1950 Called.

It Wants Its Creative Agency Model Back.

We all know the relay race of the standard advertising agency operating model. A creative team of an art director and a copywriter is briefed to come up with the concept for a client campaign. The pair are given a few days – or if they are lucky, a few more – to brainstorm ideas. Meanwhile another team – usually in an entirely different agency – is building the media plan for the same campaign. Once the client has selected a creative direction, additional experts will be pulled in to figure out how to bring the campaign to life across the selected media. If you are a marketer or work at an ad agency, this will all seem so familiar, so expected.

Because this is how creative has been done since the “Mad Men” days of the 1950’s. We may have moved on from hand-drawn renders and ads unveiled on easels, but seventy years later the process has barely changed in construct, time, and talent.

We know the advertising landscape has completely changed. The internet was born, grew-up and permeated every aspect of human life. Now, nearly 60% of all advertising spend is online and the business of advertising is conducted in a language totally incomprehensible to the team at Sterling Cooper. TikTok, Snap, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube. SEO, SEM, paid social, programmatic, affiliate marketing, A.I, virtual reality, augmented reality, gamification, data warehouses, data lakes, DMPs, DSPs, ESPs. The Metaverse. You get the picture.

So, why are most advertising agencies still operating a twentieth-century model that relies on an art director and a copywriter to conceive ideas for all media? Please don’t misunderstand me. Writers and art directors are critical to great advertising ideas. But the modern terrain of advertising requires more diverse expertise than can be found in any two-person team. Advertising today requires creativity in the use of technology, platforms, devices, data, and automation. Sure, producers, user experience designers and technologists are part of the process now, but these experts are brought in to deliver the campaign, not to shape it. Without this range of knowhow embedded early into the creative concept, even the most skilled specialists may struggle to adapt the concept across platforms and channels effectively. The idea will often be translated as “matching luggage” rather than adapted to maximize the potential of each channel. We have all seen the poorly executed and ineffective digital ad units that just mimic a campaign’s TV spot or billboard.

The solution is two-fold. First, agencies need to reimagine the “creative team” as a more fluid and collaborative group of makers beyond writers and art directors with a leader who can inspire, integrate and build trust between a team of disparate skills. A team that includes specialists who deeply understand the “how” of platforms, technology, data, media, and human behaviour. Second, the current assembly-line inspired creative process should be abandoned and replaced by an agile model that enables diverse thinkers to work together to conceive campaign ideas that maximize the power of platforms and channels.

Is this shift simply unrealistic? The agency “suits” are quickly calculating the extra billable hours of all these people. The client-side marketing managers are worrying the agency is just looking for ways to take more time and money. The creative directors feel insulted on behalf of their teams. The media AOR doesn’t want their people in more meetings with the creative AOR. And it goes on. Which is why the model has not changed for over 70 years.

But a fundamental change to the advertising model isn’t impossible. Instead, we’d say it’s inevitable. In 1964 Marshall McLuhan famously said: The medium is the message. This axiom is even more relevant today. Messages are shaped and transformed by the media that transmits them. The advertising ecosystem is now too vast and technically complex for agencies to limit creative conception to the traditional creative department. To keep making effective work, agency creative talent must be as diverse, specialised and dynamic as the media landscape around them.

To meet this moment, FCB New Zealand have launched a new creative agency model – FCB/SIX. An agency of agile collaboration between data scientists, technologists, writers, media planners, engineers, user experience designers, animators, art directors, information architects, scrum masters. An agency where creative is not a department, but the mindset of everyone. An agency that would not hire a Don Draper as Chief Creative Officer. We believe this new agency is well overdue and will deliver our clients better value and better results across the entire advertising eco-system.