Mobile Fix: Apple Agency?
Apple is building an internal agency with 1,000 people and using them to compete with their long time agency partner TBWA. Can this really shake things up? asks Simon Andrews, founder of Addictive!
Viacom are the latest ‘old’ TV business to invest in newTV with a deal with DefyMedia, trading a couple of their games properties for a stake in Defy.
Next to go could be Fullscreen who reportedly are about to be bought for $1 billion. Their head of talent talks about what’s happening with YouTube in this Guardian article:
“I really believe there’s a tipping point that’s happening right now, where you see studios, networks and advertisers all starting to look at these creators and what’s happening.
“… What Madison Avenue and all of traditional media has yet to understand about this is that there is this authentic bond between these creators and their fans. Their fans represent their distribution channel: it’s a living, breathing organism, which I don’t think traditional media understands, nor do they really understand the power of that.
“The fans helped build their distribution channel: they told their friends to subscribe, to retweet something. They’re part of this whole process.”
Here in the UK we have a similar set of emerging talent and this C4 video looking at them is worth watching – as are the related interviews. Brands are already starting to get involved. In New York a new talent agency is representing the talent emerging on Vine and Instagram. How long before this goes mainstream?
Apple Agency?
We have talked a lot about how much of the work traditionally done by agencies is getting hoovered up by new competitors. The big professional services firms like Accenture and Deloitte have built big practices around digital and made smart acquisitions.
Big tech firms like Adobe, IBM and Salesforce offer more and more marketing services too. And increasingly businesses are seeing that digital is a core competence and building skills inhouse.
This is one reason we like our architect builder model – we can work with any builder that a client already has a relationship with and add value through strategic thinking, big ideas and UI expertise. Because those soft skills tend to be under-represented in these new competitors agencies still see a valuable role for themselves.
But a new move by Apple might shake things up a little. They are building an internal agency with 1,000 people and using them to compete with their long time Agency partner TBWA. Whilst there are no stars moving over – yet – this will be worth watching.
Google has hired some remarkable creative talent but still partners with agencies. Can Apple replicate this success or will they struggle to persuade talent to forgo the variety inherent in an agency job to concentrate on one brand – albeit quite a special one?
Another sign of the evolving marketing services landscape is the partnership messaging app Line announced with Salesforce – where Salesforce users can now schedule campaigns in Line alongside Facebook and Twitter.
Music
Not that long ago music was a basic element of the Vertical Stack for GAFA – offered by everyone, but not seen as that significant. With the recognition that streaming will transform the economics of the music industry, focus has shifted back – as the Beats acquisition shows.
Amazon made a big push into music last year with their Cloud player – and by giving customers digital versions of most of the CDs they had bought through Amazon. In the US they have now relaunched the Cloud Player app as Amazon Music and Prime customers now have access to over 1 million songs.
They have some work to do as they don’t have some of the latest music – particularly from Universal who don’t share their most recent hits – and of course Spotify offers 20 million songs.
We suspect the average Prime customer is a little different to the typical Spotify customer and this is another play by Amazon to make Prime absolutely essential – their Anchor?
Google are also looking at this area – although a £15 million deal to buy Songza isn’t going to worry anyone. Of GAFA Google seem least concerned with content – other than in YouTube.
One writer talks of his dissatisfaction with Beats and has switched back to Spotify – largely because Spotify is more social than Beats.
Do we think that will get better within Apple – who arguably don’t really get social? Or will Apple encourage a closer link between Beats and Facebook? What would that mean to Spotify? And how will Apple use their Shazam/Siri partnership to drive Beats?
A big focus for all the music services is curation – helping people discover music they might like. This piece points out that there is a risk this gets distorted by the money to be made. Just like Payola was a scandal in radio when people found the DJs were getting kickbacks to play certain records, curation might go the same way.
Beacons
With launch of iBeacons Apple have enabled a very interesting new way of connecting with people. There is a huge excitement at the potential of beacons – especially in retail – even if there hasn’t be too much implementation yet.
But Apple have also taken away one of the main ways people like retailers have been using to monitor customers. In a little noticed change in iOS8, Apple stop anyone from tracking people using WiFi. Amongst others JC Penny in the US have used it and Asda are using it in the UK.
It gives Apple a big tick in the privacy stakes and, by a happy coincidence, makes their new technology even more attractive.
(VC Jason Calcanis has written a good article on why he is so excited about beacons and points to some of the companies that are doing good stuff in this space.)
This is an edited and abridged version of Mobile Fix – click here to read the full article on Addictive!’s website
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