Why Ad Agencies Are No Longer In Charge
I work for a company, Large Blue, that describes itself as an integrated digital communications agency. A few years ago, we were a video production company and web development agency. Over those years, we’ve thrashed through “what we are” umpteen times. However, it wasn’t until yesterday that I really understood what was going on.
Prompted by this comment exchange and a few tweets, I was fortunate enough to meet Justin McMurray and Paul Sims from Made by Many, a company that creates “very social digital stuff”.
They are “fairly obsessed” by “service thinking”. As Justin says,
“I think the people from whom we can take most inspiration are the service design agencies. They do have fixation on the right customer and they understand that co-production is the merging of production and consumption, not simply a cool way of describing a few people working on a project together :)”
I have to confess that until this meeting, I’d never really understood what “service design” meant. Justin and Paul were passionate enough for me to finally wrangle Google into some decent results (“service design” agency -“full service”) and to check out live|work, an agency they collaborate with.
The live|work homepage has a great slideshow that explains how service design applies user centred design to every interface (or “touchpoint”) that customers interact with.
For example, service design for Laithwaites might mean focusing on the customer experience across their wines, website, product deliveries, brochures and literature, events, telephone sales and customer support.
For those of us in web design, it’s actually a very familiar concept. Well versed in the concepts of user experience and agile development, service design is, in a sense, the application of web thinking to wider business and marketing. However, whilst familiar to “us”, this focus on customer experience is alien to traditional branding and is quite simply not something that traditional agencies are geared up to be able to do.
If we look at a visual overview of a generic business model, where does branding fit in? We can see it’s about crafting the value proposition:
Whereas we can see service design is focused on the interface with the customer:
Branding develops messaging and value propositions. These are then exported and imposed “top-down”. Service design, in contrast, is bottom up. It swaps the direction of the arrows around, much as UGC turned TV broadcasting on its head (instead of the brand dictating the customer messaging, the message from the customer dictates the brand).
The thing is that user centred design works. As Justin’s original post pointed out, “Most new products fail because they’re the ‘wrong’ product, not because of project or executional risk.” How do you make sure you’re making the right product? You get out of the office, “It’s about testing and iterating every part of your business model and product, and about getting frequent and fast customer guidance as much and as early as possible.”
Traditional agencies can’t do this because they’re setup to be centralised and hierarchical. Their whole value offer is based on being smart enough to develop the right message for brands and campaigns. Whilst that process includes research (testing ideas and messaging through focus groups) it’s research designed to fix a consistent message which is then delivered through top down machinery. Any bottom-up co-creation is tokenistic, because they defined the creative in the pitch!
This has created a power shift where smart operators are focusing their effort and resources on customer experience, instead of traditional branding. Smaller, smarter, practitioner agencies, who are trying to adopt user centred design and agile methodologies are challenging established ad agency and PR incumbents. We’ve known at Large Blue for some time that these agencies need to come to us both for ideas and execution. However, until now, we’ve defined our “rise” up the pecking order in the redundant terminology of the companies we’re essentially replacing.
I can see now that this really misses the point. We should learn from the likes of live|work and Made by Many and proclaim our role in our own terms. We’re agile, we listen, we’re focused on the user experience and that’s precisely why we’re now in charge.
