How Agencies Stay Relevant After Their Creative Monopoly Has Ended

Samsung’s chief US marketer thinks that agencies have reason to be concerned about competition from influencers.

He should know. Over the last year, Marc Mathieu’s re-invigorated Samsung marketing group has built a close and creatively liberated relationship with Casey Neistat, who the CMO calls the company’s “creator in chief.” The collaboration runs the gamut from Neistat’s home base YouTube videos (albeit much, much better funded and higher produced) to an appearance in Samsung’s Oscar ad last year.

The collaboration between Samsung and Neistat is notable in that is a manifestation of the natural evolution of influencer marketing. Put simply, as social media channels supplant traditional media channels for a share of our attention, the creators who are best at those channels are supplanting the ad creators who built their practices in older mediums.

This disruption has been delayed by two forces. First, the capacity for influencers and other social creators to service brands at the level they’re accustomed to took time to develop. Premium clients paying premium prices want premium services. Second, there is a natural inertia within risk-averse institutions to do anything that might be a 1-to-1 replacement of old to new. The traditional agency model has been the model for so long that it has taken (and will continue to take) time (and incremental case studies, if we’re honest) to get comfortable with putting in a new system.

Of course, that hasn’t stopped brands from taking aim at their current agencies, exemplified by the unprecedented agency reviews of the last few years. The real disruption will happen when brands start to look to entirely different actors for agency services, find that the model actually works, and scale their efforts.

It’s also not just influencers providing agency style creative services. It is becoming standard for publishers and tech platforms of all stripes to offer in house creative services for brands who wish to market with them, with the argument that they know their audiences best, so why not trust them to produce advertising and branded content?

Creative agencies also face competition from the sides. As data becomes increasingly important to strategy and “digital” pushes out of its silo to encompass the entire customer journey, the management consultancies have all put massive resources into creating competitive units equipped (theoretically) to not only advise on strategy but to execute in market. Sensing the turbulence, media agencies (who are themselves under pressure from various forms of automation) are recognizing that they too could be organizing creative resources to claim an even more central place in the brand marketing ecosystem.

What then is a good creative agency to do? The reality is that the creative monopoly has been broken forever. The new normal is a massive distribution of the means to create content and a constant flux of consumer attention between platforms.

In this context, the smartest creative shops are shifting their mindset from “ownership” to “stewardship.” Rather than acting like they, exclusively, own the ability to tell the brand’s story, they understand that their job is to be stewards of that story capable of curating and aligning the world of content surrounding the brand into a whole greater than the sum of its parts.

More precisely, the creative agencies who survive this Wild West will be great at two things:

1. Overall creative direction - There is still a difference between 50 influencer posts and a coherent brand marketing campaign. It is still a specialized skill to be able to connect a brand’s story to culture in a resonant way.
2. Creative coordination - In a world where there are many more creators who have their hands on a brand’s story, those brands are even more likely to want a single trusted party coordinating those efforts.

Coordination requires different mindsets and different skillsets. It’s likely to lead to changes in organizational structure (i.e. smaller, nimble agencies) and differences in how we bill. Its also likely the some brands recognize that as the coordination and creative need gets more specific, it may be something that could be brought in house.

In any case, the creative genie is out of the bottle and all that’s left is to adapt.