Another Digital Divide
StumbleUponAccording to a feature in Marketing Week, the rise of online media is set to completely upstage traditional advertising - old news in some respects, but the changes to the structure of the industry that will accompany this change remain very uncertain.
According to a feature in Marketing Week, the rise of online media is set to completely upstage traditional advertising - old news in some respects, but the changes to the structure of the industry that will accompany this change remain very uncertain.
This ten-year old struggle has come to notice once more thanks to the appointment of digital specialists Albion ahead of traditional agencies Mother and WCRS.
On the one hand, this might spell the beginning of a victory for digital agencies. Analyst Bob Willott says that:
On a ten year view, digital agencies will be at the centre of the work and this will feed out into other types of skill sets. Digital will be in the driving seat.
However, rumours of the death of large agencies may be somewhat over-stated. Established ‘full service’ agencies are hiring up digital people and setting up semi-independent digital offshoots to create the appearance of specialism with the perceived advantages of belonging to a much larger group:
Just last week, Virgin Atlantic moved its £2m digital advertising into the Y&R online arm Saint@RKCR/Y&R out of incumbent Glue. RKCR chief executive James Murphy says digital agencies are hamstrung by a lack of management depth in strategy and account handling. This is why the agency set up Saint rather than buying a digital shop. The digital specialists’ lack of planning capability is a weak point that holds them back from winning above-the-line accounts, he says.
The article suggests that well-established, multinational agencies will evolve to survive, quoting Tim Lindsay, the outgoing chair of Publicis, who says that:
they will buy up digital specialists and metamorphose into the types of businesses their clients require. “In three years, there won’t be specialist digital agencies, they will be subsumed by the mainstream agencies,” he says. But the multinationals will need to consolidate the different elements of their offers - such as TV commercials, direct marketing and digital - into one profit centre and in one location.
There are other issues on the horizon, though. There’s a recruitment crisis in the IT sector, as well as the advertising and PR world, and it’s going to be particularly acute when it comes to recruiting senior digital experts to manage departments and companies in sectors that have only existed for a relatively short time.
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