What is the Future for Agencies, Consultancies and CMOs?

Episode 33

Hey everyone, I hope you’re all saying healthy and safe. I’m thinking a lot about the people who are sick, and the people who are on the frontlines. I also know a lot of healthcare workers and people who work at grocery stores who are on the frontlines, and I’m reaching out to them daily to see if there’s any way I can make their lives easier right now. And like you, were all sitting around wondering what the world is going to look like moving forward. So stay tuned for that. And this episode we recorded at the end of February, just when we were all realizing the magnitude of all this. It’s a special episode for me, and I think it will be for all of you. Jeff Silverman is a marketing consultant and an ad hoc CMO. And we’ll talk more on that later. Jeff is one of those people who always has a laser sharp insight into things happening in the marketing world. He and I talk a lot and every time we do, I’ve learned something. And I usually think ah, I should be recording this. So I finally did. And in this episode, we talked about the trends of consultancies and agencies. That’s something you ought to listen to. Jeff even wrote a fantastic piece on it. You can review it for free on our website. It has data to back up his ideas. Jeff also talked about the changing roles of CMOs and what agencies must do to survive. You’re gonna love this episode. I know I did. Welcome to Marketing Upheaval.

Agency Offerings

Rudy Fernandez 4:53

Well, okay, first of all, you said, agencies are pursuing the same client mix and service mix. What do you mean?

Jeff Silverman 5:01

Well, agencies for the most part, when you look at them, they all have very similar offerings. They all utilize very similar talent, they have very similar structures. So they’re all chasing, you would say, a given universe of clients with very similar offerings, capability structures, etc. So it’s very difficult for agencies to distinguish themselves one from the next. And they have a very hard time growing, you would say, a new form of revenue from the rest. And so that’s, you know, I think that’s probably the great challenge that they face.

Ad Agency Innovation

Rudy Fernandez 5:42

That’s true. So what would be an example of a new form of revenue?

Jeff Silverman 5:48

An example, some years ago, when I was part of an agency that in turn was part of a network of other independents, there were shops in that group where one of them created, let’s say, and an innovation business where they served as an ideation and innovation lab for their clients in packaged goods. And that was not a traditional agency service, but it leveraged a lot of the creative thinking that agencies can provide to clients. That little innovation business became a great business generator in turn for the broader agency. That consultancy within that agency drove a lot of activity, new business, new thinking new things to do. So that would be an example of leveraging some skills, but they also had a higher in from client side and other areas in order to have, true proficiency in that capability. But they made an investment and so that was not a traditional offering.

Rudy Fernandez 6:54

Yeah, that makes sense. You know, the old saying, “if all you have is a hammer every problem looks like a nail.” That makes complete sense, and it’s backed up by what you said at the beginning, because I know you’ve done a lot of research and basically the stock prices for all the major holding companies, WPP, Omnicom, Publicis. They’re all pretty flat over the years.

Jeff Silverman 7:15

It’s an interesting exercise, I think, for anybody that’s in the agency business, to read the annual reports of all the mega agencies that are publicly traded. When I last read them. They were really for the most part, indistinguishable in terms of how they described their business, how they describe where they were taking their business where they were going to drive growth in their business. Look at how they’ve performed in the last three years or so, with the exception of today. This is a pandemic day and the market is down 3%. The market has been up, the S&P 500 is up 60% or so over the last three years. Six out of the seven agency stocks that I looked at are down significantly over that. Same period, one is flat to slightly down, but all seven are down. So if you were an investor in the agency business model, you have been getting destroyed financially, it’s a great challenge. The way in which agencies were trying to find their growth was really in three ways. So one was early on it was we’ll go after digital, and today, social, mobile. They would go to the developing world chasing growth because there was no growth left in the developed world. And then obviously, they would grow through acquisition. Digital’s no longer providing the great level of returns. The developing world is still a challenge. They’ve all been buying, agencies, but many of the acquisitions if you look, that’s a difficult thing to bring and sustain. So a lot of that business they might have acquired, some of it does well, some if it doesn’t. But it doesn’t assure those holding companies who are all competing with each other, some form of magic that’s going to allow that one group to grow over another. The other interesting thing – we were talking about this the other day, was throughout this period where all these publicly traded agencies are out there, who audits them. The big consultancy or auditors, ensuring that their practices are good for their shareholders. So the auditors, the big consultancies, who are now the mega competition to these big agency holding companies have been inside their books in where are they you know, where they’re strong, who their client mixes, what services they’re providing. They’ve been getting an inside look at these agencies, and now they’re taking that business away from them.

