Great post from Murat over on mobileinc asking “Can The Next Instagram/Hipstamatic/Klout/Angry Birds Be Born Within An Agency?” or, as he puts it, why hasn’t this happened already?
Our model has always been based on creating new businesses alongside our client ideas – a few years ago we launched Festival Annual, a user-generated book of photos from the British festival summer, and we’re developing ideas and collaborating with partenrs on various new ideas for digital services or disruptions to existing online business models.
Murat believes the reasons come down to clients themselves, and agency culture and makes some really great observations in the post. I was going to write that I would add the effects of the downturn to the list of reasons – many agencies had to lose large numbers of staff at the end of 2008 and through 2009, and felt like they were in a battle for survival, chasing every possible pitch. But then, it’s not as though the preceding years were chock full of innovation coming from agencies either.
The answer probably lies in asking the question: what’s your purpose in the world? For many agencies the purpose is to make money, and to show revenue growth in the short term. There’s nothing wrong with that, and in fact that’s what your shareholders might expect and what most of the staff might want if they see getting bought as the fastest and most likely route to a wealthy future. The need to show revenue growth year-on-year, in a tight advertising market, compels a certain approach to running your company, and taking big risks on how you deploy staff time doesn’t really fit that template.
That we’ve chosen a different route is not to say it’s a better one – it just fits us better. Our aim is for our pensions to come not from selling the business to one of the big marketing conglomerates, but to come from creating valuable digital businesses.
For us, what flows from choosing this route is a range of things, from taking less money out of the business now, to the design of our office space, to changing our recruitment profile. Each of the four people we’ve hired in the past six months has experience of starting a business venture. Some of the businesses have been startlingly successful (we now have Yin of the YinYang blog working on the team), and some haven’t yet launched. The point is not the success of otherwise of the ventures, but the learnings and approach to work that have come from the experience, and we believe this benefits our client work as well as giving us the right team to have a pop at creating a future digital hit.