AdAge: New Resources, Digital Natives Will Define Successful Digital Agencies

Phil Johnson's post at Ad Age yesterday spells out some key points about what differentiates an agency or marketing department performing self-service display advertising that masters digital advertising from one that falls behind the curve: resources.

Both human and technical, the resources are what make the difference. Johnson advocates bringing on what he calls "digital natives" - staff who never knew a professional world away from the online space.

I notice that naturally, that idea leaves a significant fraction of the industry intact and in place - endowed with the precious and irreplaceable market intelligence, branding acumen and partnering that needs to be meshed with the "digital native" concepts.

That need is one of the biggest reason AdBean is here: we enable the digital native as well as the traditional visual communicators with the skinnable, flexible, efficient display creation and management platform they need to master the new channels.  As Johnson puts it:

I continue to be fascinated by how agencies change and how extraordinarily hard this can be to accomplish. Regardless of the difficulty, it's an essential agency survival skill. Great agencies learn how to continually reinvent themselves to the core, while merely good agencies often only change their outward structure. In some ways this pursuit of change, particularly as agencies define their relevance in the digital world, has been the great advertising drama of the last two years.

Hard to believe, but two years ago people were debating the merits between traditional and digital agencies, as if they had to choose between blue states and red states. Jump ahead to today, and most small agencies have carved out their own path. They have found a way to be true to their roots and have also made huge strides in their commitment to digital marketing. Digital vs. traditional no longer seems like a religious war.

PJA Advertising has made this journey along with the rest, and what I've learned is that change does not come from one defining choice. You need a commitment from the top. You need to redefine processes and roles. You need to bring in new resources and talent. More than anything, if you want to make changes that go beneath the surface to the core, you need to introduce a foreign agent that will chemically alter the composition of the agency.

Read the whole article here.