Today’s Ad Industry Innovator comes from New Marketing Labs, which you may know better if I tell you the name of its founder, Chris Brogan. Chris is the author of the NYT best seller Trust Agents and he’s in the top 3 on AdAge’s Power150.  Being some of the most recognizable social media marketers, these guys have a nice niche. Awesome alliteration, ay?

It’s fun to profile a group like New Marketing Labs because they represent those specialists who have stepped in to challenge the traditional agency model and offer unique and much needed services to brands. Anyway, Hanes, Sony, Citrix, Comcast, Molson Coors, PepsiCo, AMD and Microsoft seem to think so.

This is not Brogan!

I spoke to New Marketing Labs’ General Manager, Justin Levy about what makes their firm stand out in the marketplace. Besides his many duties keeping everyone rowing in the same direction, he is the co-organizer of their Inbound Marketing Summit and Inbound Marketing Bootcamp.  Prior to joining Brogan’s group Justin was Managing Director at an SEO public relations firm and President of Talent Network.  His answer to question # 7 practically had me weeping.  In all, it was a pleasure to get the perspective of such a well-rounded gent.

1. What was the aha moment when you realized “our company needs to be doing things differently than we have been”?

New Marketing Labs didn’t go through that period because we were founded to help medium and large businesses either figure out that aha moment or navigate their way through it .  We assist our clients with using these online tools to move the needles that are important to them.  We help them to enhance their communications, marketing, customer service and PR plans by using these new media tools to reach their prospects, customers and fans.

2. What books are on your nightstand or great blogs on your Google reader?

I am an avid reader and information junkie.  At any given time I am subscribed to a few hundred RSS feeds, read a few books per month and read the Washington Post, Boston Globe, NY Times and Wall St. Journal on a daily basis.  I love the consumption of information!

Right now I have about 15 books waiting to be read but I am currently reading the following books:

The Audacity to Win by David Plouffe
Six Pixels of Separation by Mitch Joel
The Back of the Napkin by Dan Roam

You’ll usually find me reading about marketing, business, lifestyle design, politics, productivity or food related books.

3. Give me an example of marketing you think is brilliant and why.

Dell has been doing an excellent job at using online tools to help them market to, learn from and listen to their prospects and customers.  From generating $2 million dollars with just one of their Twitter accounts, to IdeaStorm, a website where Dell allows their customers to generate new ideas for the company and then vote those ideas up and down, to how Dell uses the listening and monitoring company, Radian6, to help them be involved in conversations taking place around the web.  Dell has also done a great job at showing that they’re human.  Dell uses both corporate accounts (e.g. DellLatitude) and personal Twitter accounts with their staff (e.g. RichardatDell).  Using the employee name in the Twitter account helps to show the human side of the company and in turn, that makes stronger bonds with their customer base.

4. We’ve all read that the pitch / RFP process is broken.  Many agencies aren’t even interested in competing in pitches.  Do you see an alternative to this process?

The pitch/RFP process still serves a purpose in that it provides structure and the ability for the prospective client to walk down a check list to compare potential agencies who they’re interested in working with.  Where the pitch and RFP process suffer is that they don’t usually showcase the human side of both the agency and prospective client.  We have a natural tendency to want to do business with friends.  Therefore, I think agencies need to take opportunities to develop relationships with the people who make up the corporations.  Try being helpful to them in some way or connecting with them by sending a hand written note.

5. What does the agency of the future look like?

The agency of the future is more of a partner with the company that they’re working with instead of a typical agency/client relationship.  The agency of the future will need to ensure that they’re delivering value to their clients and will need to provide hard data to quantify and prove that data.  That’s not to suggest that agencies currently aren’t providing value to their clients.  But, with budgets continuing to tighten, companies are looking at what hard value they’re receiving from their vendors and agencies.  There is a difference in using new media tools that can provide hard data versus data that suggests that an approximate audience size probably saw your message.

6. What do marketers need that agencies are not giving them?

Marketers need data that will help show them the value of what they’re investing their time and budget in.  Marketers need an agency that understands the complexities of their responsibilities, their department, their company and their industry and have the tools available to help navigate through it all.  Marketers want agencies that provide education, both internally and externally to help them and their staff to grow.

