Last week, I celebrated the appointment of Andrew Robertson at the helm of Omnicom’s creative arm, OAG. I do truly believe that we need an exceptional leader to actually save our entire creative industry, not just Omnicom’s. Whether we like him or not, he’s the only figure still standing on the creative side of the business, so let’s wish him success collectively.
Reflecting on the demise of our industry and my high hopes for Robertson’s appointment, I also decided to contribute to finding solutions by looking at another creative industry that has survived multiple near-deaths since the 1900s: the music industry.
Here’s the recurrent pattern for music: 1) Free copy (player piano, radio, tapes, napster/digital piracy) 2) Legal proceedings and lobbying to ban it 3) Finally, license it and make more money than before.
There are, of course, many differences between our creative industry and the music industry. For me, however, the main difference is that the music industry regularly faced imminent death.
We in Adland, on the other hand, have been dealing with a slow death.
This is like the frog that jumps out when thrown into boiling water and survives, versus the frog that dies because it starts in cold water that gradually heats up until it boils it to death.
The music industry is always questioning itself and reacting immediately to survive. We never did that; hence the problem today.
In that context, what could we do, given that we are a B to B industry and music is B to C?
The first thing for me is to focus our attention on the product: unlike the music industry, our product has gradually become beyond mediocre, useless, and inefficient. We have to take a step backwards and inject energy into perfecting the product again, even if it comes at the cost of losing clients. We are losing them gradually anyway.
So, let’s be like the frog that jumps out of the boiling water at once. I would ruthlessly focus on clients who are still interested in a top-notch creative product and believe in its effectiveness. The rest are a lost cause and will keep dragging us down their mediocrity path all the way to extinction.
The second thing the music industry has to address is its pricing system, now selling one song at a time compared to a full record. We cannot keep our remuneration the way it is. We have to re-engineer it completely. There is no point in screaming and shouting about low pay. It is now irreversible. We have to reinvent the model.
Clients have gotten used to paying very little. We have to agree to that, as long as we do not operate at a loss. Our remuneration should be based on a success incentive, where everyone wins without adding extra expenses to the initial budget. We have to work at cost plus.
Any incremental profit will be extracted from unexpected growth. If we deliver a good product, it will work out 100% of the time. That’s why I advocate losing clients who want garbage and focusing on the ones who want a quality product. Only a quality product will drive sales and bring us out of our misery through sales-based incentives.
Last but not least, it is about added value in a totally new and evolving ecosystem. This is the music industry’s latest unresolved challenge. In my experience in this business, I have realized that only admen have the capacity to coordinate increasingly complex ecosystems, because we understand the big picture better than anyone else in the holding companies.
I am utterly convinced that admen are the only ones in the industry with the capacity to bring all the disciplines together coherently and effectively. In my experience, all other disciplines operate in silos. They focus on vanity metrics and tend to blame any shortcomings on outside factors and the ideal scapegoat: these crazy creatives.
Each of us in Adland is trying to think of new solutions, and we collectively probably have them. Unfortunately, in my long career, even at the most senior levels. Nobody at the global level ever asked us our opinion on the future of the industry.
The only direction we got was a crazy EBIT that kept increasing for no reason every year at the expense of talent, investments, experimentation, innovation, and any long-term vision. It was pure madness, and it brought each creative agency crashing down from unreasonable and very stupid profitability heights in the end. In hindsight, AI could have done a better job running agencies over the past 10 years. At least there is the word Intelligence in the acronym AI.
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