Dear Creative, Advertising is not Dying.

Advertising Agencies are not dying — they’re evolving.

Advertising is dead. Advertising is dying. We’ve been hearing this since the 90’s with the arrival of the internet when everyone was sure that TV spots were going to disappear. Fast forward to today, more money is spent on advertising — particularly in digital advertising — than ever. Even the smallest companies that would have never paid a penny now are interested in having a logo, branding, a website, and even some Facebook or Google Ads.

What an advertising agency is offering is shifting — but it always been that way. Like Ad Contrarian says, Advertising is about attracting someone’s attention. The idea is always the most important asset in a campaign but the platform is as relevant as ever nowadays. With so many touch points, it’s hard to find the best way to connect with your target audience, which makes it really hard for advertising agencies to stay relevant as a communication partner for their clients.

More and more people are talking about reach instead of content. Which influencer has the bigger audience, which hashtag should go with your post, which social media should be your primary communication channel.

But none of that matters when you have nothing interesting to say.

But like I said, advertising is not dead, and it’s not dying either. It’s also not reinventing itself — a word that is very trendy nowadays. Advertising is evolving like it always did, like it always does. Creativity is the UVP of each advertising agency for obvious reasons, but now they have to use it in their own way to answer vital questions in order to stay relevant in a world where everyone is watching something and getting someone’s attention is harder than ever.

Agencies need to find a creative way to retain the attention of (1) their clients, (2) their employees, and (3) their audience. The key points in their most important brief now are:

— How to keep the talent. It’s hard to keep young talent in an agency because there are not many millennials that want to work in an office. Also, most of us think that we are underpaid — which is true in most of the cases. How can an agency compete with the freelance lifestyle?

— Are all creative agencies, in fact, creative? What makes you creative?

— How to achieve Holy Grail work? Work that’s not only effective for the client, but also helps the agency to build a strong portfolio that attracts more clients — and more important revenue — , and at the same time attracting work that is fun for the creative team to make and keeps them motivated and interested.

— Why would a client hire me — an agency — when they can hire an influencer which will give them the same — or maybe even more — reach for less money? Even though the answer might seem obvious, we still need to answer it because whether you like it or not, the client is asking this question.

These are just some of the topics I’ll be addressing in the following posts. This is my point of view. The point of view of a nobody that wanted to be a somebody in the industry, an Argentinian that wanted to be the next Agulla or Juan Cabral. This is a copywriter that didn’t fit into the role, the culture, or the structure of an agency and now is trying to discover how the agency of the future should be today.

I love advertising more than — almost — anything. Every day I ready Adweek, AdAge, Adlatina, Latinspots, Creativity Online, It’s Nice That, and many many more websites before I even brush my teeth (but right after Instagram tbh). I write this because I love ideas and I still believe that there is no better place for them than an ad agency and the most creative, smart, and interesting people I know I met them in La Comunidad or Grey Buenos Aires — my two last agencies. But I just couldn’t do it. I felt it was my fault for a long time but now I understand it was not me, it was you. Because outside on the streets of the freelancing world people are dying of boredom working for a tech company there not dozen, or thousand, but millions — I mean, I’m assuming but I don’t really know I didn’t have time to do a Twitter poll — of young talents that left an ad agency because it wasn’t the place they imagined it would be.