7. Who do you admire and why?

I admire a variety of people from many different industries and for different reasons.   If I had to choose one person though, I would choose my mom.  Unfortunately my mother lost a long battle with Lupus during my senior year in high school.  For the better part of my life my mother struggled to deal with a disabling disease.  Lupus, as well as some other factors, closed many doors for my mom at an early age.  Even while struggling with a disease that was constantly kicking her while she was down, she did everything in her power to see that her son, me, had everything I could ever need to help position me to be successful now.  Whether it was hand-written math books to work on over the Summer, pressuring me to apply myself in school, teaching me how to deal with hardship at a young age, or any of the may other life lessons she taught me.

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Hitch is a consultancy that helps marketers hire the right marketing agency.

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Trevor Graves is a founding principle and the GM of Nemo Design.  I got to know Trevor a bit better recently when they were on the shortlist for a recent ad agency search I conducted.

NEMO lives Youth Culture.  From its roots as a three man shop in Portland, Nemo has grown into an internationally recognized marketing/design firm, with multi-million dollar clients like Nike, HP, ESPN, Fuel Television network, Smith optics, Bell helmets, Timbers MLS soccer, Salomon and Timberline–to name a few.

When asked that makes NEMO different, Trevor says “We never make ads: advertising is fake, it’s clutter, and it’s ignored by most. We touch people through art, we communicate emotions, we engage in genuine conversation, we create real experiences that real people will find interesting, inspiring, useful and memorable. We make the cash register ring, without trying to sell anyone.”

With respect to all the recent “label” discussions about agencies, NEMO eschews labels.  They become whatever kind of agency they need to solve problem.  I like that.

To everyone who wonders about the future of agencies and whether they’ll stay around NEMO says “We are paid for having vision (we see the invisible) and a Point of View (we can explain what it looks like, what it means, and why it matters). ”  In your face, cynics.

What was the aha moment when you realized “our company needs to be doing things differently than we have been”?

Is there ever one defining AHA moment? To be relevant in culture and in business, you need to have AHA moments all the time. We live in the age of change. So, the big lofty AHA may arrive and it’s very subtle. Growing up in action sports, you’re intuitively aware of nuances and you’re constantly moving. You see everything in a shifted paradigm: what can I do with this? What can I make here? What line can I take? This awareness is hardwired into a lot of the people at Nemo and it helps us tremendously; you learn to recognize change in the world and how to creatively embrace it, how to be curious and provoke the new. Our clients constantly look to us to help them see the invisible opportunity and create an impact with it.

What books are on your nightstand or great blogs on your Google reader?

The book that is literally on my nightstand today is “Built to Last” by James Collins and Jerry Porras. One of the dangers in this industry is defining your success and what your stand for through your clients, rather than having a great sense of your own core ideology. As for blogs and such, I am ADD. The snack-sized bites coming through my Tweedeck are in the same vein as things you’d find on the Hitch blogroll.

Give me an example of marketing you think is brilliant and why.

The world I came from, “marketing” was a dirty word and something not to be trusted. Marketing meant fake. The real impact came from the people and brands that were all about adding to the culture: Participating, connecting, and celebrating a lifestyle. I use that filter to judge what we call “marketing” today. Is it real, is it making real change and are people feeling it? Favorite examples are the iPhone, really centering around product as message, and the Obama campaign. The simple slogans of Change and Hope, the use of a logo mark,  and the social media was game-changing.

We’ve all read that the pitch / RFP process is broken.  Many agencies aren’t even interested in competing in pitches.  Do you see an alternative to this process?

I am going to make a Mad Men reference, please forgive me. Season 3, Episode 7.  Don Draper is called into talk with Conrad Hilton in his Presidential suite. Conrad asks Don to take a look at some mock up of ads he has on the coffee table.

Conrad- “What do ya think”

Don- “I don’t think you would be working in the Presidential suite if you worked for free.”

Conrad, surprised- “This is friendly”

Don- “Connie, this is my profession, what do you want me to do?”

Conrad smirks, taken aback that Don didn’t just roll over and give him the free advise he desired.

Conrad- “ I want you to give me one for free.”

With a poetic pause, the camera pans low and looks up at Don as he pulls a smoke and lights it with a cool guy style. The camera pans back down to an illustrated mouse dressed in a top hat, and a marker rendering of the exterior of the Hilton Hotel. Don exhales. In a confident straightforward response, he replies.

Don- “I don’t think anybody wants to think about a mouse at a hotel.”

