The Advertising Agency will never recover
September 17, 2008
George Parker went with the glaring headline “We’re all F*CK!d now”
Parker pointed out “when Corporate America is “feeling the pain” and needs to improve the bottom line, the first place they look for slash and burn, is the ad budget. That’s the way it’s always been, that’s the way it will always be.”
He is right about that… really right about that.
We have been noting for years that the Advertising Agency is in deep trouble, and of course we were laughed at.. even as their world was collapsing around them. Our initial post when we first went online was filled with sarcasm at how we were greeted in the industry as virtually every commenter called us every name in the book.
Parker noted that it will take 5 years to recover… we tend to disagree.
Many aspects of the advertising agency will never recover.
If you are making huge spends for your client in print media, a 558 year old industry (the first ad published was literally days after the Gutenberg press was invented in 1450 AD) or yellow pages a 122 year old industry (invented in 1886) .. the fact is that the market will never recover from this.. Technology has already flagged your industry as obsolete. If the recession won’t kill these industries, the environmental movement and the Internet will.
If you specialize in 30 and 60 second spots on TV … you’re going to have to face the music with Hulu and VEOH type sites, Technology has already outpaced the 70 year old industry. Though “TV shows” still exist. The format on how they are delivered is changing at a fairly rapid rate. Meaning that the overall delivery format and structure of those spots are quickly modifying the way viewers want to see their ads displayed online.
The only viable method that shows growth potential is online.
The problem is the interactive nature of the internet. You can’t dominate online using traditional methods, in other words… people have to actively seek your ad rather than it being plastered in their face when they are flipping pages to read news in the paper.
Understand what we just wrote “People have to actively seek your ad”
The only way they can find your ad online is via a handful of ways.
The first is to search for it… hence SEO is key.
The second is to find it linked from a site they read.. hence SMO
Meaning that the entire nature of Advertising has changed… from TV spots and Print Media ads to Search Engine Optimization and Social Media Optimization.
But traditional agencies have been losing their shirts due to their lack of investment in those key areas. They thought of us as flukes… talentless hacks.. until the early to mid 2000’s… it was almost shameful to call yourself a search engine optimizer, as the sigma attached to that was being one attempting to spamdex the search engines… rather than what we were doing.. making sure our fortune 1000 clients had proper metas, site structure, and text based content. That sigma still exists .. but only in the advertising agency space… as we went from being the Pariah of advertising world to actually competing during a recession for scare dollars.. and competing successfully.
It’s possible that Google helped legitimize us. As blackhat techniques have been de-emphasized to the point where they are NOT even close to being as effective as they were years ago…. meaning that every Search Engine Optimization firm worth their weight has turned to a Social Media Optimization firm.. with or without knowing it. Matt Cutts, one of the head Google Engineers popularized the term “link bait” and link bait literally has become the overriding issue for Search Engine Optimization.
Years ago, SEO was about site structure, text based content.
When Google came around and used link popularity as a major factor, it became necessary to learn how to actually market yourself to obtain backlinks from other sites. In other words, SEO firms became the best online marketers available. We started posting more and more useful content online.
We started posting news, jokes, how to instructions, helpful information, basically anything trying to obtain backlinks from forums and blogs. We started to think “what information does the market place want, how can we fill that need… because if we fill it right.. people will link to the posts.”
Generally speaking, the larger SEO firms started to play by the then changing rules… and somewhere along those lines… stopped being SEO firms.. and started becoming Social Media Agencies.
Thinking of something informative to post that will obtain backlinks isn’t exactly the same line of thought as “old school white on white text”
It’s also the reason those SEO firms grew… and grew wildly.
The majority of them started off with little resources, such as a laptop, kitchen table and dialup modem level resources.
These people are now the same ones filling out an RFP with their sales staff your client that sent out last month when he couldn’t find his site for relevant keywords… or when he found his competitor on the main page of Digg..
Something agencies tend to forget, especially the BDA’s .. the reason the client hired you was to increase the clients sales at the least expensive cost.
The pitch now needs to be “Give us an 8 dollar a year domain name, and 5 dollar a month hosting account.. and we can increase your companies bottom line.” as compared to “give us an ad budget of 20 million and we’ll push out Jerry Seinfield ads with Bill Gates and we’ll increase Vista sales” Look how the latter turned out.
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