Take-Away from iMedia Agency Summit (Bali)

This week I was in Bali for iMedia’s Agency Summit. It was a lovely experience, not just the beautiful location but the whole summit was insightful, relevant, and a lot of fun. It’s mainly for agencies and vendors in the business of interactive media. I have basically learned 4 things:

1) Interactive media is still a creative tool and less a business tool

During the summit many presentations from vendors focused on cool things they have done with digital. For instance, “See how one can turn this car with his fingers using HTML5!” While numbers were presented (this social media campaign created 40,000 more fans) there was a clear lack of showing how digital media is a business tool that drives the strategy behind a brand. Marketers don’t get excited about what’s possible; they know broadly that the sky is the limit. They want to see a higher level of abstraction when addressing how digital can fulfill business needs.

2) The relationship between digital media owners (owners of digital assets and those of content) and agencies is breaking down

I believe the traditional agency model depended on a market being an oligopoly. A small number of audience suppliers created an easy marketplace where buying volume and close relationships thrived, however this is no longer true. There’s fragmentation of those that deliver audiences, deliver content, and produce creative material leads to many in the industry seeking monetization of their assets anyway they can – with or without agencies as the middle man.

Direct relationships in a market with many brands and many media owners (the end of the oligopoly) are certainly possible as volume buying doesn’t provide the same benefits as it currently does.

3) Smart people don’t make a smart agency

There’s a lot of talk about the agencies being able to find and retain talent resulting in a lack of high quality in the agency. However, I’m meeting very strategic and smart people from the agency side. Unfortunately this doesn’t translate to a strong and smart image of the agency. This situation reminds me of a great story in the book “Gödel, Escher, Bach” where a comparison is made that the behavior of individual ants hardly explain the behavior of the ant colony. I’m not an HR person however it seems that a strategy on how to translate smart people into a smart agency would be a unique selling point for agencies.

4) There is hope

The first three points are somewhat negative and it would be unfair to not state the positive. It’s certainly true that Asian agencies know the challenges they are facing and the executives are not hiding in the past. Joseph Baladi did a survey – amongst to attendees, prior to the summit – that clearly demonstrated that everyone understands the challenges facing the industry. With the growth of the economies here I have no doubt the industry will figure it out and perhaps even create a global standard for the role and added value of agencies. But there is a lot of work to do!

/Peter