You cannot be a siloed specialist any longer, or even a jack of all trades, says Tamanna Moolchandani. Tomorrow’s leaders must be masters of their universe
I still remember the day my little sister came to me and told me she landed an internship. When she said it was at an agency and I asked what department she would be working in, she responded with “social media”.
I scratched my head and looked at her with concern. I remember thinking to myself, “Is she going to handle her boss’s Facebook account or something?” This was in 2007.
Today, the evolution of social media as an industry has immensely blurred the lines between every other service offering in the realm of marketing. Who could have predicted its avalanche-like impact upon the industry I knew like the back of my hand?
At client meetings, I remember sitting around a table with each agency in their own corner pitching in their thoughts only where their ‘expert’ opinions were applicable. This week, however, I sat in a meeting room full of new-era creatives, basically the new description for account executives and account managers.
Today’s recruitment ads look a bit like: “Wanted: executive experienced in digital, social, search, PR, media, events, programmatic, offline media, data, etc. A successful candidate is skilled at managing under pressure, people management and balancing profit and loss. And please, no old school thinkers.”
If you’re working in the marketing industry in this day and age, be prepared to be more than just a jack of all trades because, with full-service agencies resurfacing and disciplinary silos becoming a thing of the past, everyone is expected to be a master of all trades. Where there used to be agencies for creative, media, public relations, direct marketing and more, recent years have seen the need for more tangled one-stop shops.
The easy access to information on the web has created an infectious curiosity within the industry, which has led to the desire to drive innovation and progress. Channels are now more integrated than ever before. With live tweets being streamed onto talk shows and answered in real-time, or Instagram posts being used to push vending machine triggers, the lines between activation and social media are blurred. With the rise of ‘social media influencers’ leveraging the power of word-of-mouth within their communities to advocate for brands, the lines between PR and social media are blurred. The lines continue to blur between each discipline with the constantly evolving technology we’re witnessing, day-by-day.
Clients are seeing this happen in front of them and, instead of opting to sign up for multiple specialist agencies, they have started to see merit in trimming down their agency portfolio and putting their eggs in fewer baskets, so to speak.
So what does this all mean for agencies and the teams within them?
For individuals, the impact is quite evident, especially since the industry entrants drive the impact at hand. With every new generation of account executives and account managers, we are starting to see more diverse skillsets. Account executives now come with the ability to create fresh content and design their own mock-ups, while account managers are able to pull their own data and form their own insights and strategies.
If you have been in the industry for a while, start learning what your content teams are up to, figure out what the latest design trend is, or extract data to do your own primary research, because if you are not in the loop of every team at any given point, you are more than just a few steps behind.
For agencies, when a client brief comes through, it is no longer a task to be broken down for the creative team or the ads team or the digital team. The teams have integrated to become one and the same. This has been a direct consequence of the landscape change and client demands. Without integrating the teams together, the story starts to get disjointed and, since we are in the era of ‘great story-telling’, without a meaningful tale it’s more than challenging to sell to the audience.
As we strive to make happier clients, deliver quality work, affect lives and systematically seed our brands into cultures, we must seize the opportunities presented in today’s highly complex ad landscape: an opportunity to partner with each other in new and energising ways; an opportunity to stretch the definition of ‘creative’ as we know it; an opportunity to seek out non-traditional forms of advertising in a culture that embraces disruptive methods; and, most importantly, an opportunity to share knowledge between disciplines and learn from each other’s experiences.
The complexity of the creative sphere today requires not only a scale of thinking beyond our comfort zones, but also enough objectivity and transparency to realise the need for more than one entity. As account handlers, we must work integratively with other teams and agencies to achieve the end result, a successful campaign.
If you take something away from this article, let it be that the true way forward lies with creative and strategic thinking, partnerships and alliances, and transparency with your teams and clients. The power to push these initiatives lies in the palm of the account lead. In the wise words of somebody familiar with ‘the web’: “With great power comes great responsibility.”
