The Flamethrower of Truth: Agencies Obsolete?
If the agency.com experiment tells us one thing, it’s that the day of the agency might be over.
Consider this: based on number of views, the product of these brilliant creative minds is only about 1/500th as compelling as a nerdy white guy dancing (Evolution of Dance), 1/130th as interesting as a Japanese toilet prank (in unsubbed Japanese, no less), and 1/36th as effective as the Volkswagen Unpimp Your Ride ads (true brilliance in what many consider to be a “dead” medium.)
They’re losing to people running through malls, highlights of the latest Sony tech gadgets, reporters having a bad day at the office, the Japanese national anthem, college pranks. Hell, a girl talking about her lazy eye got 600,000 views in the last 2 weeks.
So why didn’t they hire her? Why didn’t they think of working their connections for a b- or z-list celeb who isn’t afraid to make fun of themselves (hello, Hoff)? Why didn’t they think of wrapping it all up in a nice big shiny story-wrapper?
To someone on the outside, it may seem like we’re moving into a new era, where agencies aren’t The Sole Repository of All That Is Creative and The Keepers of the Edgy.
And you know, they might be right.
There are times when I’ve seen more creativity in SomethingAwful’s Photoshop Phridays than I’ve seen in agency work. More thought in Fark.com than in agency concept and strategy. And accessing these creative thinkers is a breeze. In fact, there are whole sites that facilitate this phenomenon.
So is the era of the agency over? Should companies fire us all and hire a bunch of geeky college kids instead? Should they drop their Britney Spears contract and hire the Evolution of Dance guy? Should they be thinking about revenue models that encourage the best and brightest of the new content creators to jump into their own MediaPool? Should they hand cameras to several thousand of their best customers and announce the age of “reality advertising?”
Probably.
Or at least they should think about it. With most content online being user-generated, the traditional models of branding and “share of voice” are dead. The closer they are to their customers, the better they’re going to do.
“So, wait a minute!” you say. “You’re cutting your own throat!”
Not at all. The model has changed, and we’re doing everything we can to stay in front of it. We’re helping our clients become their own advertainment companies. We’re modeling the ways viral campaigns propagate online and building campaigns around it. We’re putting together openly available networks and applications to create new ways of marketing. We’re theorizing (and helping to build) entirely new revenue models, such as microproduction and the MediaPool. We’re looking for ways to fit our clients into a new world where we have a de facto reputation economy and near-complete transparency between corporation and consumer. And we’re coming up with some really neat ideas. Not All the Ideas in the Universe, or All That Be Great and Cool, but some. A few. Enough.
And, over the next weeks and months, we’ll be sharing them with you.
