The advertising industry loves its fads. They come, they go, but the industry tends to throw itself into them wholeheartedly in the meantime. The consultancy phenomenon is one that has been inflicted on it and the industry is not enjoying it so much. Several agencies, and a number of agency people, have thrown themselves into it, for a variety of reasons that they are unlikely to share. Lindsay Bennett wonders if this too shall pass. While the agencies are creating a buzz of alarm and the end of the (ad)world is nigh prophecies are rife (again), she puts forward a seriously good argument that the angst is unfounded.
Lindsay Bennett is corporate communications manager at DDB Australia. Here is her thinking:
Over the past five years, the narrative that consultancies have been encroaching onto advertising agency turf has been widespread throughout the industry. That narrative reached a head in Australia in 2017 with the Big Four – Accenture, Deloitte, PwC and KPMG – making a flurry of big moves and even bigger acquisitions to muscle into marketing services.
It quickly became the norm to speak of a consulting “brain drain” as a number of top agencies and high-profile individuals left their careers in advertising to join these firms.
However, in recent months, several of these much-touted consultancy hires are starting to boomerang back to traditional advertising networks, such as Omnicom and WPP.
One of the most high-profile boomerangs was Sunita Gloster, who returned to the agency world to join WPP AUNZ as chief customer officer after being hired a year prior to run PwC’s CMO board.
Most recently, PwC’s Ben Shepherd left the business to join Omnicom-owned CHE Proximity and Deloitte Digital’s Nicola Mansfield joined Interbrand. Last year strategist Nicky Bryson also departed PwC to take a role at TBWA.
Could this be the start of an exodus whereby agency execs have found the daily grind and billable time sheet pressure of the consultancy model doesn’t facilitate the truly creative types?
In a recent interview with the AFR, Mansfield said that the Big Four model constant delivery focus can leave little time for the “peaks and troughs that the true creative process requires”.
She found that creativity wasn’t often valued in a business where the main product is often analysis and process. In comparison to the multimillion-dollar audit process executed by consultancies, it’s easy to understand how the lower margin creative work can take a back seat. I’ve heard of instances where creative work is offered as an “add on” once the consultancy firm has completed a larger audit of a business.
In comparison, creativity, and the creative department, within advertising agencies is held on a pedestal and understood to be the lifeblood of the agency.
The ambition of creative agencies is to make great work that has cultural significance. Of course, not all work they create hits the mark, but when agencies work at their peak and with a brave client behind them, they can change the way society thinks and feels.
Mansfield said this type of radical creative work is often unobtainable with the level of work that staff are expected to charge to clients at a Big Four firm.
Speaking to other execs who have joined consultancies over the last 18 months, many mentioned that it can be a challenge to adjust to the working environment of the Big Four after growing up in agency frameworks.
Culture plays a big factor and while I’ve been told the environments of the Big Four are not always as two dimensional as they seem, creative agencies tend to have a more vibrant and diverse culture that helps spawn the true creative “weirdos” that go on to create the best work.
Others say the KPIs set by consultancies can be incredibly challenging and often unachievable.
In my own experience, meeting with the newly formed CMO panels at KPMG and PwC in my previous role, I was overwhelmed by the breadth of services they offered but also confused as to what they actually do.
In fairness, the offerings at Accenture Interactive, which acquired The Monkeys two years ago, and Deloitte Digital, which ransacked McCann for its leadership team in 2017, hold models closer to the advertising framework that are less convoluted.
The Monkeys and Maud give up their indie status to join Accenture
With more ex-agency people now populating the world of the Big Four there’s no doubt that some of them will be tempted back to senior roles back at big advertising firms as we’ve just seen with Ben Shepherd.
I’m not saying the threat of consultancies and their impact on the agency business is unjust, but merely suggesting it could have been exaggerated. Of course, the Big Four will continue to make moves in advertising territory, as we’ve seen with the recent Droga5/Accenture Interactive acquisition. There was also the PR push from Deloitte Digital last month, announcing it had recruited 64 grads making it one of the “largest creative and digital consultancies in Australia”.
However, “doing a Howcroft” became industry jargon when the exec jumped to PwC after a long career in advertising. As Mark Ritson predicted last year, “doing a Gloster” could become part of the industry’s vernacular sooner than we thought.