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Can the ad industry really learn the latest new media moves?

Platform: Internet | Author: Tim Hayward | Source: NMA magazine | Published: 12.10.06

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My Dad used to read the paper at the breakfast table. Like most of us, I now get all my news from RSS feeds which rather robs me of this pleasure - so I only metaphorically choked on my cornflakes when I read a headline, last week, announcing that a large London ad shop was setting up a 'Virtual Agency'.

So this was it. The moment we'd been waiting for. Having finally woken up and noticed the cataclysmic changes in media, the hungry efficiency of digital business models and the hopeless,...

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... dinosaur dysfunction of their own, the agencies had decided to go virtual.

What form, I wondered, feverish with excitement, would this new model take? Would they cash in the extravagant Soho premises, put the ubiquitous Bauhaus chairs in the foyer onto Ebay, lose the ludicrously pretty receptionists and all dial in from their laptops? Millions could be realised from that.

Would they finally awake from the delusion that they are a 'creative industry', fire the whole creative department and make them pitch back in for the work? To take out that spoilt, overpaid cadre of preening, self-obsessed haircuts and make them actually work for a living rather than rehashing the same tired old tropes would not only save money but be a general service to humanity.

I read on...

It turned out that BBH is launching a 'virtual agency' in the online world of Second Life. Leo Burnett is also planning to launch 'Leo Ideas Hub' into the same corner of cyberspace, using the technology to connect the creative departments of its agencies worldwide. (One could, incidentally, point out that the advertising industry has reached something of a nadir when this is considered worth a press release).

Sweet Jesus, where do they get these ideas from? Have they ever met an agency creative that could collaborate? An agency is a corporate structure of hundreds of people whose sole purpose is to force the creatives to take a brief from the client and deliver a product - they usually fail. Creatives don't talk to the rest of the agency let alone each other. And, by the way, the only thing less likely than a creative taking input from his own agency is getting him to take suggestions from a team in the Amsterdam office.

According to the article, the agency has hired a "London-based virtual world design agency" to create the environment and avatars for their staff - which, when you think about it, is a pretty final statement of their total inability to deal with anything even remotely new media.

You would imagine, wouldn't you, that in a world where slack-jawed, dead-eyed teenagers are expected to log on and create their own personalities, highly creative agency staff in a wired agency might be able to create their own avatars.

The tragedy is that the agency are doing this in a, probably genuine, attempt to 'engage' with the new environment. They are obviously, scared, confused and a little bit lost.

Unfortunately, like everything, else they're trying to do it by forcing their existing model into it. Brilliant - now the world's virtual, lets build an 'agency' around a 'creative department' and get some people in to design us a piece of sexy and expensive real estate... I don't want this to sound like a Bill Hicks rant (actually I do) but WAKE UP PEOPLE - this is exactly where you screwed up in the old world.

Watching old-school agencies do stuff like this is like watching your Dad dancing at a wedding. You might have a sneaking respect that the old bugger's still got the gumption to stand up and give it a go - but you really wish he'd sit down before he makes a complete prat of himself.

Tim Hayward is a facilitator and trainer specialising in inter-agency idea generation; tim@ideopraxis.com