文 | Innocent Roland
Recommended reading: Analysis of 10,000 words long article: Why do advertising companies want to do consulting? Morketing Trend View Issue 011
The book continued from the previous one, and the last book said that before 2018, consulting companies and advertising companies gradually moved from mutual cooperation to competing with each other, and finally formed a situation where you have me, I have you......
The time has come to make your choice:
“Big than bigger”抑或是“think small”
Of course, 4A companies are not going to sit idly by and wait for consulting firms to eat away at their business. Advertising agencies are beginning to realize that they need to arm themselves with weapons other than creativity.
For many large advertising groups, internal transformation is a necessity: adding a consulting department in-house to create new types of services to meet the needs of brand owners, or conversely acquiring consulting, technology and design companies to strengthen their business. With the continuous mergers and acquisitions, after attracting more talents from different backgrounds to join the company, a large number of companies have begun to choose to complete the merger of their own different companies to provide advertisers with full-link services.
In China, the same is true for local 4A, whether it is Blue Label or Leo Digital, they are trying to extend their business scope through investment or internal incubation, cut in and provide different communication methods and models, and try to provide more diversified services.
Finally, whether it is strategy or strategy, the gap between the two definitions is gradually getting closer, and both advertising and consulting companies have regarded strategy based on data and insights as their important weapon.
As a result, many large advertising agencies finally have two new brushes: strengthening their strategies and integrating their capabilities into the digital advertising industry. Of course, we can also choose to put it more bluntly: at that time, the ultimate purpose of this change was to cater to the wave of digital advertising, and for large advertising companies, not only did they have to undertake the whole case service including public relations, advertising, and communication, but also tried to achieve the best possible marketing effect for advertisers.
Larger and more complete full-cycle service capabilities ensure that there can be creative presentation throughout the year, and stability without mistakes, which has become a new moat for many large advertising companies to survive.
But at the same time, the digital age has also brought new changes, that is, it has been repeated in the past few years: when communication has become fragmented or even powdered, the traditional big ideas are no longer a set of effective paths, which means that for brands, they still need creativity, but they need "small but beautiful ideas" that can spread at the speed of light on mobile and social platforms.
Just like Birnback's Think small for the masses, another route for advertising agencies is to try to get smaller, and in order to be responsible for the diluted communication content and media resources, and the out-of-focus advertising communication effect, they start to focus on one small idea after another.
However, the reality is that for a complex, diverse, open and hierarchical communication environment, if an idea still needs to be understood and translated from the client's brief, AE, and then brainstormed and thought by the creative, delivered to the designer to complete the design, and finally handed over to the production department to form the traditional process, this traditional process is a bit too lengthy.
For the huge volume of 4A, the transformation is undoubtedly difficult, and it is precisely because of this that the transformation is late, and the transformation speed is not enough, the 4A companies are obviously not so easy in that era.
As a result, a creative on the front line can quickly respond to brand needs and seize fleeting hot spots in a short period of time. Therefore, making the brand quickly become the creative hot store that can stand on the hot spot of the moment has become another way to break the game, and when everyone is trying to be big than bigger, being the person who thinks small may be another solution.
Moreover, at that time, the mobile Internet was still in the process of rapid growth, and it was still relatively open to most Internet media, as long as the content was interesting enough, it could get enough traffic. What followed was one idea after another from creative hot shops that went viral and sought after on all kinds of social media. There is a case of swiping almost every few months.
Therefore, at that time, when the transformation of 4A had not yet been completed, the volume of digital advertising could not be regarded as very large, and the industry had not yet completed full integration, the small and beautiful advertisements created by creative hot stores and in-house models became important partners of many brands.
In this regard, in 2018, the creative hot store ushered in its peak.
A dog has his day
The second half of the creative hot shop
As people have always said, there has never been a thing in the world that is not easy to do, and the changes in the Internet era are even more drastic, with the gradual rise of various Internet platforms, in 2020, marketing communication has begun to have new changes.
There are limits to people, and the growth of the mobile Internet is also limited, there are only 24 hours a day, and when the growth of mobile Internet users gradually begins to stagnate, almost all Internet companies realize one thing: the era of endless and brutal growth is coming to an end.
Although the growth of the number of mobile Internet users began to slow down, for individual content creators, the market at that time was far from saturated, especially with the rise of short videos and short graphic content, more and more content producers saw the benefits. As more and more people join the ranks of content creation, the content production capacity of a large number of platforms has made a qualitative leap.
Especially for short video platforms, the simple production threshold has largely released the creativity and creative ability of individual creators. In order to compete with other KOLs (influencers, influencers), these creators rack their brains every day to create. Their ideas are then recommended by algorithms to users who might be interested in the content.
