• by Richard Whitman , Columnist, October 19, 2016

Here we go again. Yet another agency promises to reinvent the ad agency by -- surprise -- doing things in a completely different way! This time it's the hilariously named Blinding Glimpse of the Obvious. The agency is based in Chicago and headed up by former Digitas creative strategist Mark Beeching. 

Blinding Glimpse of the Obvious (BGO) promises to think, work, and make money in ways never before done by agencies of the past. I'm told it's been set up in a way not to push marketing at CMOs, not to add to the noise, confusion, and cost of an increasingly messy agency marketplace. 

The agency will work with what they call an inside/out model. The agency will shape, buy, and orchestrate marketing from inside client operations which Beeching claims will be free from structures of legacy agency business models, cost structures, or turf wars. 

Of this new approach, Beeching said: "This isn't about selling brands more options. It's about helping them filter through the noise and understand what moves the needle. What to do. What not to do. How to do it. It's about ideas and execution freed from old agency bias and burdens." 

Yeah -- no one's ever done it that way before. 

Working with Beecham is another Digitas alum, Stephanie Sarofian, who said: "It's already a badly confused agency landscape for clients. It's a buyer's market. Why add to the problem and noise? Brands don't need more new approaches to marketing, but a new approach to the agency." 

Hammering home the approach, BGO financial guy Aaron Webber adds: "Agency change is smoke and mirrors or short-lived at best if you don't fundamentally change finances too." The agency plans to share risks and rewards in a variety of ways including performance-based remuneration as well as joint ventures with shared or full-risk ownership and funding by BGO. 

Gleefully slamming the status quo, head strategist Ron Gibori added: "We don't hide behind the façade of ad spends, mark-ups, and billable hours. We want to pull back the veil and get to work. We're very much an agency of record, of the collaborative economy, not agency zero-sum games, and freed up by our business/operating model to stay brilliantly small, transparent, and do what we believe in for clients, not push what we do."  

Right. 

Hey, you can't blame an agency for trying, right? Of course no one's really succeeded in doing anything radically new. Sure, plenty of agencies have slapped a new coat of paint on their exteriors but when you get right down to it, an agency's primary function is still to help a brand sell stuff by telling the right people about that brand in a way that makes those people want to buy the brand's product. Do we really need all this fancy buzzword bingo to convey what I just said in one sentence?