Rudy Fernandez 9:42

I’m gonna get to the consultancies, I want to ask you, you said that there is a lack of leadership inside agencies?

The Agency Project Manager vs. Account Manager

Jeff Silverman 9:50

As I was saying earlier, you saw the rise of the project manager…

Rudy Fernandez 9:56

Okay you said that. What does that mean?

Jeff Silverman 9:58

For example, when I started the business, the project management function was typically handled by the account manager. And it was part of the training process where you learned how to execute programs for clients. But meanwhile, you are also growing in your competencies to how to evaluate a given client’s business, their competitive set, the trends that were driving their business, you were thinking about their business in terms, many terms like a CEO of that client would think. What’s going on in the business? Where will growth come from? What kinds of things should we pursue? A project manager today, and there are many great ones, their task is really to deliver a project on time on budget. But now they’re not really tasked with thinking through, you know, what are the challenges that my client is facing? What kind of programs should we be doing that’s going to help them grow and then thrive and succeed? And what I’m not seeing is who’s representing the client’s needs, the client thinking at the highest level. I just don’t see it anymore.

Rudy Fernandez 11:03

Why? Why has this happened?

Jeff Silverman 11:05

For a couple of reasons. One is, it was invoked to further specialize the account management function. There are some people who are great at project management or some people that are good strategic thinkers. Let’s not ask somebody to do two things. Make sense. But on the other side of it, I think part of it was taking cost out of the business. And when you have decreasing margins, more commoditization, a more competitive environment, you look to take costs out. And a lot of that was done by taking out the more experienced parts of the team that were “more expensive”, but these were the people in my experience that really knew how to lead clients. And they also were very good at working inside of a client account and learning, where are their opportunities to grow the business here.

Agency Opportunities

Rudy Fernandez 11:51

The good news, because so far, this is a big bummer. Thanks. So you said you were bullish about some of the future things. What are some of the opportunities that maybe agencies are missing or some opportunities that you think are out there?

Jeff Silverman 12:05

Whenever you end up seeing agencies that have the ability to think strategically in terms of what can they do to truly help their clients’ business beyond the communication program that they may be tasked with? I think those agencies have opportunity. But I think when you look at what clients are struggling with, clients still struggle with innovation. I gave that example before where there can be innovation labs that agencies provide to their clients.

Rudy Fernandez 12:35

But that would be an investment of course, because there’s no revenues. If there’s no revenue, now you’re gonna invest in it and hope that your clients will, buy it.

Jeff Silverman 12:41

There’s level of investment but I think the other thing is and as we talked through this consultancy, I think there is a creative disruption that’s occurring right now in the business that’s reshaping the business. And I think that is really where the business was going. It’s not going to be the old business just hanging on. It’s gonna have to be reformed with new skill sets. And as the business becomes more data driven, more technical, you know, obviously there’s agencies that have grown some of their competencies in there. Those agencies are thriving, but there’s many agencies that they have to outsource all that type of heavy lifting work. And that’s also a place where the consultancies moved in. But, you know, the question now is, are consultancies a separate business? Are they the same business?

Rudy Fernandez 13:34

Well, I think we know the answer to that.

Jeff Silverman 13:37

We do and that is they’ve become now among the very biggest ad agencies in the world? Yeah. Deloitte and Accenture, PWC, Ernst & Young. I mean, they are all now very large ad agencies with 10s of thousands of employees and their business is growing.

Consultancy Approach

Rudy Fernandez 13:55

And what is the innovation they’re bringing that agencies aren’t?

Jeff Silverman 13:58

Consultancies are now coming in at a different place than the agency. They’re coming in at the C-suite, they’re able to talk through strategic business issues at the very highest level. And then they’re helping marry their strategy to business operations, to IT systems to, you would say customer experience all the way through digital transformation and providing all the services in the chain. Some agencies you hear here and there are responding by saying we’re going to create a consultancy of our own. Yeah, you have a consultancy of your own 20 people. Accenture has 500,000 people globally. Many of these consultancies are adding to their marketing disciplines in any given year. Literally 10s of thousands of people. So the agency’s response to that I think will be, they’re not going to win that battle, long term or that war. They might win a battle here to skirmish, but they’re not going to win that war.

Rudy Fernandez 15:00

So what? Where is the place for an agency like an existing agency? Because you’re right, they’re flat when everything else is growing, so where is their place in the future?

Jeff Silverman 15:12

As I mentioned, you have a hyper competitive business condition where they are all battling each other for every scrap that that exists, and that’s going to continue to go on. They will probably end up going down market as they get displaced from the biggest clients who are now turning to those. I would really now say those consultancies are consultancy hybrid agency businesses.

