• by Tony Quin , Columnist, April 2, 2008

Agencies had better pay attention and move fast

Forget the elephant in the room, there is a rather large one sitting in the middle of Madison Avenue. Interactive, the Internet, broadband, mobile — call it what you will, the digital behemoth is in the process of wreaking havoc on the traditional agency models we have known for 50 years or more. The facts are simple. The Internet, in many and ever-evolving forms, has already profoundly changed the way people discover, understand, select and interact.

In an Internet-centric world, the dynamics of how the consumer moves through the sales process from awareness to consideration to conversion is radically different, so how a brand attempts to influence it must also change. It used to be that the primary focus of marketing and advertising was on influencing awareness. Consideration and conversion were mostly left to the sales channel. In the Internet era, three pillars of the sales process have been connected for the first time ever. Now consumers find you through search and get to know you through Web sites. They evaluate, compare, buy and have their relationships online. Not exclusively, of course, but increasingly the majority of brand touch points for most people are digital. The job of the agency is no longer about media and messaging. The job becomes influencing behavior. That requires mapping and shaping the digital consumer experience of a brand from first awareness through conversion and then to retention and advocacy. As you might imagine, this is a bit more complicated than making TV spots.

The agencies of the future first must have a profound understanding of digital user behavior. They need to understand how to connect the dots, from strategy to creating awareness to designing persuasive consideration and driving conversion and retention. In a broadband digital world this takes deep technology, strategy, analytics skills and experience. It also takes user-experience architecture, information architecture and content development skills. But that’s not all. The agency of tomorrow must also have the strategy and brand skills of a traditional agency, the content skills of a television-production company and the discipline of a software-development company. Then these skills must seamlessly come together to cost-effectively map and create a consistent brand experience across all the touch points a consumer travels through.

This sounds like a very different kind of agency, and for most traditional shops it’s a virtually impossible task to become such a radically different organization. It’s not that they don’t get it; it’s just that the people, processes, perspective and skills needed are very different and few organizations are capable of the fundamental gut-wrenching, dangerous and expensive change required. As a result, these agencies of the future will probably come from interactive shops that have learned or incorporated the comparatively simpler skill sets of traditional agencies.

Already we are seeing a new breed of interactive agency with these deeper, broader skill sets. These agencies create Internet-centric strategies that incorporate both digital and traditional tactics. They design, test and manage digital experiences across all touch points — from e-mails and dot-coms to widgets and mobile. They create traditional as well as interactive drive to ads, including print, TV and direct mail. They know how to produce the stream of content required to keep the consumer engaged at every step. Every day these new kinds of agencies are getting more respect and recognition from marketers, and before long they will inevitably drive the business of the brand. When that happens they will no longer be interactive agencies or even agencies of the future, they will just be the agency. 

Tony Quin is the founder and CEO of IQ Interactive. (tony@iqtv.com)