The Beginning of the End

Are you old enough to remember when there were travel agents?  I am.  Every town had one, and most towns had many.  They used to provide personalized service for people planning trips.

Until the internet connected regular people with more travel options than they could ever imagine, at lower prices than agents charged because agents had to pay assistants and rent and business insurance and on and on.  Now, the only people who use travel agents are people that spend more money on vacations than the rest of us do.

There are many more stories like that.  Just swap out travel agent for retail stores or music or print journalism or Blockbuster Video or landlines or ……you get the idea.  The internet has disintermediated lots of businesses  (was “disintermediate” even a word before the internet?).

Another death is in process.  It’s early, and if you aren’t close to the marketing profession, you haven’t heard.  But, in five years, you will be reading LOTS of stories….on the end of ad agencies, as we know them.

I can hear you now.  Aren’t business services different?  Uh, no.  Big brands will always be able to afford big agencies, with fancy offices with lots of account executives and strategists and researchers and account planners.  They continue to employ them because it’s easier, and individuals know how to work within that system.

Eventually, though, if something can be found better and cheaper, better and cheaper wins.  There are no inherent economies of scale to creativity, to story-telling.  More and more, brands are looking for little bits of digital content at relatively low cost, because the digital appetite is virtually insatiable.  The days of  just making a commercial a couple of times a year, with big crews and big budgets, are long, long gone.

The nature of the task for video content has also changed.  Overt product overtures to “buy me” don’t work anymore,  with millennials and affluents and other groups too numerous to mention tuning them out.   Marketing is more about storytelling and emotionally connecting and turning a stranger into a trusted friend.  Does that sound like a commercial to you?  Does that sound like what your agency is  equipped to provide?

There is a better way.  More on that later.