Now available on-demand, the highly-acclaimed
industry strategy and insights report,
The Future of Agencies

The 4A's gave AgencyAgile CEO, Jack Skeels, the charter to produce an industry-vision white paper.  Working with Chick Foxgrover of the 4A's, a broad industry and competitive analysis was conducted. Eventually, it was rolled up into a still-relevant 50-minute presentation format.

Viewed and lauded by hundreds of agency executives at key industry conferences, the topics explored include:

  • The fundamental shifts in the marketing and marketer landscapes
  • How these shifts unlock deeper competition; both for dollars, and with established, formidable competitors, including how to compete on value versus price
  • How agencies will need to build stronger structural and skill-based capabilities
  • How "strategic posture" can vary, based on competitive choices, including simple steps to get your agency started on its journey

AgencyAgile also offers leadership workshops to help agency leadership formulate their future-forward strategy, aligning to vision, values and a shared view of the future.

Part 1: Enter the Era of CX

The marketing and advertising industry landscape is going through multiple disruptions - and this was before COVID!  Among the key shifts that affect agencies are increasingly connected consumers and buyers, how that shifts the dialog from brand-push to broader customer experience (CX), and how CX has a ripple effect on the brand enterprise, coinciding with a "perfect storm" of bottom-up and cross-enterprise automation.

Implications of this include possible shifts in ownership of the marketing function, its budgets, and also the mix of competition that can access those funds.

Part 2: The New Face of Competition

In this part, we explore the most challenging of the new competitors; the management consultancies (MCs), such as Deloitte Digital, and Accenture Interactive.  We view them through a comparative lens, against agencies using eight different perspectives, including sales & pricing, client engagement, staffing, and many others.

At the center of the MCs strength is their ability to create and sustain a strategic posture with the client, a topic that ties to the "Commodity Trap" problem that agencies experience.  We explore the antecedents to buyer perception of strategic value in the context of how a typical agency engages.

Part 3: Becoming a Stronger Competitor

In this part. we explore a range of shifts that agencies can and should make, including shifts to structure and operating model, service offerings, and the posture and capabilties of their teams.

Key concepts include: data and b-school style narratives being the new lingua franca, shifting to a data-oriented and more persistent role for strategy, and the need to "escalate" the conversation across the brand enterprise and into the C-Suite.

Part 4: Getting Ready for Battle

In this last part, we discuss the idea of "strategic posture" whereby an agency makes strategic choices around its service offerings and also its delivery model.  We'll cover some of the pro's and con's that go with these choices. as illustrated around three sample strategic postures.

We end with a brief discussion of some first, small steps that an agency can take down this path.

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