11y
I’d agree with you that around the time of your post we as a management team did not communicate clearly why we were expanding our capabilities and evolving our positioning. Since, late last year, we reengineered our weekly discipline leadership meeting with the goal to align all ranks of management. At BLITZ, like most companies, senior management and department heads tag team to translate and articulate the direction of the agency to broader groups, explain the client and market drivers behind it, and support people towards professional growth and new skill development. Today, any lack of clarity and team feedback is brought back to the leadership team and addressed.
Let me also take a stab at addressing the client services and strategy feedback.
TL;DR (Too Long; Didn’t Read):
To remain relevant, agencies must evolve with the market demand. There has been a lot of fragmentation and complexity in our industry and we’re all racing to figure out how to do it better. This kind of evolution requires experimentation, and often failure, which, at times, results in doing extra work. But we didn’t waste that (and your) extra work. The experimentation helped us figure out how to integrate brand and communications planning with digital strategy, product and service design, user experience, search and social. Today it is a multi-disciplinary practice that maps out the entire brand ecosystem. We’re able to validate hypotheses quickly and guide clients where and how they should invest their marketing dollars.
The long version:
It is well known that our industry has gone through a lot of change in the last 10 years, resulting in introduction of many new disciplines. There was a myriad of talented specialty shops that did the most amazing work, but chose not to adapt, grow or evolve. Many of those shops are no longer around because their specialty got commoditized, technology and marketing needs evolved, and things like social media and marketing automation became a thing. The disappearance of these shops accelerated as the traditional agencies learned digital, while clients built up their internal teams so they can better manage costs and mitigate risks. The saying “if you don’t change, change will happen to you” couldn’t be truer. This is why in the last 14 years we very purposefully evolved the agency 3 times - from a “Flash shop” to a digital agency, and then again in the last 2 years from a digital agency to an integrated marketing agency with digital product development.
The journey from a specialty agency to an integrated agency requires onboarding of new capabilities and skills in a relatively short amount of time. Naturally, this is especially challenging for account and project management. Previously they “only” had to be experts at building websites or managing retainers (no small tasks on their own). Now they have to be experts in servicing clients and teams across a digital / traditional hyper-fragmented environment, involving multiple touch-points, disciplines, and technologies, fused with new business and marketing strategies. It is a tall order, and ramp up for some has been bumpy. But since we’re talking about real people, we chose to give them runway and invest in their growth. Some disagree with the approach, but I stand by it, and I sleep better because of doing the right thing. The outcome? In the last 12 months many of these folks grew professionally, while some moved on. Overall the PM and Account teams are better than they’ve ever been and while we have made significant progress, we continue to work on it very hard, every day.
On the topic of strategy. All this change requires innovation in how agencies approach strategy. And to innovate, you have to allow for experimentation and failure, so you can learn. What some perceive as egos I would characterize frustration we’re not evolving fast enough. Experimentation and failure does, at times, results in doing extra work. But we didn’t waste that (and your) extra work. The experimentation led to integrating brand and communications planning with digital strategy, product and service design, user experience, search and social. Today it is a multi-disciplinary practice that maps out the entire brand ecosystem. We’re able to validate hypotheses quickly and guide clients where and how they should invest their marketing dollars. Many BLITiZens agree that the strategy team has done an amazing job evolving and is one of the most unique and respected strategy practices in our industry. But at the end of the day, the real litmus test here is if clients value it, pay for it and hire you again for it. In the past 6 months the team has absolutely killed it - delivering awesome client work and winning great new pieces of business. When you keep getting hired by the client over and over it means it is working, and that they value the agency, the people and the output.