Conrad Hilton is startled and dazed. Don has earned Conrad’s respect and is asked to symbolically sit at the table with him to discuss the advertisements, peer to peer. This is an opportunity we as agency people are asked to do in the RFP process yet we give away our spot at the table by giving our service for free. I think many of us have read Blair Enns “Win Without Pitching” and there are some insights in the work that help the community of agencies to commiserate as victims about how unfair the RFP process can be. We can’t control the world but like Don Draper, we can control our reaction to it.

Let’s look at the RFP process from the client side and see where we as the agency can have our own Don Draper moments. The average relationship between agency and client is about 4 years. What that means for the client is that they are not practiced or even up to speed on what agencies are out there, who is a good fit for their band and even practice on how to “court” a great agency. Like Mr. Hilton, the client can be a bit unsure and wants to avoid what Enns calls Buyer’s Remorse. They don’t want to hire the wrong firm. They ask the agency to pitch free ideas because the execution is very literal and makes it easier for them to compare agency to agency. I get it. What Nemo has done is set up a routine or process around qualifying the lead.

1. Is this client a good match for Nemo? Nemo is an Action agency and it makes sense for a client to come to us to us for our expertise. A Hotel like the Hilton might not be a good fit for Nemo however a resort like the Black Pearl resort in the Caymen Island would be a good fit for Nemo, http://www.blackpearl.ky/
2. Budget. If they are not willing to go over a scope of work and budget then they are showing signs of a bad client and we would put up a red flag at this point. If they have a small budget, we ask to work around an actual contest of pitching. Our margin gets sucked up in handing out free work when there isn’t more money to offset the pitch once and if we win the account. $500k is a budget that pitching starts to make sense for Nemo. Smaller than that is a project and handled differently.
3. We ask whom else are they asking to pitch. I am not sure why all the secrecy around this topic but it is fair to know the landscape. If a client is asking for something for free, I want transparency of who else is on the short list. This is because if we perceive any of the competition is a better fit for the client’s needs, we are the first to endorse their service and save ourselves all the expense and inefficiency of pitching.
4. If the client has a smaller budget and the work lines up and the client is still in the “Buyer’s Remorse” mode, we suggest doing a small, real project to see how the relationship works first hand. We have also done in depth case study reviews to help clients understand how we have worked with other clients and how we might work together.
5. We try to have the actual stakeholders present rather than just the marketing department. The territory is not the map.

What does the agency of the future look like?

The agency model I see reflects our vision of what Nemo was born to do. Fast, smart, passionate and well connected. We keep our core team full time to insure our branded look and service, then ramp up around them with experts and freelancers when needed. There are so many talented creatives in the market; it makes managing a business much smarter. We can hand pick a SWAT team of experts to tap for consulting in short bursts. Hollywood works this way.

I also see the best creative agencies contributing more to culture; making their own brands and content, taking more risks and sharing the rewards, collaborating and experimenting. Who wants to play?

What do marketers need that agencies are not giving them?

Marketers need their agencies to offer emerging rates for services that they want to grow into. The old cliché states that you can’t get the job without the experience and you cant get the experience without the job. Your agency understands your brand and with the ability to expand that service you both win. For an example, if you were an interactive shop, extending into a social media service wouldn’t be a huge leap of faith. It is fair to pay that firm less for them to gain the experience on your brand and in return you as the marketers get a deeper service at a discounted rate. A win-win for both parties.

Who do you admire and why?

Amelia Graves. She is our 5-year daughter. I guess I am getting to maturity to be able to observe her world and how she might see it. She is imaginative, curious about the world, she lives in the present with no concern for the future, she has no concept of money, she breaks out in song and dance with no fear of being ridiculed. When she plays with her toys, she is lost in an endless imaginary world. My selfish side wants to bottle that energy up and use it to further my agenda in the real world of constantly needing to invent more creative for clients. The other side of me admires this innocence for what it is and knows that she can own that space and time.

“All children are artists. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.” - Pablo Picasso

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Well, it’s been an exciting and busy summer.  I’m talking to lots of agencies lately who are hearing the phones starting to ring again–which is good news for everybody.  That’s partly why it’s been nearly a month since a new Ad Industry Innovators series, everybody’s busy, including me.  I’m a little over two weeks from finishing up the first Hitch search–with a few other interesting potentials on the horizon so stay tuned for exciting news!

Today’s Ad Industry Innovator is a shout out to the Emerald City with a Seattle agency called Creature.  New Business Director, Barton Bodell described Creature as their clients’ wild card agency.  The folks clients go to when they don’t want same old same old.  I thought that was a great description, so I’m going with it.

