
• But they are simply a byproduct of the gradual need agencies staying on top of what’s happening
in a much more effective way and which are able
erosion of the regular, production-heavy model to create something that works throughout
different attention spots.’ – Sam Reid, Guided
‘Strip it down and the internet serves a basic
• The real change is the growing realisation human desire – it connects us to stuff. But, it also
offers us more control than ever before. So the
that in today’s world, the answer to clients’ challenge now is to create ideas that people want
to connect to, ideas that enhance lives.’ – Henry
problems is rarely better advertising Chilcott, Antidote

12. AGENCY FUTURE
THE CONVERSATION HAS CHANGED
FROM, ‘WHAT DO WE WANT TO TELL
THE CONSUMER ABOUT OUR BRAND’,
TO ‘WHAT DOES THE CONSUMER
DESIRE/NEED/EXPECT FROM THE
BRAND?’
SCOTT MELIN For me, this quote encapsulates the emerging
CEO OF FACTORY DESIGN LABS dynamic of what we crudely call the ‘ad industry’.

13. AGENCY FUTURE
FLUX
This is uncharted territory for ad agencies.
Ad expenditure is fragmenting along with media
consumption. Long-held agency certainties are
shattering – from team set-up to principles of
effective communication. The challenges are
numerous and daunting – they include getting
to grips with constantly evolving digital channels,
mobilizing and involving more empowered
consumers and reworking the organisation
to be more reactive, agile and innnovative.
The new world order for agencies is flux
(continuous change).

14. AGENCY FUTURE
New channels – from search to geotargetting to
apps, to tablet computing – are forcing agencies to
evolve faster than ever.
BBH London recognised the problem and acted:
‘The problem is, creativity is way more complicated
than it used to be. It’s a difficult process to man-
age in this day and age. The world we work in has
changed and we knew that if we didn’t respond we
would no longer be able to deliver a sparkling crea-
tive product and future proof our business.
‘These days BBH is unrecognisable from the
company it started as. We’ve always been about
advertising magic and the great idea, but now
that thinking has been liberated by new technol-
ogy and a vast new media landscape. The speed in
which we respond to briefs has accelerated, clients
demand more than just TV, Press, Posters etc.
We have to look at brands as the whole story not
just one piece of the pie. And that’s all good. But a
business founded in 1982 is not going to be able to
process these requests so we needed to change to
embrace them and indeed, get ahead of them.’

15. AGENCY FUTURE
To quote Made By Many co-founder William Owen,
‘the future of advertising is not advertising’.
Broadcast is no longer first and last resort and
controlled, one-way messaging is giving way to
conversational marketing.The holy grail today is
earned media.
For more on this, see Mr Owen’s peerless recent
presentation on the subject:
http://madebymany.com/blog/my-talk-on-future-
advertising-models-at-the-apa

16. AGENCY FUTURE
‘MARKETING IN THE FUTURE This is a quote from a recent Fast Company article
– The Future of Advertising.
IS LIKE SEX. ONLY THE LOSERS This sums up the tone of the article:
WILL HAVE TO PAY FOR IT’ ‘Over the past few years, because of a combina-
tion of Internet disintermediation, recession, and
corporate blindness, the assembly line has been
obliterated -- economically, organizationally, and
culturally.’
It’s a must-read: http://www.fastcompany.com/
magazine/151/mayhem-on-madison-avenue.html
But in the interests of balance, be sure to read
this BusinessWeek article that appeared just a
week or so later, and shows the big four holding
companies in rude health, and fighting back by
‘carefully, painfully reconfiguring their workforces
to take advantage of the changing landscape.’
JON BOND It’s also a must-read: http://www.business-
week.com/print/magazine/content/10_49/
COFOUNDER OF KIRSCHENBAUM BOND SENECAL b4206074203079.htm

17. AGENCY FUTURE
WHAT IS THE MINDSET OF
THE AGENCY OF THE FUTURE?
This is not easy to condense but my highly
simplistic synopsis would be: ‘Think beyond
messaging – think utility, entertainment, social
currency. Think value, think meaning.’

18. AGENCY FUTURE
CREATE STUFF THAT
HAS A RIGHT TO EXIST
IN PEOPLE’S LIVES
I think Henry Chilcott, managing partner of
Antidote, says it best with this.

19. AGENCY FUTURE
Antidote were asked to raise the profile of the
cycling performance wear brand Rapha – it sug-
gested pop-up cafes in New York and London to
coincide with the Tour De France and beyond. The
result was a massive upsurge in awareness and
sales.

