Welcome to episode 109. My guest is Michael Farmer, a management consultant who has been looking at the agency business model for over 30 years.
He’s identified three burning issues for creative agencies.
- Work is increasing in volume and yet agencies fees are declining. But because agencies aren’t measuring scopes of work, they don’t often realize the extent to which this is happening.
- Agencies aren’t helping clients achieve their business outcomes. Clients are paying them less and typically fire them every three years and generally treat them as order takers.
- AI is now putting fuel on this fire and is threatening to reduce the amount of creative adaptation work that agencies do.
It’s not all doom and gloom. I found this an enlightening conversation and I particularly enjoyed listening to the history of how it was before agencies priced their services by the hour. Michael talks about the problems, but he also offers solutions. I suggest you read his latest book ‘Madison Avenue Makeover’, which maps out the transformation of Huge’s business model step by step.
If you are in an account management role or you’re in charge of an agency account management team and you want to raise the value of this position, then please connect with me on LinkedIn at Jenny Plant or check out my Account Accelerator programme.
