A different way
What happens to agencies in a world where Chief Marketing Officers and Marketing Managers are neither chiefs, officers or managers any more? Or when marketing departments are not departments any more? The “new” management paradigm with roots from Toyota in the 80’s that later reached software is now spreading like wildfire in all businesses and have started to involve all areas including marketing and sales. Regardless if you call it agile or not, the change towards working with autonomous cross functional teams have really put pressure on the agency business.
The paradox is that agencies are full of creative talents, niche experts and innovation power that organisations rate as the most important thing to have going forward in todays competitive market. The two eco-systems just don’t match any more. Partly as a response to that and also to the ambition of becoming faster and more efficient the in-house trend is growing rapidly.
IS In-house THE ANSWER?
It makes sense to increase marketing, media and creative competences in-house and integrating them into the teams but recruiting and retaining creative talents and some niche expertise is really hard and expensive. Often because of cultural reasons but also because they are not needed all the time. So regardless on how ambitious your in-house plans are you will probably still need some help from the outside to be really successful. So is getting help from freelancers the answer?
Freelancers
The gig economy is blooming and growing rapidly. More work is becoming project-based versus the classic agency-of-record assignments which also boosts the need for freelancers. But what holds many back from taking the step to become a freelancer is the uncertainty of income, having to chase new assignments and not being part of a social context. The IT consultancy business that have had a longer history in this economy and also in agile ways of working have been creating independent consultant suppliers and digital platforms you can use. If you work in a bigger organisation you probably have a frame agreement with at least one of these consultant suppliers. The creative and marketing/media business however have not really caught up to this in a good way and your existing consultant suppliers neither have the knowledge nor the network to help you in that area, and continuously chasing individual freelancers by yourself is nothing you should be focusing your energy on. So is going to the big networks the answer?