Before we dream Instagram let’s make Housebite first
by asi
There’s been a lot of words pouring over the new darling debate: Can The Next Instagram/Hipstamatic/Klout/Angry Birds Be Born Within An Agency?
Fashionably late, yet not a bit less ‘ranty’, I want to chip in, if i may
In short, no. Agencies are too damn busy making what Murat was referring to as branded fluff. They(we) respond to briefs, they make ‘advertising’ and that’s not going to disappear anytime soon. Despite contrary belief, advertising works – it makes our clients feel like their doing they’re job and it helps people in agencies make a living. Occasionally, it does what it’s ultimately meant to be doing – to help brands sell more of their stuff.
As much as we want to believe, and while agency peeps are accountable to 85% of the ‘start-up is the new black’ chatter (people in real start-ups are normally too damn busy running a start up), you need a certain conditions to be met to move any start up idea, small or big, from talking to doing. Even the most motivated, savvy, ingenious, oh-so-digital agencies will find it massively challenging to direct resources from their hectic billable everyday operation to make a start-up idea happen.
I don’t mean to discourage anyone but let’s get real. Ask Noah if he could have made Percolate happen from inside the Barbarian Group, ask Andy what happened to the potentially amazing “we feel earth”, Ask Tim about the time and resource he now puts in BrandFeed. Making most start-up ideas happen takes massive resource that 95% of individuals and agencies can’t afford (there are some small exceptions).
The very clever person that is Tim Malbon wrote an inspiring and sobering respond to Murat and I cannot agree with him more. Expecting agencies to become the next darling start-ups is a bit childish. Most importantly as Tim notes, the ‘makers generation’ is so much bigger and significant than brands and agencies.
What agencies can do and some of them have been trying for a while with vary degrees of success is to (a) learn from and adopt the culture of start-ups into their process and operation, and (b) make some stuff that is actually useful (yawn, it’s funny how the chatter of 5 years ago is so similar only instead of the darling start-up, we had the darling ‘utility’ with Nike+ as the holy grail – how many of these did agencies end up making?)
There’s loads to do between the branded fluff and the next instagram. And smaller useful platforms that bring value to people is where agencies can realistically innovate for/with their clients. One such idea that got me super excited the other day is Housebite. A simple, clever platform that revolutionises Take Away and makes any foodie and aspiring masterchef a local take away spot. Now if I had someone like Waitrose as a client I’d be bitting the shit out of myself for not coming with this idea for them.
When we’ll get just a bit closer to make some stuff like Housebite for our clients we’ll earn the permission to talk about start-ups.
‘naff said
I wonder how you’re defining ‘agency’ – let’s say you mean creative company who’s primary business is from commercial clients, and that company could be any size, a two person team (i’ve just hired my first employee, so now i guess i’d be called an agency) or a two thousand person team.
I think both sizes of agency could create the next ‘big thing’, but enabling this requires the fundamental DNA of the agency to support it.
First of all, where is the idea going to come from? If it is internal, the agency is just creating a product and releasing it, and providing they’re setup to invest and dedicate time to it, there is no reason why this product could not become popular.
If it is external, and this is where I think the heart of the discussion is taking place, if it is a client brief or which drives the creation of a new product/service, it requires the client to support the project AFTER launch – this is where I think the biggest challenge lies.
Most clients think a project has finished when a project has launched.
Most products haven’t really before the project has launched.
Its the post-launch activity which really makes an app/product/service successful, whether that is product development, community management, PR, or simply just something existing longer than three months, and it is that challenge which will make it hard for products to come out of an agency, as most are not set up to adequately support something post-launch. All of their systems and processes are geared around launch, not support.
Oddly enough, it is the large agencies who are probably in the best position to support post-launch activity, as they have resource, and probably the capability of spinning off a team to live with a product after launch. Smaller agencies would have to dedicate a massive amount of time to a single product (where failure is more risky), but larger agencies have the potential margins and teams to handle ongoing products.
But larger agencies have more mouths to feed, and generally are more concerned about the bottom line (again, oddly enough, as they’re probably making far higher margins), committing to work which is, in the short term, non-billiable, is also a challenge, or perceived as a bad thing.
So perhaps the opportunity falls to the client, to say ‘Yes, I’m willing to invest in this, pay for some development time, pay to prototype, pay to get us to beta, and see how things go, because I believe in the opportunity’, which helps the agency rapidly get to a point where they can demonstrate what success might look like (and note, this is done not through powerpoints, but actual demonstration of the product and getting it into an audience’s hands).
Some clients are doing this already – the Nokia Push Snowboarding project, developed by hypernaked, is a great example of a brand developing something which wasn’t an advert, didn’t have a product to sell, and started to pierce the surface of product development. BERG also have a handful of examples of future-scratching, early product development for clients (and for themselves). Mint Digital have a long history of developing tools for themselves and their clients. Projeqt is a storytelling platform developed by TBWA. There are dozens of examples.
I guess much of it comes down to attitude towards risk and structure of the agency, and if agencies do not support risk-taking, or proactive opportunity seeking, non-billable development and post-launch support, it is unlikely that the next hipstamatic is going to appear from within an agency.
And finally, lets think about the numbers: for every Angry Birds, there are a million Ambivilant Dogs which didn’t achieve breakthrough success. It may actually be that there are dozens of agencies already attempting this, but none of them have been truly successful yet. Don’t assume just because agencies are filled with talented communication types that they can create business succcess in this new world.
Our job now should be getting long term commitment to online ideas. Instead of doing campaigns where things die out and end up in a Webby shelve, we should be looking at ideas that have a short term upside and long term growth potential.
Many of these ideas that fit this bill deal with “fans” and “community”. I have found that getting brands to appoint community managers helps a great deal.
Good stuff Asi.
There was a fella at last weeks Tedx London who spoke about the current problems in education (can’t find the video yet). The way he saw it our current education systems teach kids to be ‘problem solvers’ not ‘problem finders’. This basically means teachers spend their evenings and weekends finding and framing problems for kids to solve, where as the kids should be doing this job for the teachers. Then in later life they’ll be used to finding the problems that need solving, rather than just waiting to be given problems to solve.
Same metaphor works here I think. Agencies need to move from the ‘problem solvers’ to the ‘problem finders’ in order to create this stuff.