can we decommoditise the advertising agency?
Aside from being a decent all-rounder on the art front Pablo Picasso had a few good hats and an extensive repertoire in one-liners.
'The paintings are not important, who the artist is, that is what matters'.
In other words, superficial differentiation on simply an outputs level is a sure fire way to commodotise oneself.
Stood on a packed South Yarra station the other evening I looked around at the millions of dollars of 'value' the surrounding billboards were supposedly delivering for the advertisers.
Close on half a million sets of eyeballs must ebb and flow through that station every day.
The problem is, none of them were looking at the billboards, they were all tweeting, reading email or playing Angry Birds on their mobiles.
This is the challenge facing the 'advertising' industry, for sure.
There is no there, there.
Thinking in terms of WHAT and HOW the agency produces 'advertising' is the road to commoditisation, at best, irrelevance at worst.
This narrow 'WHAT' perspective was the downfall of the music business model that we have just seen crash, and it will be the downfall of advertising agencies who fail to recognise they are in the communications business not the advertising business.
The real question is not WHAT? or HOW?, it's WHY?
Asking WHY? gives different answers.
Can we decommoditise the advertising agency?
Yes we can. But it's not by making 'better' ads.
That's 'a faster horse'.
