Digital isn't key just to marketing strategies

17 September 2009 | By Michael Nutley

Talking to agency heads for the introduction to the upcoming Top 100 Interactive Agencies 2009 guide, the key discussion seems again to be around strategy and who should be responsible for it.

I repeatedly heard that clients are starting to realise digital has to be part of the overall strategy and can’t just be bolted on at the end. Partly this is being driven by the economic climate pushing money into performance-based digital channels as marketers attempt to squeeze the most out of budgets that have been cut and cut again. And partly it’s because marketers now understand that the way people use media has changed. Another thing I was told frequently was that social media is now crucial in brand communications.

However, the interpretation put on this changing top-table relationship differs dramatically depending on who you’re talking to. Digital agencies report an increase in the number of strategic briefs they’re getting, while traditional creative agencies talk about clients wanting to keep digital and creative under the same roof as digital is too important to an integrated strategy to be left to digital experts.

But there’s another argument put forward by people in the digital sector echoing the remark, usually attributed to Hewlett-Packard’s David Packard, that marketing is too important to be left to the marketing department. According to some online agencies, digital is far too important to the overall business strategy to be left to advertising experts. People like Tom Adams of SapientNitro, Daniele Fiandaca of Profero and Margaret Manning of Reading Room argue the consumer landscape has changed so much, changing a marketing strategy is a lot less important than rethinking your business strategy. In their view, ad agencies aren’t equipped for this since their expertise is in advertising.

As Adams put it to me, clients are worried their businesses are organised according to principles that no longer apply and they’ll never be able to talk to their customers in the same way again. This harks back to the idea, popular among digital types, that ad agencies in the 1950s helped their clients solve business problems, whereas now they make ads. There’s a tacit assumption that digital agencies, with their culture of constant change, are best equipped to respond to this challenge. But the digital sector has claimed before that above-the-line agencies didn’t get it, only to see them take big chunks of business in recent months.

It also suggests a new split among digital agencies themselves. There are the digital marketing agencies competing with the offline creative and media agencies for the marketing strategy piece, and there are those positioning themselves in business strategy development. The head of one of those mentioned to new media age recently that he didn’t want to be a “cool marketing agency”. With the rewards to be had from business transformation, why would he?

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