States of (semi) independence
There a place in between where the gap in the market and the market in the gap can exist…
Take a look at last week’s new-business league table in Campaign. Study closely and you’ll see that about half the agencies listed are independents – the likes of Krow, Mother, St Luke’s, Cheetham Bell and The Red Brick Road.
One of them, Lucky Generals, will this week power up the table to about fourth place after seeing off AMV BBDO and BBH to win Twitter – comfortably ahead of the likes of JWT and Leo Burnett.
They are living proof that, not only is there a gap in the market, but also a market in the gap.
I know…it’s shocking. This, after all, is supposed to be the era in which the giant networks sweep up every client as they come available, that draw on the holding company to offer these clients ‘horizontalised’, bespoke networks that provide every service under the sun – like Team Megacorp or whatever WPP calls its Ford unit.
Once they’ve done that, the big holding companies offer cash and a comfortable home to those independents which then give up the brave fight and decide that, if they can’t beat the networks, they might as well become a tiny, almost invisible, part of one…and take the cash.
Except that, as the table proves, this is not always the case. The independent state, at least in the UK, is currently a happy one, buoyed by a climate of entrepreneurialism that suits a certain type of client and agency.
Well, mostly. It seems to me there is a place in between where the gap in the market and the market in the gap can exist: let’s call it semi-independence.
Take the London arm of Crispin Porter & Bogusky (CP&B), which last month announced the hiring of Karmarama refugee Dave Bounaguidi as the final part of a revamped management team.
Some might quibble with my description of CP&B London as semi-independent; after all, CP&B is an agency brand that resonates across the western hemisphere (if not globally), and itself is part of the MDC mini-conglomerate.
But MDC is not exactly London- or Europe-focused, and nor is the parent CP&B, which has had its share of troubles of late. CP&B London has seen a succession of invisible American executives come and go since it opened around 2010.
Apart from Paddy Power and, more recently, that Turkish Airlines ad featuring Lionel Messi, it has never punched its weight. Effectively, it has withered on the vine. It might as well have been on its own. And Paddy Power has gone too.
But now, in a sort of reverse declaration of independence, it has an-all British team running it: planner Chris Chard, late of Leo Burnett; CEO Richard Pinder, late of The House, Publicis and Burnett; and Buonaguidi.
(By the way, in a happy co-incidence, the initials of the new trio are C, P and B.)
But does the world need another semi-independent slugging it out in the unforgiving battleground that is London?
Well, yes it does. Variety is good.
But how do such agencies survive against the mighty conglomerates when the gravitational pull, as one might describe it, is all in their favour?
The answer lies in two factors. One, there’s a whole breed of client – they might be challenger brands, they might be dotcoms, they might have an entrepreneurial culture, or they might be owner-managed – who find the ‘establishment agencies’ too bureaucratic and process-bound.
Two, there’s a whole breed of talent – creatives, planners, digital strategists, app or web designers, data scientists – for whom working independently, yet collaboratively, is the thing. For these individuals, the opportunity to work with the likes of CP&B is a real attraction.
Many of them have spent time with the giant networks, and relish the difference.
For CP&B, it means that it can effectively compete with the networks – if that is what their clients want. As Pinder describes the culture: “we want to be aggressively collaborative”.
Of course, Pinder must make the best of the hand he has been dealt, so one might conclude: ‘he would say that, wouldn’t he?’
Except that his is not the only agency to have identified this gap in the market and the presence of this experienced, collaborative, talent pool with which to exploit it. It is exactly this that Blue 449, the media agency born out of Walker Media, aims to tap into with its ‘open source network’ concept.
You can see that, for the right clients, it is an attractive proposition. The flaw in the Team Megacorp model is that is based on a group of people and companies who have to work together. The alternative, the open source model, is that it is based on people who choose to work together.
Will CP&B London make this approach work? Only if it can get the right clients, clients that allow it to stay true to its proposition.
It’s off to an OK start: Turkish Airlines is a big player that it can (and to an extent, has already) make famous. The Messi video was named Ad of the Decade by YouTube – I know, it surprises me too.
It is also working with Infiniti, the Nissan luxury car brand, Lenovo and the Argos own-brands like Chad Valley and Bush.
They tick the right boxes: challenger brands, with international footprints or ambitions to break into the big time; small enough to eschew the big multinationals; but large enough to want more than three men and a dog.
Now CP&B just needs a few more of them.
In its own way, the deal agreed earlier this month by 18 Feet and Rising to sell 27 per cent of itself to Creston to mini-conglomerate Creston is another manifestation of the shift to semi-independence.
It’s an interesting choice by 18 Feet. The agency very much in the image of its founders, Jonathan Trimble and Matt Keon: ambitious, fiercely proud, challenging, determined to do things their own way…and just a little bit bonkers (but in a charming way).
Would they have fitted into one of the big conglomerates? Absolutely not. Both parties would have hated the other.
Creston, for its part, is small (tiny, by comparison with the big players) and nimble, happy to be supportive and lend a hand where needed – which seems to me to be a definition of semi-independence.
Nearly every country – not the UK, bizarrely – celebrates its independence day. But maybe it’s time to introduce a variant: semi-independence day.