Ryan MacMillan

I don’t get ‘advertising’. This week I was chatting to an eminent media chappy and realised that I don’t understand what ‘advertising’ is and why people have businesses called ‘advertising’ agencies.

A different confession: I’ve replaced the word “digital” with “advertising” in the above quote. The original came from Richard Huntington’s blog, AdLiterate. Richard is the Planning Director of United London.

Richard claims (mischievously) that he doesn’t understand why people have ‘digital’ agencies.

By “people”, it’s probably safe to assume he means both clients and agency networks. As I understand it, Richard is talking about “brand communications” digital agencies here (and - by implication - not the software engineers who install your e-commerce platform).

Without going into it, while we at RMM are clearly digital, we’re not a digital agency. But we’ve all worked at digital agencies, or for the digital wings of broadcast agencies, so we have a keen interest in this sort of question. I thought about posting this on Richard’s blog, but - really - this response is now too long and involved, so I cleared it with Richard that I’d post it here.

His argument falls into three parts. I’m taking them slightly out of order, but they can be summed up as follows. Digital agencies are:

1) No better than they should be: despite their claims, digital agencies don’t actually do anything very remarkably different from broadcast agencies. Therefore, the distinction is meaningless.

2) Not what they say they are: Agencies aren’t production houses. Therefore having digital production capability doesn’t define you as an digital agency; it defines you as a digital production house.

3)No different from the rest: Everything is digital. Therefore, the word is meaningless as a descriptor of an agency’s activities.

No better than they should be

Maybe, Richard argues, people who call themselves a “digital agency” mean that they are more in tune with emerging audiences, audiences who expect more interactivity with brands, audiences who want a voice of their own. But then, he asks,

…how come so many are still grubbing around in the world of interruptive banners and pop-ups with scant regard to the cluetrained populace that is viewing their work.

The implication being that since so many agencies still base campaigns around pop-ups and banners it must devalue the activities of all current and future agencies in this space. This is flawed logic; arguing from the particular to the general in this manner doesn’t invalidate the need for digital agencies. It just suggests that we need better digital agencies.

One of the problems our market faces is that decisions the media and marketing industries made in the early days rapidly became enshrined. The decisions were often based on their understanding of broadcast markets, and weren’t right for the emerging channels. Now these industries have too much invested in these early decisions: and they’ve become the basis for too many of their business offerings. They’re unwilling to ask difficult questions. Little wonder that new players are stealing their space.

My point: just because we’ve been doing something for ten years doesn’t make it right. There is still room for change. It’s possible, therefore, to imagine a better digital agency, and dismiss this argument. Nevertheless this remains an important criticism, and not one I’d dismiss lightly were I a digital agency.

Not what they say they are

An alternative approach, suggests Richard, might be to suppose that digital agencies are those agencies with digital production capabilities: coders, designers, and so-on. People who can build you a website, or a flash banner. But these are simply craftspeople; and ad agencies employ consultants and advisers, not craftspeople.

Sure there will always need to be digital production houses with very clever people and lots of big kit - online equivalents of The Mill if you like. But they won’t be front line communications advisers to clients, they will be craftspeople not consultants.

This is slightly more complicated argument. At one level, we’d all agree: an agency shouldn’t be tied into making recommendations based on its capabilities. If you employ dozens of Flash developers, it probably does rather colour the recommendations you make to your clients. One of the reasons we set up RMM in the first place was to get away from this: we wanted to be able to offer our clients the right answer at the right time.

In fact, when we set up our consultancy, we stuck close to what we saw as the broadcast agency model.

But RMM isn’t a pure consultancy. Our expertise is in digital media, just as broadcast agencies’ expertise is in broadcast media.

Digital agencies employ people with new kinds of skills: information architects, user-experience planners, usability experts, data analysts, eCRM specialists. What sets these people apart is not that they are not brand thinkers, but that they think about brand experience in different ways. For digital agencies, brand follows function, interaction, and utility.

Comparing broadcast agencies and digital agencies is like comparing painters and film directors with architects and games-designers. No-one uses what a painter does, just as no-one uses a 30-second film. They are expert storytellers and communicators who can convey emotional, visceral messages.

An architect or a digital planner, on the other hand, must ask questions like, “how will people expect to use this?” “which spaces are public, and which spaces are private, and what are the flows between them”, and even “what if something goes wrong?”

We have a certain skill-base, and a certain way of approaching problems. This doesn’t make digital agencies ‘craftspeople’ or ‘production houses’, any more than a TV skill-base does broadcast agencies.

No different from the rest

Everything is digital. The word is meaningless. Richard says that he struggles “to find some non-digital means of communication.”

Is this just semantics? Of course, at one level it is. As Richard points out, we can’t really use the phrase “new media” more, as:

…media is evolving at such a pace that today’s new media is tomorrow’s been-there-done-that media

I think he (and we) can dismiss this argument quite easily. ‘Digital’ is a label - perhaps a silly one - but one that receives its meaning (like all signs) through common use and understanding. My immediate response to this question was “we call it digital because that’s what the clients to whom we talk call it. That’s what they want to buy.”

But this is a glib response. We have to accept that technology convergence is a real pressure on both the media and marketing industries.

When we set up RMM, we recognised that we had a limited window of opportunity for what we’re doing. Broadcast agencies employ smart young people, so our edge will erode within five years. We’ll probably see them stop trying to spooge their broadcast sensibilities into interactive channels.

Until then, we feel, there’s an opportunity for us.

What’s really interesting, of course, is that our generation of planners (I started working full-time in digital marketing in’96 at AKQA, before going through digital wings at Lowes, BMP, HHCL) will always have a better idea of “how it works” than the subsequent generations (for whom there never really was a “before”). I think that the really revolutionary work is done by people who have this kind of knowledge.

It’s like the difference between the generation of kids who grew up with command-line computer interfaces, and those who grew up with a graphical drag-and-drop interface, PlayStations, etc. Sure, the experience is more “ingrained” in their experience, but they don’t have the same sense of perspective, the same freedom of thought. There are structures in place that define the way developers think, and what audiences will accept.

For some reason, the advertising world hasn’t really done the revolutionary work that should have been expected of us. Much of what digital agencies did in the 90s was derivative, misplaced; like children trying on clothes from the dressing-up box. This has only really happened in our world: outside it, the digital world is vibrant, exciting - and as revolutionary as I could wish it to be.