Some things that won’t happen in 2013

It’s customary at this time of December for columnists and certain types of organisation to tail-end their annual output with a list of predictions for the coming year.

They’re usually a mix of the finger-in-the-air type forecasting and wishful thinking (beloved of columnists), or – favoured by professional media organisations and forecasters – the extrapolation of industry or proprietary data carefully designed to align with that organisation’s business agenda.

By way of mea culpa, I have to plead guilty to many of the former in my past life.

So instead, this column is going to forecast some things that won’t change. Some might call this a conservative (with a small c) agenda. But this is not because I don’t think they should change, but because the innate conservatism of the industry means they won’t.

Let’s start with the business of agency categorisations, as demonstrated by last week’s Agency of the Year awards.

Both Campaign and Marketing favour the traditional – i.e. ad agency, digital agency, direct agency, media agency, content agency, sponsorship agency and so on.

How delightfully artificial. What for example, is the difference between a direct agency and a digital one? Is it because the direct ones still do some old-fashioned DM? If they do, they don’t tend to shout about it.

And why can’t the so-called traditional ad agencies – BBH, AMV, Adam & Eve, VCCP, for example – be considered in the digital category? I bet they’d like to be. They certainly consider their digital output to be on a par with that of the digital agencies.

And isn’t it restrictive to call the likes of LBi and AKQA ‘digital’ agencies? Why define them through the medium of their output?

I could go on. In my experience, content agencies produce ever-increasing amounts of digital work, and there is much stepping on of toes between them and other agencies – traditional, digital, direct.

The truth is that those once-sacrosanct silos are disappearing, largely because digital removes the dividing lines.

Campaign’s Claire Beale acknowledges the problem and promises to revisit the issue next year. I hope it will change, but I’m not optimistic.

That’s because it won’t change until clients want it to, and they don’t want it to for two reasons: one, because life’s simpler when you can stick your suppliers in different, discrete, boxes and make easy comparisons; and two, because client internal structures are still predicated on those different functions. This means the digital marketing manager needs or demands a digital agency to kick around, without which they have diminished status or clout within the organisation.

Agency remuneration models won’t change.

I chaired a conference last month where someone asked when the panel thought ‘billable hours’ or ‘FTE’ (full-time equivalents) would disappear.

Blimey, I remember that thorny issue from years ago. It seems that remuneration based on staff time (i.e. input rather than output) is as resilient as the cockroach. As long as it remains the preferred payment mechanism (and clients love it because it’s both quantifiable and predictable), the holy grail of charging for The Big Idea is still a dream.

The same goes for Payment by Results. Initiative Media’s worldwide chief executive Jim Hytner wants to make it a point of difference for his agency, but admits it doesn’t work for many clients: the big ones not only point to its potential complexity, but also find it culturally difficult. Sure, there will be experiments at the margins, but a game-changer it isn’t.

New agencies that promise to break all the rules will find that, even though everyone knows the rules are past their sell-by date, no-one wants to change them.

Every year agencies launch (or relaunch) with a PR-friendly strategy of differentiation, usually based on ‘a new way of doing business’ or ‘we’re not like all the others’. This entertaining video by The Dirty Dozen, which popped up in my in-box last week, is a classic case in point.

I’m not saying they won’t win any business, but I’ll bet that if they do it’ll be in a conventional way and on conventional terms. The reason? See above for why clients don’t really want change.

‘Real’ people won’t feature in ads.

Every year, someone predicts the death of celeb-based advertising and, in tandem with ‘authenticity’, the rise of the ‘real person’. But this is a parallel universe for advertising where terms like authenticity are, well, relative.

Every year someone signs up Myleene Klass and Kerry Katona. It’s quite simple: they’re available, they’re cheap(ish), and – used properly (a big caveat) – they’re a short-cut to fame. And you’d be surprised by how often the chairman’s wife is a big fan too.

Ads that use furry animals will continue to be popular.

Next to celebs, the British public likes nothing better than a bit of anthropomorphism – just check out Aleksandr, the Argos family, Ikea’s Monsters, EDF’s Zingy, and dear old Churchill.

Unlike celebs, animals and puppets are reliable. And unlike Martin Clunes, they won’t embarrass their paymaster. So Churchill keeps going, but he’ll get a human sidekick – hey, maybe even a female one as they’re known to be safer drivers.

And one thing that will change: social media will finally get a decent currency, beyond ‘likes’, ‘views’ and ‘shares’.

This will stop people raving pointlessly about virals like the Turkish Airlines video with Lionel Messi and Kobe Bryant (see what I mean about celebs).

Yes, I know it’s funny, it’s got 57 million views in a week and tops all the charts, but do you really imagine that Lionel Messi would ever fly from, say, Barcelona to Argentina via Istanbul? On Turkish Airlines? And how many of those 57 million have bothered to see where the airline even flies to?

Of course, lots of other things will change. But that’s a business I’ll leave to my fellow columnists and professional change-spotters.

See you all in in 2013.