Will Technology Drastically Change the Agency Business Model?

On February 19, 2010, In Biz, By Tac Anderson

Adam Singer has a post about the challenges in building a consultancy/agency in the digital world. I shared this post on Twitter and instantly had replies from Marc Meyer and Jason Moriber. Marc couldn’t agree more and Jason totally disagrees. I don’t know exactly why Marc and Jason feel that way, maybe they’ll share their comments here, but I love it when a topic sparks polarizing responses.

I’ve been an individual consultant. I’ve helped grow a 4 person agency startup into a 12 person million dollar agency over 2 years and an acquisition of a web dev shop. (I then left 6 months later before it all imploded.) I’m now at a 800+ person global agency that’s growing like crazy. Technology scales, people don’t scale. You have to grow and develop talent. The only other option is to acquire talent and I’ve already talked about the challenges of social media talent acquisition.

When I was on my own I did a lot of consulting. Consulting pays the bills but the only way to grow is to hire people. People are expensive. As an EIR at Highway 12 Ventures I saw a lot of people that wanted to build agencies or service firms of some sort. Here’s your free tip for the day, if you’re trying to build an agency that is technology enabled don’t bother talking to a VC, an Angel investor maybe but not a VC. If you’re a technology company that also offers consulting that’s something different. That’s why Mark Hurd spent so much money for HP to buy EDS.

I personally think all agencies will become a hybrid of consulting and technology. This still isn’t scale, it’s just market demand. Publishing, measurement and workflow tools technologies are just a few areas agencies are developing. Many agencies are partnering with technology providers, we’ve seen a lot of that over the last year and we’ll see a lot more.

In addition to partnerships some agencies <ahem> are quickly developing internal technical capabilities to create their own technology solutions. This is also going to increase significantly.

The work agencies are doing has been changing drastically but I also think the agency business model is going to drastically change.

What about you? What additional changes is technology bringing to the agency model?

Will Technology Drastically Change the Agency Business Model?

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Be Better Doing What You’re Good At

On December 3, 2009, In Comm, By Tac Anderson
Do Better

Do Better

Over the course of my life I’ve had more personality and intelligence tests than your average person. Growing up with ADHD before people understood it, meant I went through a lot of tests. Then between my various jobs and when I got my MBA I have taken dozens of additional tests.

The net result of all of this is that I know a lot about myself that I already knew.

I just  received the results of my most recent test. Surprise, I have a lot of ideas, I’m good with people and I’m bad with details. This probably isn’t a surprise to anyone who knows me at all.

Something that this test highlighted is the differences between my personality when I’m trying versus when I’m not trying. When I’m trying I’m just more me. I don’t try an compensate much for my lack of attention to details, I just try harder at the areas I’m strong in.

There used to be a time where people strived to be “well rounded,” there was an effort to strengthen your weaknesses. I don’t think that matters so much anymore. I think people would get further along if the focused on their strengths. Don’t get me wrong, you can’t ignore your weaknesses. I’ve had to improve my writing, but I’ve never made any effort to improve my penmanship. Why bother?

I work to be just as organized as I need to be but it’s not worth my effort to remember everything. I have technology and an office admin who make sure I’m where I need to be when I need to be. I’ve worked out a Moleskine system that works for my day to day but I have no interest in being David Allen.

Personality Test

Personality Test

Technology and our hyper connected lives (both to people and technology) means I can spend more effort increasing my strengths and spend just enough effort on my weaknesses to get by.

It’s really about personal ROI. I create more value doing what I’m good at because it takes me 2 to 3 times longer to do stuff I’m not good at. Because I’ve identified my strengths – my true strength – I don’t worry about trying to do things I’m not the best at.

Businesses shouldn’t focus on areas they can’t be among the best and neither should we.

Now I said true strengths. Being ADHD, people thought my multitasking and hyperness were a weakness and tried to “fix me”. I have to focus to a degree but the multitasking and hyper activity are huge strengths when it comes to ideation and innovation. I see trends and connections others don’t see because I don’t “keep my head down” and focus on one thing. Now I’m really glad that some of you can do that. It’s important that some of us stay focused. You still need some generalist. But they’re good at that.

But if we all focused on our strengths and worked together we’re infinitely greater together than we are individually trying to be well rounded.

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Stop Trying to Change. It’s Pointless.

On October 7, 2009, In New, By Tac Anderson
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I often forget that most people aren’t used to change. Some people have to constantly relearn how to do things.

I’ve never not know change. The idea of changing seems almost foreign. Change to me means I have to teach someone a new way to do things.

This may be a little meta, but I think we should instead learn how to learn instead of learn how to do some *thing*.