I interviewed Robson Grieve, who is Creature’s Managing Director.  He came to the agency after being a Creature client con Corbis.  ( 5 pts for reading that correctly out loud.)

1. What was the aha moment when you realized “our company needs to be doing things differently than we have been”?

The big “aha” moment for Creature happened back in Amsterdam, when Matt and Jim (co-creative directors) were talking about starting an agency. After working in a couple of the biggest and best agencies in the US (Wieden & Kennedy and Goodby Silverstein), they went to Europe and saw a different way of doing things. This old world+new world experience led the guys to the simple philosophy that “the best media space you can buy is in someone’s mind.” That idea really defines how we look at the changing relationship between consumers and brands, and it has shaped how we do our work on a day-to-day basis. The evolution from a “broadcast” model where advertisers were telling people what to think, to more of a cooperative model where we are starting a conversation with people and incorporating them in to the brand development process.

The truth is, however, that we are having “aha” moments all the time and we look at our model as a work in progress. We are constantly studying our capabilities and looking for ways to make Creature more relevant to current and future clients. Every year we seem to undertake one or two big changes, and we are constantly challenging the status quo and updating our business model. Essentially, we look at the search for “aha” moments as an every day part of the job.

2. What books are on your nightstand or great blogs on your Google reader?

I almost never read about advertising or business, because I find most business popular books to be a little too orderly in their analysis.  There are a few notable exceptions, of course, but in general I try to find interesting/thought provoking books rather than books about business.  I’m working on a pretty scary book right now – it’s called “Global Catastrophes and Trends.”  It is a comprehensive look at the risks we face in the next 50 years by a university professor named Vaclav Smil.  Smil has written a lot about energy and the environment, and has a very data driven perspective on projecting the future of the world.  Before that, I read “The Black Swan: The impact of the Highly Improbable,” which was a really inspiring book that basically reinforced my belief that it is more important to be open to new things than it is to be expert at pattern recognition.

In terms of blogs, I read Mark Cuban’s blogmaverick.com a lot because he is such a firebrand, and has the ability to separate the hype from reality in new media.  For social media stuff I read Logic+Emotion.  He has a nice theory-based approach to explaining social structures online.  I am also a bit of an economic news junky, and my jumping off point there is a blog called “calculated risk” which has some interesting articles, and a wealth of links to top econ authors.

3. Give me an example of marketing you think is brilliant and why.

Michael Jackson. Look at how popular he is all of a sudden. Tough way to do it, but you have to give the guy credit for his commitment to the brand.

Seriously, this is a really difficult question to answer because some of the most examples that people use as great “marketing companies” aren’t marketing companies at all – they just make great products that people love. I would say that I have been pretty impressed with Fed Ex and how they have incorporated golf in to their brand. They created a great event with the PGA (The Fed Ex Cup), and they have succeeded in making the connection between golf and fed ex very natural through their advertising.

4. We’ve all read that the pitch / RFP process is broken.  Many agencies aren’t even interested in competing in pitches.  Do you see an alternative to this process?

I think it is convenient to complain about the RFP process. Is it fun to put a bunch of resources in to a high risk endeavor, with disappointment the most statistically likely outcome? Of course not, but I don’t see how the industry could come together and invent a method for pitching could be set up that would solve all the problems. Competitive bidding is a part of almost every industry’s procurement process, so agencies aren’t alone in being disappointed because they didn’t get a piece of business. Watch “Glengarry Glen Ross.” Life isn’t fair.

The thing agencies need to decide is how much they are willing to give in this process. This is an individual and situational decision. For example, at one extreme, some clients are demanding ownership of all ideas created for the pitch, and agencies just need to decide if they are willing to go that far. In some cases, the answer will be yes, in some cases it will be no.

There have been some crazy pitches the last few months (the famous “twitterfp” and Zappos are on people’s minds) that have people buzzing, and I would say that if they agencies don’t like the process, they should sit out. Or better yet, if agencies don’t like the process they should work with the client to shape the right process.

5. What does the agency of the future look like?

It is interesting to try to predict what the agency of the future looks like, because we are likely to be mostly wrong no matter what we predict. I think it is safe to say that it is likely we will be more similar to strategy consultants like Bain or McKinsey than we will be to old-line Madison Avenue agencies. I also think it is safe to say that we are going to need to be “cross trained” at every level, because the world isn’t going to be neatly organized by media like it has been in the past.

