Poaching, client in-housing top agency concerns
By Zion Rufus
Besides digital advertising fraud, death of third party cookies, 2020’s Coronavirus pandemic, and inflationary pressures, another phenomenon which has topped the list of agencies’ concerns in 2022 is poaching of creative talents and clients in-housing their media and creatives.
Although clients in-housing and creatives transitioning to the client side isn’t anything new, concerns have risen following a CMO Pulse Survey which revealed that 44% of CMOs plan to move more marketing in-house this year.
“Agencies have simply brought this upon themselves,” Creative Director, Rodd Chant said while speaking on why consultancies are snatching creative talents.
According to the Creative Director, the hunt for creative talents has become a global issue; pointing that as the needs exceed the abilities of their engineers and marketing eggheads, from the junior level on up to the C suite, tech and marketing firms are luring agency employees with bigger paydays. As it sits, Chant observed, even startups are beginning to successfully recruit creative talents by offering them equity and stock options.
“These are trying times for agencies with competition coming at them from all angles such as consultancies and client’s starting in-house creative departments. Creative talents are going to the tech world and the consultancies; some are starting their own agencies, while others have simply walked away from the industry,” Chant noted.
He continued: “Many clients don’t need agencies. Well, not agencies in the traditional sense. Not ones that live in the past. They don’t need a building full of people strapped to desks. They don’t need twelve people from the agency in a meeting to discuss the brief with two people from the client side. They don’t need traditional team structures, especially on the creative side. They don’t need back-and-forth on that brief for weeks on end. They don’t need endless conversations about what to do. They don’t need to be blowing their budgets on agency overheads. What they do need is ideas and creative people to bring those ideas to life. They don’t need to work with an agency that looks and feels more like an accounting firm (let’s be honest, that is most big agencies), instead they need to work with creative people, people who love creative work, and love making that work – they need to be working with creators and makers.”
Validating Chant’s premise and expatiating on why creatives feel more at home on the client side in an interview with MARKETING EDGE, Franklin Ozekhome, Strategy and Planning Director at Insight Publicis shared that the traditional agency model does not allow for real-time discovery (trends and insights), always-on engagement (communications) across platforms, sales and conversion (creative commerce), and monitoring and control (evaluation).
“And as you know, the creative mind is a restless spirit. There’s nothing like seeing your work come alive on canvas and people loving, appreciating and buying it.”
The tech guru pointed that although brand custodians and heads of marketing tend to connect very strongly with planners and creatives on the agency side because they can hold on to something tangible when discussing briefs, solutioning, campaign ideas and tactics for executions, working with the in- house creatives help to shortcut the process.
He said: “Marketers are losing sleep searching for newer ways of circumnavigating this seemingly endless loop of ideation to development to management and execution. They want to be able to respond real-time to consumers and vice-versa as events occur, especially if they are to borrow the design thinking mindset of startups that focus on product development, prototyping, testing, iteration and launch to market at speed.”
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