This makes creativity no longer a skill that belongs exclusively to advertisers.
Coupled with a new weapon that is different from traditional media - intelligent algorithms. It further exacerbates the trend of user stratification and segmentation, and people can easily get their favorite content, which means that even those creative content that many advertisers felt was shoddy or incomprehensible in the past have been widely disseminated.
With the increasing maturity of the recommendation mechanism, information flow has become the number one hegemon in the mobile Internet era, and they almost monopolize the user's time, even thinking and cognition.
This means that a change that we are all too familiar with has happened again. Just like the story mentioned above, as advertisers took the initiative in marketing communications, the advertising industry was transformed.
Now, unlike the institutional media in the past, which single-mindedly produced content, the new generation of media that started with the free thinking of the Internet is inherently closely integrated with advertising. And with the development of technology, Internet media platforms, which control traffic, user time and attention, have quickly gained the initiative in the field of marketing communication.
In addition to these, with the emergence of a large number of creators, MCN agencies that have sprung up like mushrooms after a rain are also constantly eating into advertisers' budgets. Not to mention that on the other side, after several years of pain, the 4A that has completed the integration has also reopened its own new "first half".
In addition, for brands at this time, after experiencing the traps of false traffic events and advertising black industry, as well as various crazy pursuit of performance advertising, they almost began to plan carefully and invest cautiously. In addition, the traffic price and cooperation threshold of various channels and platforms have been repeatedly rising, and many brands will wake up from blind investment and rethink their brand and marketing strategies.
20 years ago, in the golden age of the advertising industry, almost all brand budgets flowed through advertising companies, and there were only so many reliable media, which meant that for advertising companies at that time, if the relationship with the media was good enough, even if it was just a billing company, it could make a lot of money.
But now MCN, e-commerce channels, and Internet platforms are sharing the profits of advertising companies, and with the increasing trust of KOLs, bloggers, and Internet celebrities in the circle of the younger generation, it has become an era for influencers to bring their own traffic, bring their own creativity, and can also endorse and directly complete sales conversion.
Not to mention, in the past few years, due to the decentralization of marketing communications, brands or Party A may have long been tired of connecting several or even dozens of suppliers for a campaign.
As a result, for creative hot stores, just like the 4A companies at that time, the time for transformation has come, which is why almost all the transformation time of creative hot stores is almost concentrated between 2021 and 2022.
It's time for transformation to begin
So even the smash hit creative hot store in 2018 has reached the moment of transformation.
Therefore, for the creative hot store at that time, there were only two ways to transform:
Let's start with a simpler one: do it more vertically and subdivided, and become the current head in a certain subdivision - become the most professional filmmaker, or become the most well-known offline event company, or become the most professional part of Xiaohongshu marketing.
The other path is comparatively more complex, simply put: gaining the initiative in more directions in the marketing chain.
For example, taking advantage of the two core positions in an advertising agency: copywriting and design, long-term honing and producing are text products and visual products. By incubating cultural and artistic IPs, it can enhance its own media attributes, break the boundaries of traditional business, and transform into a diversified and independent institution of content + creativity + IP + culture, and open up more growth points.
Of course, although this direction sounds like an MCN agency, in essence, the direction he designed may still be broader.
For example, Hua Shan and Hua Nan have written books, and BBDO's Leung Wai Fung and JWT's Lo Shuangen have both worked as composers or lyricists. W+K has worked on experimental electronic music groups and HIFANA, New York-based creative hotspot Anomaly has made the American version of "Twelve Sharp Flavors", and Jimi, who has been an advertising man for 12 years, has transitioned to drawing comics......
Or for example, TAMNAAAA, which has filmed advertisements for a series of companies such as 7 Joy, New balance, and Tencent Games, made "The Great Click", and then began to interpret the movie in a creative way from 2016, even if it was suspended for nearly 4 years in 2019, it still has 1.874 million fans, and at the same time, after the stoppage, it further filmed the original web series "Under the Prosperous City".
Of course, from the current point of view, TAMNAAAA can no longer be regarded as an advertising agency or a creative hot store. The transformation has directly transferred out of the advertising industry, but in the current situation where the cultural track is gradually crowded, this may already be a more difficult path.
Considering that many creative hot stores are actually founded by creatives who have left from 4A, it is a more realistic situation to transform to create personal IP, if you can't shine in the cultural field, continue to output your own views in the creative and commercial track, and become a KOL will naturally become a good choice.
The problem then arises, personal KOLs, especially those in a vertical and professional business field, cannot rely on promoting products to complete monetization, which is not only not easy for creatives, but also undignified. Since he has been exporting his professional views on brand building and marketing communication, even if he has not done self-media, strategy is a relatively important item in the arsenal of advertising companies.