I do think that a lot of the speculation around ownership of ideas that has gone on is a little misleading. Big brands don’t need to share risk with agencies, so the expectation that they share rewards in a significant way is probably unfounded. Pay-for-performance is coming in some way, but I think it is going to end up being more of a cost cutting measure by corporations than it will be a chance for agencies to grow their piece of the pie.

6. What do marketers need that agencies are not giving them?

Marketers need agencies to solve problems – not just make ads. Too often agencies decide to make ads, even when they know that won’t solve the underlying problem. Our clients need us to be ready and willing to look at each engagement as a chance to solve an important problem – sometimes that will be through ads, sometimes it will be through something entirely unexpected.

7. Who do you admire and why?

I would say that I admire my business partners, Matt and Jim. They have had a lot of fortitude and foresight as entrepreneurs, and I am fortunate to get to work with them on a day-to-day basis.

In the agency business, I admire the guys at Goodby Silverstien. They have managed to reinvent themselves over and over, and that is no small feat in any industry.

I look at Tiger Woods as a role model from a competitive perspective. He has such great focus, and usually finds a way to be win even when he isn’t at his best.

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Today’s Ad Industry Innovator is Jake McKee from Ant’s Eye View.  Talk about a niche, these guys get customer engagement like Picasso gets painting.

The founders have very diverse backgrounds: Jake McKee built his reputation playing with Legos and Sean O’Driscoll in a company you may have heard of in Redmond, WA called Microsoft. These guys are bright.  They’re insightful.  Ant’s Eye View occupies a place in marketing that’s not only unique, but 5 years ago, wasn’t even talked about–now every company needs to be listening.  The voice of your Customer demands to be heard.

Ant’s Eye View recognizes that as companies grow, often they unintentionally detach from the customer relationship and miss out on crucial conversations happening about their brand.   Through grassroots, online and offline collaborative processes, Ant’s Eye View helps companies engage with those customers by developing strategies that identify, address and leverage those conversations.

What was the aha moment when you realized “our company needs to be doing things differently than we have been?”

Actually we’ve developed our company specifically around the aha moment! Our team has been doing customer engagement work for a combined total of something like 40 years. We get that this customer engagement stuff is the path to amazing business success and customer loyalty. When Sean O’Driscoll left Microsoft and when I left LEGO, it was because we saw that so many of those companies and agencies talking about this stuff had never been on the frontlines of customer engagement and we thought this “in the trenches” understanding was important to share.

What books are on your nightstand or great blogs on your Google reader?

Well, selfishly, I just got my first copy of the 10^th anniversary edition of The Cluetrain Manifesto, where I had the extreme honor of being asked to write the afterword. On top of that, I just got a review copy of Angela Connor’s 18 Rules of Community Engagement. It’s an exciting to book to have gotten in the mail: small, tactical, and smart.

Give me an example of marketing you think is brilliant and why.

One of my favorite examples, an example that makes me just giddy with excitement is the new and much written about Skittles.com. I once had someone ask me “how do we create community and social media for a particular soda pop?” At its core, the question was really about an agency trying to understand how to pitch “social” to clients. But the problem with the question is that soda pop in itself doesn’t have much inherent social interest. Marketers can work hard to create some type of inherent value, but what Skittles realized is that it would be smarter to simply highlight the conversations, interest, and inherent value already being created by their customers. Replacing nearly their entire Web site with a floating nav item that links to Wikipedia articles, YouTube videos, and a Twitter search. Brilliant. It’s the most compelling CPG Web site I’ve seen to date. If I meet the person that sold this into the organization, I’m buying them a drink for work well done.

We’ve all read that the pitch / RFP process is broken.  Many agencies aren’t even interested in competing in pitches.  Do you see an alternative to this process?

I do agree that the pitch/RFP process is broken in today’s marketing climate, but not for the reason so many agency people talk about. The agency focused argument is one that goes back years, well before the rise of the Social Web: pitches are little more than free spec work that allows clients to get far too much for free and agencies to deal with too much risk.