Rudy Fernandez 15:37

Yeah, I knew this happening for years ago, when we started to see that – we were a pretty small agency. We were in a pitch against a huge over your JWT and like, what we’re never in their sandbox. And now they’re coming after clients that were at our level. That’s been going on for a few years now.

Jeff Silverman 15:58

Many of the people that have also left, you would say that JWT is the bigger agencies who then started their own shops. Whether it’s a shop like yourself, a consultancy that I’ve created, we’re in a business where the barrier to entry is very low for the traditional agency service, you obviously have to deliver for your clients. Otherwise, you don’t have much of a business. But it’s very easy for you as a small shop, in some instances to compete with a larger shop provided that the scope of work is relatively small. But if you needed to, let’s say have 4000 ads done for delta magazine across all their platforms next week for you know, spring sale, you know, that’s not going to be where you’re gonna play.

Rudy Fernandez 16:48

Incidentally, that client came back, by the way.

Jeff Silverman 16:51

Awesome. They’re smart clients. I once heard someone saying, you know, every client deserves the advertising they get. So if they’re coming back to you, it’s because they’re getting the right stuff from the right people.

Rudy Fernandez 17:07

I’m still not clear on what agencies can do. They can’t compete with the consultants on the consultancy level. They can compete in creativity. I mean, how valued is creativity, now, do you think?

Jeff Silverman 17:23

Every client business, every business that’s out there, needs to have innovation, and they need some level of differentiation if they’re going to be highly successful. And you look across almost any category, the level of parity offerings, the amount of competition in a given categories is intense. But the people that are most differentiated and have the most innovation are going to be the most successful performers. Those agencies that do a phenomenal job of providing innovation in the work that they provide to their clients but also help their clients become more innovative. Entities become more differentiated from their competition. There’s got to be a place for them. Let’s say we’re Capital One now has their banking cafes. Right? So it’s a different form of branch bank, in a different type of location than a branch bank. Whether that came from Capital One, or whether that came from an agency they were working with or an ideation shop, and enables Capital One to have a new form of outreach to new customers in a less intimidating setting that opens up their business. On the agency side, I would say an agency like RGA over many years, leverage their production, knowledge and skill sets to move from TV production into digital into many new forms of services capabilities. They’ve always been out front and for themselves, they look at recreating themselves and recasting themselves every five years or so. So how many big agencies, have you seen that have completely recast themselves every five years and have the courage to do that, and the ability to do that. It’s not an easy thing to do.

Rudy Fernandez 19:13

A long, long time ago this I read it, I think was the it was in the Harvard Business Review. It was a great article about slide rules, right? At some point in time, they were manufacturers of slide rules. And if you ask them, what they did, they probably said something to the effect of, we make the highest quality slide rules and blah, blah, blah, blah. But if they really stopped and thought about what they offered, you know, they help people can’t calculate. They help people solve problems they might have had, if they had that mindset, they might have invented the calculator. They might have invented the computer, but now they’re all out of business. Because they didn’t look at the core thing that they offered their client. Yeah, it sounds like from what you’re saying agencies are sort of doing the same thing. We’re storytellers, which everyone says.

Building Your Clients’ Business

Jeff Silverman 19:59

Right. And if you said you are truly in the business of building your clients business, then to your point, you might start thinking about it differently then, and I would say every agency will say we’re Business Builders. That’s part of what we do. But the reality is they restrict that typically to the communications discipline, not necessarily to, you know, you’d say whitespace. And what would the whitespace be if you were a business building entity?

Rudy Fernandez 20:29

You know like the Capital One Cafe, that’s not a communications thing. It’s more of a structural operational thing, where you say, here’s a way to engage people and make them connect with you in a different way.

Jeff Silverman 20:44

And for a Capital One, that enables them to be differentiated from their competitive set and, you know, good for them.

Rudy Fernandez 20:54

So I want to ask you, you are brought in to sort of become the CMO’s right hand person, you know, here’s my duties. And I need another temporary CMO, because right now I can’t handle this. Tell me about that more, because that’s an interesting phenomena I see happening as well.