Moreover, the corporate strategy is too large, the market communication is too detailed, how to talk about the specific transformation of the corporate strategy into brand strategy or brand strategy, so as to go until the market communication prospect has become a necessary part. Or to be more specific, corporate strategy is more biased towards mathematics and logic, and market communication is more biased towards perception and creativity, so how to do a good job in translation and transformation between the two has become a very important part.
It's like a game company already has art and technology, but it often needs a position called technical art, which combines rationality and sensibility, logical thinking and creative aesthetics, so that the two can work together.
For the creative hot store at this time, just like the consulting company said when it invaded the advertising industry, since the consulting company can knock on the door of advertising with data and professional analysis reports, why can't the creative hot store use its ability to understand the laws of communication, and then absorb some talents who know how to strategic consulting, return to the top-level design of the brand naturally, provide Party A with strategic and creative integration services, and use innovative ideas to help customers solve business problems from the source of marketing?
If you focus on the domestic market, another very important reason. In the past few years, a large number of new consumer companies have risen with the slogan of "consumption upgrading", and the founders who have received a lot of financing have each firmly believed in the sentence: all consumer goods are worth redoing.
However, with the changes in the overall economic environment and people's increasingly cautious consumption, many new consumer brands and Morketing have expressed a similar dilemma in the past long time, that is, they have begun to diverge: some brands have begun to shrink and have to face the ultimate choice of transformation or bankruptcy, while others have completed their initial growth, but also need some external opinions to break their own barriers to complete further growth from a small sub-category.
What these two types of brands have in common is that they need the help of consulting firms. Moreover, compared with the advertising creative business of 200,000 yuan, which is already a large order, the consulting business of 2 million + is obviously a better direction.
After all, if you don't make money, it's really the same as the joke says: there are two professions that have not raised wages for 20 years, one is a taxi driver, and the other is an advertising person. 20 years ago, the monthly salary of fresh graduates to 4A was 5,000 yuan, and they could buy a one-square-meter house in Beijing, and 20 years later, the monthly salary of fresh graduates to 4A was almost 5,000 yuan, and they could not rent a one-bedroom apartment in the fourth ring road.
Not to mention, there are just too many outlets for creative people right now.
Make a brand in the form of consulting
However, if it is not accurate to say that the current advertising company has completely transformed into a consulting company, strictly speaking, the consulting of advertising companies at this stage is actually more like the sandwich layer of sandwich biscuits: the upper undertaking of corporate strategy, the lower level of specific marketing communication execution, the past strategy that relies on data and logic as the main axis and the communication that relies on perception and creativity are combined.
Of course, this may still sound a bit abstract.
If you put it in a more straightforward way: the essence is that with the changes in the current economic environment and communication environment, it has become an ancient legend to be an advertiser without being president, and the limited channels and rough communication methods in the past have led to brands and consumers almost completely relying on advertising companies and advertising to connect, so for brands, even half of the advertising costs are wasted and can only be accepted.
However, at this stage, MCNs and live streaming e-commerce brokerage companies, advertising business departments of giant Internet companies, e-commerce channels, and almost all media platforms that can directly link with consumers and complete conversions can almost all give advertisers a ROI that will not be too outrageous before advertising.
On the other hand, in the era of the division of labor between consulting companies and advertising companies, advertising companies cannot and dare not give a definite answer, and it is almost unknown whether the idea can work and how much it can work. To put it mildly, even if you do it badly, you can dump the blame with the consulting company, the advertising company says that the strategy set by the consulting company is problematic, and the consulting company says that the advertising company's communication execution is not good enough.
Therefore, to a certain extent, the essence of today's advertising agency consulting is a change in ecology, and with the change of the entire advertising ecology, brands are eager to be closer to the brand in the digital era, which makes the marketing ideas of brand owners naturally change.
While this doesn't mean that all advertisers' marketing budgets will be strongly aligned with ROI, once a brand's mindset shifts from future development to surviving the present, marketing budgets that don't deliver clear returns will be cut in the first place. Even if they don't, advances are very fatal for many small and medium-sized companies.
As a result, advertising naturally began to start a two-level differentiation, or more subdivision, just like the creative hot store at that time to 4A companies, but such a segmentation must have an upper limit for growth.
Either it's natural to try to expand the consulting business further, so as to fundamentally agree with advertisers to clarify what content is meant to bring returns, what content is to promote and which may not bring clear returns in the short term, but for the development and growth of the brand, and clearly distinguish between these content before it is launched.
Of course, the eventual shift is likely to be exactly what advertisers were hoping for back in 2020, when the IN-house model was in vogue: co-branding.