We should seek knowledge, not process. Don’t get me wrong, process is vital but it’s not the end goal. Process is a means to free up more time to learn something new.

If we are constantly learning than every knew experience is an opportunity to learn something. You may do some tasks in the same way you did them last time but when you have to do them differently it won’t be a “change” it will be new knowledge.

To quote Tyler Durden in Fight Club:

“Nothing is static. Everything is evolving. Everything is falling apart.”

I don’t actually think things are falling apart. That would imply change.

Business, technology or society will ever go back to a time where we learn a task and never have to relearn again. But some people approach their jobs and Marketing like that.

Social media is not another tactic to learn how to execute on and them optimize. Yes there are tactics we need to learn and optimize but if you approach this space with that mindset, then you’ve already become obsolete.

Social media is one manifestation of a broader shift that’s happened in society. Things have fundamentally changed.

We have entered an age of perpetual learning. Stop trying to change and just start learning.

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Is Technology too Main Stream?

On August 12, 2009, In Biz, By Tac Anderson
Is this tech?

Is this tech?

Just a little thinking out loud this morning. What is tech? Maybe a better question would be what isn’t tech?

This is a problem I struggled with for years when I started and ran the site TechBoise. It was fairly easy to deal with then because I let the companies and people in the community self select if they considered themselves tech or not. But then I saw these story lines in the technology category of the AP iPhone app.

I read some of these titles and I wonder if this is what tech news is:

Redbox and 20th Century Fox suing each other is a business article for sure but has nothing really to do with technology.

Same with the big studious picking on RealNetworks. (Didn’t we get over the whole copying media we purchased to our hard drive issue a decade ago? I guess not.)

Netflix running a second competition to improve their recommendation algorythim makes sense to me as a tech story.

EA and ESPN partnering to promote the new Madden game is a Business/Marketing story and not tech, IMHO.

Is this really tech?

Is this really tech?

A Twitter Opera? Really? Come on, that’s Arts and Entertainment!

Another DDOS attack on Twitter, yeah I buy that.

Google’s new search engine? Yep for sure.

GM selling their cars on EBay? No. Not tech.

I get that business and technology are forever linked at the hip. They can’t live without each other.

My point in breaking down each of these articles was not to diss on the AP or Journalism and what passes for news (I’ll save that for another post). This is more a comment on society.

As much as I may not think these stories are “tech” I found all of them interesting. The first section I head to is the Technology section. Now for “hard tech” they have the Science category but I think something has happened.

Technology used to be the realm of engineers and uber geeks. But over the last decade technology has gotten easier. It’s become an everyday occurrence to the point that every aspect of our lives is impacted by technology.

Tech blogs set the pace over the last 5 years and the main stream media is getting the hint. These headlines could just as easily be the headlines of any tech blog. OK that’s not totally true, if they were from a blog they’d be much more snarky.

And just to answer my own question; No I don’t think technology is too main stream.

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2009 predictions: Mergers, Netbooks, Smartphones, Linux and Energy

On December 27, 2008, In Biz, By Tac Anderson

comparison of the sizes of a package of handke...Image via WikipediaWhile I think all of these are pretty safe bets, I think the author got it right on. And in 09-10 I think that safe bets will be the only bets, but that still doesn’t mean they’ll pay off.

TG Daily – 2009: Year of mergers, platform changes and conservation

Analyst Opinion – 2009 is shaping up to be a nasty year, in fact it looks like 2009 and 2010 will be years we’ll want to look back on as briefly as possible. But these years will also clear out of lot of the dead and dying companies that have been clogging up the market. I believe the U.S. and the technology industry will both emerge stronger than they went into this cycle. Let’s look at some of the trends that likely will dominate 2009 and a few of the bellwether companies that currently define the tech market.

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Web 2.0 and New Media Definitions

On May 29, 2007, In Comm, By Tac Anderson

There is a lot of confusion around the definitions of Web 2.0 vs New Media. You will hear a lot of people use them interchangeably. Even the above linked to Wikipedia definitions don’t offer much differentiation. So while theses may not be definitive this is the difference as I see them.

Web 2.0 is the technology.

This includes things like: AJAX, Blogs, Wiki’s, podcasts, RSS, widgets and tagging.

New Media is the philosophy.

This is the new approach to how we communicate with each other. This is what makes things like social communities so powerful.

It’s the combination of these two factors at the same time that have created the change that we are experiencing. One without the other is not as powerful.

Web 2.0 is cool, I like the technology but without the philosophy it’s just a cooler way to experience the web.

New Media is great, the approach of many to many and knowledge sharing across multiple groups is extremely powerful but without the technology you are limited to off line geographically limited groups.

Combine the two you you achieve exponential results.

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