The Adjunct CMO

Jeff Silverman 21:14

I look at it as an adjunct CMO. So meaning that I am not there in place of or waiting for a new hire to come in. So I’m working side by side with the client. And the reason for that is when you look at what client have to do and client side marketing today, it’s really a brutally difficult job. So they have so much internal stuff that they have to manage between all the different CRM marketing automation systems, tracking and reporting systems that they have. All the different outreach channels that they have. Their ability to coordinate a program all the way through their organization and if they are far flung, meaning a global organization, and so forth, it’s daunting. And so there’s just not enough hours in the day to run all that inside work while also managing a stable of agencies and all of the programs and projects that they’re running. So the client will bring me in, in some instances to help form those teams to help with planning and budgeting. And then to program manage all of that external activity. So between the two of us, we get it all done. Whereas if that client were there by themselves, they would be really struggling. And so my goal is to help that client then move into rather than playing strictly a defensive role going fire to fire, having to address various issues and kind of dropping one thing to address something else. It’s like, how do we get ahead of it? How do we then develop innovative approaches to marketing and get it done and just improve their quality of life and also get better programs built.

The Changing Role of a Chief Marketing Officer

Rudy Fernandez 23:04

Yeah, I’ve seen that. And we talked about a little bit on here, a while back where it was, you know, the CMO role has become so complicated. They’re overwhelmed because every aspect of customer contact or internal communications, every experience now is kind of under marketing. It is overwhelming. The two models, I’ve seen, every department has incorporated some sort of decentralized marketing, which doesn’t seem to work, in my opinion, or you have a CMO who has a lot more than she or he can handle.

Jeff Silverman 23:39

The CMO is really no longer just the client side person who’s in charge with getting the campaign out the door. There’s all these other touch points that have to be managed. Processes that have to be managed. It’s daunting, what they have to do. Plus, the brand that they develop, they have to transform culture with that, branding. Everybody lives and breathes the brand and believes in the brand. And so that also affects, their recruitment. It affects their Investor Relations. The CMO also has to be an absolutely brilliant polished, presenter internally, let alone managing all the activity through their own organization. But I think the other point is, I have yet to run into a client organization that’s not extremely lean. And that’s even a nice way of saying understaffed. I mean, they’re all understaffed, tremendously. And there’s typically not a lot of strategic resources that are there. There’s obviously some, but they’re, they’re not deep in that discipline. And they’re usually running so lean that it’s difficult to get work done through organizations.

The Future of Marketing

Rudy Fernandez 24:54

Traditionally, marketing is the thing that gets cut. We’re in a downturn. That the people making the cuts can’t see, feel, touch feel like they don’t understand really what it does. Is how marketing is being viewed, changed? Has the definition of what marketing is changed?

Jeff Silverman 25:13

So first cut last to be restored. Yeah, for most companies in a downturn. And the thing about it is there’s so much research that’s out there that says those companies that don’t do that, that specifically go against that grain and invest during those downturns, they gain profitable market share. They grow faster than their peer group. They do better. But in the face of companies when they are experiencing a downturn, many of them don’t make the right long-range decision. Do I think marketing has expanded? I think in the end, you know, a company has two things to do and they have to make stuff a product or service. And they have to sell it. And so marketing falls into the sell side. I don’t think at the highest level, it’s fundamentally changed. But I think what you’d say is the recognition that everything is affected by marketing in terms of what we make, what we do, how we go to market, how we touch the customer, how we drive a customer experience. I think there’s greater recognition that marketing has a very beneficial impact on companies. But at the same time, CMOS are still finding it hard to want to have 10 years that are enabling them to have a lot of equity internally with their management teams and really kind of earning a place at the C suite table for the biggest and most important conversations in their company. So on the one hand, yes, it’s expanding. It’s more important. The CMOs themselves are are still struggling to get to the highest levels of recognition within their companies.

Rudy Fernandez 26:58

Yeah, actually, I read a study that that It backs that up. CMOs don’t feel like they have as much voice in in the C-suite.

Jeff Silverman 27:05

And I think the reality is there’s turnover there because companies are, on the one hand, they’re restless for transformation. They have big appetites and big needs, usually underfunded. And it can take a long time for somebody to really affect significant amount of change while also running the ship, right? You’re flying the plane and having to fix the plane. So it’s difficult.

Rudy Fernandez 27:32

How do we fix all that?

Jeff Silverman 27:33

I’m not necessarily bullish on the traditional agency, the multinational you know, publicly traded agency holding company, business model, it’s going to look very different than what people might have forecast. But somewhere out there, there’s people inside the consultancies who recognize the opportunity to glue together a broader offering and deliver value to their client customers. And they’re winning that business and that business is growing significantly, much faster than what you’re seeing the agencies are doing. So there is a change that’s afoot. And as an example, a good friend of mine that I knew from my older agency days is inside one of these consultancies and the work he’s doing is fascinating, not what a typical agency assignment would be at all. And there’s the demand for his group’s services, which is a marketing team inside of it. One of the big consultancies is, is daunting. I mean, his problem is there’s not enough hours in the day to get all the stuff that they need. Meanwhile, if I go back into the traditional agency world, everyone is essentially starved for new business. How do we get more business? And you’re seeing inside these consultancies, they’re growing at much faster rate, they’re gluing together a service offering, which is very different than the traditional agency model, but they’re doing it successfully. You know, time will tell. They’re buying great talent. I mean, they bought up a hell of a lot of talent. And a lot of people said, Well, you know, the great creative teams are not going to end up there. They’re ending up there. And probably the smartest, you know, creative shops will end up saying, you know what, that does represent an opportunity for the long term. So rather than be resistant to that, I can guarantee you they will become much more amenable to offers to come inside these big companies and do some interesting things.

