Agency Future was at Marketing Week’s Agency Evolution conference earlier this week. A little under-attended and a lot over-priced, it was nevertheless a very useful day with plenty of good talks and nuanced debate around the usual issues of integration, remuneration and the role of the consumer. Particularly helpful were the talks from clients, but more on those later.

Fallon MD Karina Wilsher chaired the event and opened with an appeal to move the debate past business models: ‘Model schmodel, the old-fashioned supertanker model is already dead. Clients want smaller collections of people tied to nimble, innovative, evolving structures that can shape and mould themselves into whatever form is needed to best solve their problems.’

Karina ended by saying that the agency of the future would not be unrecognisable from what we see today: ‘The best agencies will still have the best people, the best ideas and the best culture. Good ideas will still be central to what we do. Actions speak louder than words and any new model should still be servant to the idea.’

Up next was Ian Milner from Iris who gave a well-received talk that proclaimed the death of the ‘old-fashioned’ ad network but also spelt out how he saw the solution: ‘The advertising industry as we know it is facing an armageddon moment; there’s too many agencies and we don’t have a divine right to exist. If we want to remain relevant, we need to start playing a broader role all along the value chain. It’s about effectiveness. Clients want outcomes, not outputs.’

Ian even had some fancy graphics to illustrate this last point. One was a triangle with the words ‘Create advantage (not just pretty pictures and nice films’ in the top segment. The bottom segment contained the words ‘Faster, action-oriented partner’ which would become a theme of the day.

He ended with some very useful thoughts around the need for agencies to be more commercially minded: ‘Most of us are pretty crap at business. We need to be more inventive around how we bill, whether it be shared equity arrangements or performance-related schemes. Agencies should employ more people from the client side who are better at engineering more time in the value chain.’

Will Harris, marketing director from Nokia, was next at the lectern. He announced that while he was very much ‘pro agency’, there was a pressing need for most of them to reclaim their relevance: ‘At Nokia we are using those agencies that can get our message to the right people in ways that can enable those people to share the message. We’re looking at smaller, agile agencies with smart people and cohesive offerings.

‘We see the right agencies as partners, not suppliers. They need to understand our business more. We value truely transparent relationships and that means getting remuneration off the table as soon as possible. Lastly it’s about people. The best agencies have the best people.’

Mike Parsons from Tribal DDB pitched in with the digital perspective: ‘Clients are dramatically changing the way they want to build their brand. The move away from paid media to earned media is accelerating fast. At DDB, VW now spend more on digital than traditional, and that spend is mostly on web utility, not broadcast media like search or banner ads.’

I liked Mike. He had the approach of a genuine enthusiast and wasn’t shy when it came to detailing the necessary improvements around digital communication: ‘There needs to be better standards around measurement. No matter what some software companies might tell you there’s still no compelling measurement of sentiment out there and clients want it.’

There then followed a pretty wide-ranging panel debate, chaired by Alex West, global innovations director at Mother. Here’s the highlights from a discussion which focused strongly on remuneration and client/agency relationships:

Alex: ‘Clients are looking to us for more interesting remuneration models. We have to be inventive and push for fair reward for what we do.’

Laurent Ezekiel, client services director for LBi: ‘New remuneration models are all well and good but the reality is that the vast majority of blue-chip companies are too structured to allow for any significant changes to the model.’

Kerry Glazer, chief executive at AAR: ‘Clients don’t care about the size of your agency. Even the biggest agencies in the world are small-fry in corporate terms.’

Ian Pearman, managing director at AMV BBDO: ‘Clients would be well advised to look at how spread their prospective agency’s revenue is. Those agencies with the overwhelming majority of their revenue coming from one client might not be your best choice.’

Kerry: ‘The split between clients’ procurement and marketing departments is not a good thing. Many agencies just don’t make any money thanks to procurement guys coming in and renegotiating fees down.’

James Tipple, UK marketing director for Yahoo, agreed that cost-squeezing can be counter-productive: ‘We need to be closer partners with our agencies. We’re taking a more collaborative approach at Yahoo and trying to phase out the project-by-project mentality and think more coherently.’

Graeme Dignan, founder and CEO at Erasmus Partners: ‘There needs to be much less ‘them and us’. If you were trying to build an amazing building and you treated your architect the way some companies treated their agency, you’d end up with a shit building. We need to get closer and share common goals with clients.’

Kerry: ‘We know that the value and power of our ideas goes beyond the time it took to have them and we need to start acting like we know it. Why is it that KPIs are always around the agency performance and never about the client’s?’

Ian: ‘Why not try and institutionalise the right to play? Take the last 5% of any budget and use it for experimental, innovative communication that moves the brand forward in other channels and other ways.’

Phil Rumbol, UK marketing director for Cadbury’s, was among the last speakers on the day and his focus was very much on how agencies’ main role should be to help brands earn, create and maintain cultural relevance: ‘I see an agency’s main role as working much closer with its client and acting as a purveyor of brand ideas and as guardians of brand behaviour.’

The three preconditions for this to take place were as follows:

- Stronger client/agency relationship (agencies need to be more flexible and responsive to clients’ needs)
- Reconcile artistic and commercial tensions
- Volume of activity up and cost per unit down

Overall, a worthwhile day. Maybe nothing really new but it was good to see some industry heavyweights clarify their thoughts, and to get the clients’ thoughts.