Gone are the days when a brand needed only an informative website. To remain competitive, brands today must build consistent cross-platform digital experiences to engage with their customers. This demand is fueling a new breed of agencies, who must not only keep a pulse on emerging technology and trends, but be able to create integrated digital experiences for their clients.
Consultant and agency veteran Andy Jacobs offers advice on how digital agencies can be successful during this period of digital transformation and deliver better expertise to their clients.
Technology trends of tomorrow
Technology is bridging the gap between digital and creative. It’s redefining the way we consume content online. As media channels and delivery models evolve, we’re approaching an intersection where the current state of media meets the future of creative. This is redefining the customer experience and fueling a new generation of creativity.
“We are continually evolving the customer experience […] At this point, the exercise of redefining the customer experience extends to creative, user experience, and even the technologists,” said Jacobs.
Brands are changing how they engage with their customers and experimenting with new channels to reach them.
“Our clients are engaging with their customers in new and creative ways given the new solution options that are available today compared to where we were 10 or 20 years ago,” Jacobs said.
New trends can arise through a feedback loop — where advertising festivals, like Cannes Lions offer awards for breakthrough categories leveraging technology and where agencies, who live and breathe by their awards, work with brands to compete for them.
This shouldn’t come as a shock. For decades, agencies have touted new awards as a way to showcase their innovation and creativity. According to Jacobs, these awards are actually fueling new technology trends.
“Award categories are showing up today that weren’t there five years ago […] ” Jacobs said.
“In 2016 there was a new category at Cannes Lions called Digital Craft which celebrates digital artistry […] There we are seeing some really cool stuff like virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), and other innovative uses of technology,” he said. “In 2015 the Creative Data category was introduced as part of the Innovation Lions where we are now seeing solutions leveraging things like data visualization.” These new categories are a harbinger that brands should be exploring these breakthrough technologies as part of their digital strategy.
“Agencies that do this well are winning these awards and thriving,” Jacobs said. “The ones that aren’t risk going out of business or getting acquired by the agencies that are doing this well.“
The intersection of the horizontal and vertical
The marketing technology (MarTech) landscape today is robust. To stay competitive, “agencies working within the digital space are going to have to change to be more specialized.” This comes after an explosion in the tech landscape, where today there are literally thousands of different technology solutions out there and it’s becoming nearly impossible for agencies to provide expertise in all areas.
Jacobs suggests that for digital agencies to be successful in today’s technology climate, they will need to become specialized. This can mean either vertically, where agencies become an expert in a specific line of business (i.e., hospitality), or horizontally, where they specialize in a specific area (i.e., artificial intelligence) and deliver that expertise across all different verticals.
“Digital agencies will become specialized with expertise and go deep as opposed to broad. They will demonstrate the ability to deliver within a specific vertical,” Jacobs said. “There will be horizontal ways as well […] for example, some could specialize in personalization or artificial intelligence and they would deliver this expertise across different verticals.”
Jacobs suggests that the most powerful digital agencies of the future will sit at an intersection of a horizontal and vertical.
Don’t underestimate the power of partnership
There will, of course, always be successful full-service agencies, however, to deliver the best cross-platform expertise to clients, they will need to invest in technology partnerships.
“For agencies, it is impossible to acquire all of the skills and expertise to deliver the solutions of tomorrow[…] they will need to partner with other vendors or system integrators to help bring these digital experiences to market.”
In Adobe’s future of the agency report, the majority (94 percent) of survey respondents talked about increasing their investment in technology and technology partnerships. These partnerships are invaluable to clients as they provide them true expertise across a range of different verticals and horizontals.
The agency model is evolving to accommodate the ever-changing demands of clients. Agencies can remain competitive by becoming more specialized and investing in technology partners to offer expertise to clients.