From my perspective, the problem is that the pitch/RFP process work happens almost entirely void of true strategy development activity. When developing strategy, and certainly strategy work around social engagement immersed marketing, you want to have a better understanding of your customers by first engaging. Listen first, generate ideas second. But a pitch to get business is inherently based in ideas. Certainly agencies are doing research, often expensive research, but that misses a great many opportunities for the client. My work at LEGO had me listening for 6 months to adult fans who were angry that the company had ignored them for decades. After joining fans in basements, classrooms and restaurants to hear their concerns, not only did I learn, but I proved to them that the company was honestly interested in knowing more about how to serve and work with them.

How can that happen if your ideas are being largely generated as a means to first win the business?

What does the agency of the future look like?

I don’t know what it looks like, but I know it has to have a new billing model. In my opinion, traditional marketing agencies will only be able to move to a place where they can more effectively help their customers understand and plan for a more social customer experience once they figure out how to charge for the time that that takes to do. We’re not talking about limited, specific campaigns anymore. Or at least not those alone. But agencies are setup to bill against that model, and it’s nearly impossible for them to effectively teach rather than implement.

What do marketers need that agencies are not giving them?

An agency that is happy, both in approach and in billing model, to train their clients to not need them after a reasonable period of time. Today’s marketing and agency culture is based on the fundamental principle that the bigger check the brand writes, the less work the brand’s marketing person has to do in the daily grind work. When headcount is a core metric of a division’s success, writing checks, even big checks is easy but hiring is not. Unfortunately that simply doesn’t work in today’s environment. When I talk to one of my favorite brands, I don’t want to talk to their agency, I want to talk to the employees of the brand. Agencies have traditionally existed to take the load off the shoulders of their clients, but today they have to be switching to helping their clients learn techniques and tactics for being able to better engage, to scale that engagement, and to support the daily grind in a way that helps build internal competency.

I’m not suggesting that agencies don’t have or shouldn’t have long-term clients. My suggestion is that agencies large and small should be working with their clients “teach, learn, own” model. Once the client owns the project, the (hopefully and expected) success will drive a more complex project that will start the process over.

Oh, and to be clear, I’m talking about marketing agencies, not advertising agencies. There is a often forgotten difference between the two and sadly they’ve gotten mixed up into one concept when we talk about this stuff.

Who do you admire and why?

Easy to explain, hard to name. I really respect and enjoy meeting the practitioners at brands that are doing this social stuff every day, toiling away in relative obscurity. You may know the “social media experts” who blog and twitter and speak constantly, but do you know the folks at H&R Block who are convincing a company working in a highly regulated industry to get involved in Second Life? Do you know who convinced Skittles.com to give up thousands of dollars of Flash development and replace it with Social Web content? Do you know who at Alaska Airlines is the face behind the official twitter stream? If not, you should find out. Those are the true experts, the experts you can learn from.

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No, Al Gore did not (re) invent the ad agency today when he said, in effect, that the only sustainable advertising model will be one where clients buy yeoman produced spots for as little as $1000. He did make some valid points, however, and backed them up with facts like ‘Viewer produced spots on his new Current TV network are preferred by his viewers 90% of the time.’

Al Gore is just one of many voices lately who have said we’re in uncharted waters.

• Dan Wieden has no idea what’s coming in advertising, although to his credit he doesn’t think the sky is falling, he sees this as an exciting time and I admire, and choose to share his point-of-view.
• Bootb (yes, I thought it said Boob the first time I read it too. FAIL on the name) in the Netherlands is crowdsourcing the ad agency and turning everyone into a marketer (or so they think). This model had marketers of every stripe with their hackles up this past March at SxSWwith a lot of the wrath focused on Crowdspring by the likes of David Carson and others. Mostly around the sticky spec work issue.
• Accellteon says “Today’s marketing problems will be solved by people with diverse skill sets” and I have to agree with the opening statement of the press release–although I haven’t read the ebook they’re hawking yet.
• Scott Goodson of Strawberry Frog has said “Why not give clients the opportunity to put teams of cherry picked talent together to work on their business and generate the best ideas? If a client decides , “I don’ want an agency, just want that particular team, made up of top talent across these areas” why wouldn’t we agree to collaborate on shared business with shared reward?” 

None of this means the end of the ad agency but it certainly signals the end of the ad agency as we know it. The decline of traditional advertising is a reality that’s been with us for a while now–it didn’t just happen when Oprah got on Twitter.

So what does this all indicate? The rise of classes in marketing? I think, yes. The end of the industrial revolution of marketing as Gore said in the above article? Probably not.   So, what does this new marketing society look like? Dare I say, marketing social democracy! I’ll explore this in part 2.

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