Rudy Fernandez 29:37

We talked about unmet needs. When you look at the landscape, what are the trends that concern you the most, and what excites you the most?

Jeff Silverman 29:46

So let’s start with the concern. We’re in a election year. We hear about Russian meddling and so forth in our in our elections. We also hear about some of the social platforms are turning away political advertising and others are not. And they’re not necessarily going to require truth in advertising. But the thing that bothers me the most, or that concerns me the most is now this development of deep fake video. It’s one thing if you say, I’m going to marry The Matrix with The Office, and I’m going to do something funny. It’s another thing when you can literally have anybody in the world saying anything you want them to say and that what that manipulation means? In the political landscape, it’s frightening. But go beyond that. And then you end up saying where we now live in a world where people are their trust of institutions, has fallen, given the rise of purpose driven communications, but trust is down. What could one competitor do to another competitor using deep fakes?

Rudy Fernandez 31:00

Yeah, and people are in their media tunnel. So they’ll believe whatever, as long as it agrees with their worldview,

Jeff Silverman 31:06

Anything that looks real, and smells real. I mean, the fact is, that works and you know phishing emails. It can be very difficult for people to discern when they’re in a man in the middle attack on a website. Pizza gate. I remember the story, obviously, I never heard it, but I’ve seen recordings of it. Orson Welles in 1938, The War of the Worlds broadcast was supposedly created a panic. Now, some of that is disputed. But the reality was, if you had listened into that broadcast, and you didn’t hear the preamble before it that said that this is a fictionalized event, it could lead you to believe that it was, in fact happening and it was a crazy thing. We’ve seen that people’s ability to no longer discern the truth and to be manipulated as a result. So yeah, in the political realm that could exist, but it could also exist very much more broadly. I’m also very, very excited about things like AR and augmented reality and virtual reality because of the type of immersive experiences that can be created. Or in the case of AR the layering of information that can be very useful to people or very entertaining to people. You could say like, for example, is there still a place for agency in the world? Yeah, and these new disciplines because there is such an incredible wow factor and the ability to deliver experiences that we’ve never had before as a recipient of marketing messages and communication entertainment.

Rudy Fernandez 32:40

Now, you’re right, you point your phone at something to find out the price of it or the history of that building, and suddenly you have an opportunity to tell a neat story that can bring somebody in with augmented reality.

Jeff Silverman 32:53

And you know, people have been doing that now. Whether it’s, you know, you could put your phone across a basketball game and get layers of statistics on players you may not have seen before. I was at an event recently, and there was a really, really simple thing done for one of the Caribbean destinations where they had Oculus go there and you could take a visit to this country and see it and it was filmed for a 3D virtual reality immersive experience. And they did a great job. It goes beyond just, let’s say, the beautiful photography. But now as you begin to think about what that means for destinations, for any form of marketing of a physical place or object, it’s incredible.

Rudy Fernandez 33:41

Okay, thanks for joining me, we’re gonna continue talking but I got a chance to record it. So I’m really happy about that.

Jeff Silverman 33:46

These conversations I value so it’s a lot of fun for me as well. So yeah, thanks for having me.

Rudy Fernandez 33:51

We’re gonna stop recording and rant about health care now.

Jeff Silverman 33:54

Okay.

Rudy Fernandez 33:56

Well, that’s it for this episode of Marketing Upheaval. If you want to learn more Jeff and get his thoughts, reach him on LinkedIn. Look for Jeff Silverman 1. The link is also on our show notes at CreativeOuthouse.com/podcast. And also check out Jeff’s article on our website. You can link there from CreativeOuthouse.com/podcast. Thanks Susan Cooper for producing the show. Gopal Swamy for our earcon and Jason Shablik for his audio advice. The world is in more upheaval now than any of us ever expected. So, let’s look out for each other. What do you say? See ya.

Podcast credits:

Host: Rudy Fernandez

Producer and Cover Art: Susan Cooper

Earcon sound design: Gopal Swamy

Audio Consultant: Jason Shablik

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