Just came across this old (July 2008) but good article / interview with Alistair King on Bizcommunity. He makes some hard-hitting but very relevant points.
Ad agencies are “bottom-feeders”
- Alistair King
By: Vivian Warby
Alistair
King, creative director of KingJames and one of the judges in this
year's Loeries Awards, tells it as it is in the industry these days, no
holds barred.
“We have become bottom-feeders,” he says, talking quite
frankly about ad agencies in the new era.
“We
get our creative kicks cheaply and without the pain of having to fight
with clients and persuade them of the value of a great advertising
idea. The pressure of keeping clients is now officially greater than
the desire to push them harder to make great advertising.”
Sad indictment
This,
he says, is a sad indictment, “not just for agencies but also for
marketers, that the best advertising this country makes is seldom for
public consumption. It's for industry consumption.
“That needs to change for advertising agencies to earn back the respect it feels it deserves.”
But
the future is not all bad, says King. “Agencies, I believe, will
continue to grow it skills in making brands live and breathe in
multiple places. In fact, agencies that don't learn these skills will
perish. The need for innovation will grow as the price of media grows,
and this will be good for the agencies that hold the best brains.”
He
does not expect any whirlwind changes to how advertisers communicate to
consumers, but does expect there to be an incremental move each year
towards embracing more and more mobile media.
“I think media
is getting more and more fragmented with more and more advertising
mediums being on offer, but I do believe it will be a long time before
classic advertising on classic mediums like TV, print and radio, will
be redundant. I think in the short term, cutting edge technology will
create a ton of new advertising vehicles, but I do believe that the
bulk of consumers will ingest their advertising the good old fashioned
way. In fact, for as long as I have been in advertising, the web has
been touted as the next advertising paradigm, and yet here we sit, 15
years later with the web attracting only the slightest portion of ad
spend. I find the constant hype around the next big thing to be rather
exaggerated.”
Major fragmentation
In the last
decade there also appeared to be major fragmentation in a number of
areas; in particular strategy and media. “In the '80s, media (planning
and buying) was housed in agencies, and was, in fact, the norm for how
agencies were remunerated. During the '90s, independent media houses
emerged en mass, and marketers often liaise directly with media
companies, sometimes independent to its agency.
“In more
recent times, media companies, who now find their markup being
squeezed, are even attempting to grab a greater portion of the budget
by attempting to generate strategy, and even creative. What qualifies
them to do so is a mystery to me, but it's happening, and is often
painful to witness.
“I believe that media will gradually
gravitate back to agencies, and brands will be better off for it. In my
opinion, handling media outside of the creative process has been
destructive to brands.
“The emergence of strategic consultants
is also relatively new. There are some very good strategic companies
around, but there are also some shockers. It seems anyone who was once
in client service in an agency can now position themselves as a
strategic consultant, and charge obscene fees in the process. I am
often amazed at how hard it is to get a client to increase their agency
retainer by a few thousand rand a month, but how easily that same
client will blow a couple of hundred thousand rand on a consultant
without blinking. Again, I believe strategy should work in tandem with
the creative process, and when it doesn't it is counter productive for
brands,” he concludes.
[24 Jul 2008 23:54]
