Agencies Aren't Digital Or Traditional, They're Effective Or Ineffective

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Fight!

Ever since the rise of online advertising, the agency world has had to contend with a cultural split.  Based in technology, but stretching far afield, the break is between two factions that often snipe at each other.  In all the dirt kicked up you can tell this is an industry that is engaged in a struggle for its continued dominance in the future marketing budgets of its clients.

I was reminded of what's at stake in the war of words between digital and traditional when I read "Why Digital Agencies Are Indeed Ready To Lead"  an AdAge piece written by Jacques-Herve Roubert, President-CEO of Nurun, a global interactive marketing agency in rebuttal to Ana Andjelic's opposite claim of a week earlier "Why Digital Agencies Aren't Ready To Lead".

What I noticed is that neither piece goes into the most grave reality for advertising: the industry's changes add up most importantly (and unprecedentedly)  to a new era of customer control.

Ad networks mean customer control.  Display advertising management platforms including AdBean mean customer control. Software tools and decentralized access means customer control.  Traditional advertising and digital adertising may believe their greatest cultural enemy is each other, but that's not true.  The future threatens both of them. The entire industry, encompassing both halves is equally at risk for the widepsread disintermediation of no less than the kind that is wiping out the once-mammoth music and newspaper businesses.

It's what the internet loves to do.

The focus for agencies shouldn't be on an artifical cultural division.  The focus should be on racing the customer to quickly deliver the effectiveness and efficiencies customers are increasingly able to achieve for themselves.

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[Digital Agencies And Tradition]

[...] I have to say Liz is kind of reminding me of something I said here a couple of months ago: Agencies Aren’t Digital Or Traditional, They’re Effective or Ineffective.  It’s “deja vu all over [...]