Comments on: Agencies and intellectual capital: enough of the Flava Flav routine

By: Marcus

Marcus — Sat, 02 Aug 2008 17:31:57 +0000

Doesn’t buzzword bingo mean the game you’re playing with your friends when listening to some insane hype-speech? Writing the buzzwords in a grid & start listening.. I’m not a native English speaker so I might have just misunderstood the exact meaning of your sentence.

Anyway, a good & thought provoking post. Thanks.

By: Venu Gopal Nair

Venu Gopal Nair — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 07:55:36 +0000

A consultant comes into a business relationship as an equal, not a subordinate. In India at least, advertising agencies are willing vassals. Large clients call for specs from any of the top 10 agencies and they gift strategy and creative concepts. The ‘privilege’ of working on a large account is motivation enough.

Agencies will leverage their intellectual capital when they believe in it themselves. Or when they decide that accountability is their trump card and not their creative product. I believe in the power of ideas – but only after they have been executed to perfection and delivered the desired results.

By: Venu Gopal Nair

Venu Gopal Nair — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 07:49:32 +0000

By: Eats Wombats

Eats Wombats — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 06:46:08 +0000

One of the things I’ve learned doing an MBA is that strategy (as taught in business schools) is, by and large, nonsense. It’s a language one has to be able to speak, an attempt to bring the rigour of, say, economics (hah), into business decision making and analysis. But an ounce of creativity or disruptive innovation makes the strategies of others so much sawdust. If it smells like bullshit it usually is.

By: srp

srp — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 21:41:09 +0000

Some academic marketing colleagues once told me that a dirty little secret is that there is no rigorous empirical evidence that advertising actually works to create additional purchases. Absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence, of course, but there might be a good reason why enduring principles of advertising are hard to come by.

By: Rick Liebling

Rick Liebling — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 14:57:32 +0000

In the words of Flavor Flav: Don’t Believe the Hype!

Grant, I think many Ad Agency people will take exception to your generalization here. I work at an independent PR agency, but we don’t talk about becoming more like Burson-Marsteller or Edelman or Weber-Shandwick, we talk about becoming more like Bain and McInsey. Not in what we do, but in the way we approach business – more strategic, more business building driven. When we pitch new business, our focus is on the consumer insight, the creative natural results from that insight. I’m not sure that we’re revolutionary, but I think we offer something more than just creative for creative sake.

By: Matt Mantey

Matt Mantey — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 13:22:24 +0000

Great post! Public Enemy is hot again!?

I’m more surprised that the consultancies you mention haven’t pushed the agency kids to the basement for playtime. My take – there is no repeatable/known pot of money in the advertising and comm departments that the consultants can laser target and own. CMO has so little juice with a waffling budget – all bark and no bite.

Now, in an organization that focused on the web; bringing IT and marketing $$ together under a shared vision, and funded it adequately with bodies and attention, then the McKinsey fellows will come a calling. Though I smell that there are a few guys out there headed this way – taxi, naked, barbarian group, etc.

Why agencies won’t head toward this consultancy model? Or act more like kpcb? They’ve been burned with that approach before, so they stay the course and look for the same clients they’ve been getting and just sell them a few new things. It’s a decaying model.

At the core, the agencies aren’t looking for the connections. They aren’t looking to simplify things for the consumer. They are looking for something to do or make under any crooked strategy. Obviously, part of this issue is owned at the organization, too. Many of them aren’t really looking to make the connection at the consumer either.

By: nh

nh — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 06:23:14 +0000

why still use strategy? why not have some guy just browsing throught the books searching for past strategies and giving full range of freedom to creatives..

Cadbury comes to mind as a case of creative driving sales. why not just put out as many creative ideas and just see what sticks? why try to predict when you could just do stuff independent of the market and on the other hand have a sort of creative war room that reacts to external developments and comes up with a repsons.

as an agency: do what is interesting, create energy and tell clients to make products that are actually worth talking about..

By: Tom Guarriello

Tom Guarriello — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 22:36:42 +0000

But…Flav is so fly, G. And, it’s all about fly, right?