The death of marketers
If you work in the world of marketing you would have noticed a certain zeitgeist - agencies are battling. Not all of them, but many are spluttering along desperately trying to stand out with quirky websites, and differentiate themselves from the other agencies with even quirkier websites. That fine line between ‘we are creative and like to write ridiculous staff bios’ and ‘look how credible our client portfolio is’.
You would have also noticed that the marketing industry’s upheaval has also been met with an identity crises unfolding in ‘rebranding’ - the progression from marketing agency, to digital agency, to innovation agency or product development agency. The semantic iterations go on.
Technology has displaced marketers as much as it has your local Mr. Video. The proliferation of technology solutions that have become easier to use mean that the offerings of agencies (previously wrapped in verbiage) can now be delivered by a non-specialists. Offshore resources with a laptop and some cool software are corroding market share for the agencies of yesterday.
Facebook, LinkedIn, crowd-sourcing content initiatives, pay per click and programmatic advertising mean that all you need now is a few hours, a credit card and a good algorithm to reach your audience. Of course if your client is victim to wholesale ignorance and has not bothered to do a simple Google search you may be lucky for some time to come, but the days are numbered.
That’s not to say that no other channels will become available to the early adopters in the world of marketing, the difference is that thanks to social media the length of differentiation will be shorter as others figure out the value and offer competing services.
I hear you say that this has always been the game - keeping up with the latest developments! But as the lifecycle of adoption shortens, marketers exponentially find themselves in a quickening arms race. Is this anyway to live or build a scalable business?
So what is the solution? For starters it is an acknowledgement that all marketing agencies with longevity are now technology companies. In fact this could be argued of most businesses in the 21st century. So what differentiates technology companies?
A good place of departure is that they are more inclined to follow a blend between creativity and engineering. Delivery, implementation, project frameworks... and as the apotheosis, in-house software development, are at the forefront. Not creativity, photoshop, and a content calendar for your Twitter feed.
By way of example, when we started our company two years ago we realised we could not be another marketing agency - there are more marketing agencies than burger joints in Cape Town, we would be salmon navigating a very crowded torrent.
We opted through a lot of thought to blur the division between automation, business development, data and marketing. It’s a tough and complex road to tread as we are learning about several discourses at once - but the payoff is in the fact that we can usurp traditional models.
The scientific side to our business informed by strong operations, data and tech means we can predict our results and work on a risk basis with our clients. So far, so good - the proof has been growth during a tough economic climate.
Will we be unique for long? Probably not. But we’re ok with that - there is nothing left worth discovering in this world that is not hidden. A pithy epithet on the virtues of curiosity and persistence; but one marketers would do well to live by.
Rebranding is not the solution - investing in specialised technology and augmenting this with divergent strategy and factory-type operations may just be the lifeline your agency has been seeking in a storm of change.