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FORGET THE AGENCY OF THE FUTURE. CONSULTING FIRMS ARE FORCING THEIR A INTO THE SPACE WHERE BURNED-OUT AGENCIES STRUGGLE TO THRIVE
HEAT, A SAN FRANCISCO-BASED INDEPENDENT CREATIVE agency, won eight Lions at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity last year for E A Sports' Madden NFL Football game with a campaign that checked all the boxes for modern marketing creativity: digital-first content (and lots of it), real time, social, personalized, sharable, engaging, data-driven.
There was the Madden Giferator-a real-time GIF engine stocked with thousands of game-scenario GIFs created from the video game that fans could customize and sent out based on real game action every week. There was also a rollicking, very sharable music video with comedian Kevin Hart extreme-taunting Dave Franco into a game of Madden with a handful of NFL stars (with huge followings) making cameos to boost the social reach.
By any measure, Heat's campaign was a spectacular touchdown-500,000 GIFs were made and the game enjoyed one of its most profitable years ever-but by the end of the year, the 11-year-old agency had been acquired. Not to WPP or Interpublic or Publicis or any of the other advertising holding companies that pride themselves on creative thinking. Instead, Heat agreed to be bought by Deloitte Consulting, the largest business consulting firm in the world, famous for its accountants, operational efficiency experts and button-down culture. Why?
"Without being too trite about it, we could see where the market was headed," said Mike Barrett, Heat's managing director.
Which is where, exactly? While most agencies have adapted and evolved in response to the uncertainty and forced transformation that arose from the break-neck speed of the digital revolution, there's a sense that the ground has dramatically shifted again in the just the past couple of years, and lots of people are stilling trying to figure out how to respond.
The problem has layers: increasingly marketing-savvy consumers are even more elusive thanks to ad blocking, new players (like Deloitte) are entering the fray while everyone still struggles to turn big data into anything meaningful.
But talk to agency execs and very early in the conversation the crux of the problem emerges: while agencies have endured years of procurement-mandated fee cuts, now they are being asked...