20. AGENCY FUTURE
Rapha’s London pop-up café.

21. AGENCY FUTURE
Burberry’s Art of the Trench - ‘A living docu-
ment of the Burberry trench and the people who
wear it.’ In sync with the participatory dynamic
of much successful contemporary brand com-
munication and successfully positioned Burberry
in the burgeoning street style movement. Earned
an estimated 6.8m in PR coverage and increased
trench sales by 85%.

22. AGENCY FUTURE
Anomaly’s ‘Domaination’ campaign for Converse
took the bold step of rethinking the traditional
campaign as a game.
http://vimeo.com/8254341

23. AGENCY FUTURE
NEW AGENCY BEHAVIOURS
So far, I’ve talked a lot about how advertising has
changed, but not specifically about what agencies
need to do to stay relevant. The behaviours that
follow are some of the key trends I’ve identified
based on the interviews I’ve conducted and my
continuing study of those agencies’ actions.

24. AGENCY FUTURE
HIRE CREATIVE The copywriter/AD team is arguably no longer fit
for purpose in a communications landscape
TECHNOLOGISTS utterly transformed by digital channels. Both
BBH London and W+K London now employing
creative technologists and are reporting successful
integration. The role is still vaguely defined but I
like this description from Weir and Wong:
‘It’s someone who knew the ins and outs of
technology and they were able to work out the
creative possibilities of an idea. This person
didn’t sit at the end of a factory-line creative
process, but got involved in the strategy, the
big idea, and then the implementation and how
it grew from there.’
http://weirandwong.com/blog/creative-technologist/

25. AGENCY FUTURE
LEARN TO COLLABORATE
Many of the agencies I spoke to found strength in
their networks. There was a refreshing realism
at work, with both Anomaly and Made by Many
readily acknowledging that ‘they couldn’t possibly
know it all’ but were prepared to work with who-
ever necessary to solve their clients’ problems.
Indeed, agencies are collaborating even when not
solving specific client problems. Dentsu London
and Berg have recently worked on a series of
films, speculating on the future of media. The
results are beautiful and thought-provoking:
http://vimeo.com/16423237
It’s a relationship that recognises that no one
agency has all the answers, and which pushes
and develops their own creativity, while enabling
them to take the lead in the discussion about the
future of media.

26. AGENCY FUTURE
BECOME AN AUTHORITY
Made by Many’s recent Signals experiment is a
good example of this. Existing alongside their
regular blog but fulfilling a more specific function
in terms of positioning the agency as invested
in particular topics. A lot of their work revolves
around content provision so their Future of News
and Future of Television signals are especially
apt. The signals are ‘streams of content and
analysis around the big themes they think are
exciting and urgent’.
Leading and shaping the debate around these
‘big themes’ is an increasingly important way for
agencies to market themselves and increase their
visibility. Today’s hyperconnected world makes
it easy for clients to see who the real authorities
are.
http://madebymany.com/signals

27. AGENCY FUTURE
BECOME FUTUREPROOF
Of the agencies I spoke with only BBH have gone
so far as to set up an actual ‘Labs’ entity within
their organisation, but all agreed with the neces-
sity of constant innovation and keeping up with
technological and behavioural changes. The job
of an agency Lab is to explore new expressions of
creativity, and to act as a scout for the rest of the
agency – pulling it into the future.
To quote Mel Exxon, founding partner of BBH
Labs: ‘The role of Labs here boils down to two
things, I think - 1. Reducing complexity (new stuff
can look and feel labyrinthine at the outset, it
helps to have a few scouts) and 2. Accelerating
the transfer of knowledge.’
More here: http://www.influxinsights.com/blog/
article/2636/why-agencies-need-labs.html

28. AGENCY FUTURE
LEARN LEANNESS
co: is a brand innovation studio
for the 21st century CMO & CEO. Made by Many describe themselves as ‘thinking
like a start-up’. It’s an attitude that many more
established agencies may need to adopt in the near
future as clients continue to drive down billings
and means of production continue to get cheaper.
An early example comes in the form of co:
Describing itself as a brand innovation studio,
co: has assembled a network of best-in-class
specialist agencies from which it can assemble
teams to solve any brief. Co: itself remains lean
and nimble, with minimal overheads.
http://www.cocollective.com/

29. AGENCY FUTURE
‘THE REAL VOYAGE OF DISCOVERY
CONSISTS NOT IN SEEKING
NEW LANDSCAPES BUT IN HAVING
NEW EYES’
Forgive the slightly pretentious ending, but I want-
ed to stress the wholesale nature of the changes
MARCEL PROUST besetting this industry. We have to learn our jobs
all over again. We need new eyes.

30. AGENCY FUTURE
THANKYOU!
@AARON78

31. AGENCY FUTURE
ADVANCE.DK