The world of marketing and advertising is witnessing a churn out phase in India and across the globe. I should rather call it a weird phase. Online world has completely transformed the way marketing and advertising worked. In the churn out, print as a medium is facing the maximum heat. Turnovers and margins for the newspapers and magazines are slipping and the marketers are putting up a clueless face. TV has managed to hold its ground. But the real show-stealer is the new media- Digital Media.
Above changes have brought major shift in the operations of the creative Agencies. The new realities are giving shape to the following types of creative agencies:
1. Large format creative agencies with newly formed digital division
These large creative agency set-ups, who have the top notch transnational and Indian brands as their clients, have added digital strength as a division within their agency operations. Even now, the planning and ideation for the campaigns are done by the traditional advertising people. Digital division chips-in as add on strength, to create a synergy in the communication across media platforms. Though in several cases even these big spending clients chose to appoint a specialist digital agency for the online marketing and reputation management purpose. These agencies have most of their MNC clients coming with international alignment with larger groups or domestic clients who fancy working with big ticket names.
2. Mid-size creative agencies
Some of the mid-size agencies working for home grown clients still exist, but they are facing the heat. As the media environment has seen a shift, even the home grown clients are gradually cutting down on their budgets for traditional advertising models. Such clients are looking towards their digital agencies to work closely with the traditional creative agency. However, the digital agencies are walking away with major chunk of fee. Nobody is to blame, it is the macro environment that has changed.
3. Typical digital agencies
Digital agencies of all sizes starting from 2 people agency to 200 people agency, are dotting the town today. They have the resources and the manpower to understand the digital environment, digital media and they have a roster of both Indian and MNC clients, depending upon the size and operations. I have worked closely with some of these agencies, and find, they are good at driving immediate traffic, catching the consumer eyeballs but they lack a sound understanding of long term brand building. Reason is, the digital savvy young manpower does not have the required exposure and experience. They know all the new technology jargons, some marketing terminologies but in many a cases I doubt if they are doing good for their clients with a long term brand perspective. Again, they are not to be blamed. Digital media is being presented as completely metrics based media with performance from day one. That’s the reason, nobody has the clue what will be the brand position on day 1000. Quality in work is hard to find, this is something anyone can experience.
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Digital creative agencies promoted by traditional marketing people who have thoroughly learnt and updated themselves with the requirements of the online world. To my understanding they are the best equipped to handle creative assignments for any business. Such digital creative agencies have in-depth understanding of the marketing dynamics and they can easily leverage the new media to the advantage of the clients and brands they work for. It’s a relatively rare find, but the best one. Unfortunately, they are not doing as well as they deserved to be. Reason being, clients looking for digital agencies think they are from the old world marketing school, on the other hand, clients looking for traditional experience think they are trying to go digital. So they became victims of the dilemma from the client perspective. In this articles I have deliberately avoided taking any names and examples for obvious reasons. If anybody is interested to know further, I am contactable on my mail: [email protected]
