Influx

With innovation and ideas becoming the new buzzwords of business, shouldn’t ad agencies be more engaged in the process?

Clients are making their offices funkier and more creative, they are hiring more creative people and they are establishing new frameworks for innovation and idea generation.

Instead of leaping forward and innovating themselves, agencies risk being marginalized as bit-players in the ideas game.

Any self-respecting agency planner or wannabe futurist could and probably did predict, more than half a decade ago, that clients were going to need more ideas and greater innovation.

While many agencies saw the first dotcom boom as a chance to expand, it was a sideways expansion, rather than a giant vertical leap. Agencies developed new capabilities for building more of the same stuff, rather than coming up with the business idea.

What’s stopping them?

Ad making is a seductive enterprise- it comes with its own peer and rewards system and a highly visible by-product that people put their names on.

It’s ego driven and visible.

Contrast that with business idea generation; it’s more complex, more labored and more collaborative.

There is less visibility and less ego involved.

For advertising to make the leap and it can, some of the smartest, brightest thinkers in the business world create ads, it has to understand and embrace this new culture of creativity.

For advertising to succeed and move up the ladder, it needs to break away from ego-centric creativity, the “Madison Avenue” and “Ad guys” nomenclature that’s more albatross, than asset and sharpen its collaborative processes.

If they can manage to do this, clients will be inviting them to the party.