Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

You’re trying to imagine what the agency of the future looks like. You’re thinking about bringing video production in-house. Or merging a tech company with a consulting practice. Or freelancing media and emphasizing content marketing.

I would advise you to stop doing this, because you’ll just go crazy and end up right where you started: focusing on what the agency of the future looks like. As marketing leaders continue to shake their magic eight-ball and arbitrarily guess what the future holds for communications, most of us make the same, frustrating mistake: We focus on the “what.”

The truth is that what the agency of the future looks like doesn’t matter. What you do, regardless of your level of expertise, has completely and forever transformed into a commodity. Don’t believe me? Look around. Consulting firms are building content development powerhouses. Algorithms are writing articles. Enormous freelance communities are a click away. And brands are increasingly looking inward for solutions.

As a partner and strategy director of my own agency, I can tell you this much: What you do is a commodity....

Ever since the commercial Internet emerged, content has been at the center.  Bill Gates, quite famously, declared that content is king and called it the “killer app” of the Internet age.  Inspired, media executives and internet entrepreneurs alike sought to marry content and distribution to create the perfect business model.

The problem is, as I’ve noted before, that content is crap.  Nobody walks out of a great movie and says, “Wow! That was some great content.”  Nobody listens to content on their way to work in the morning.  We never call anything we like “content,” the term is a mere fantasy in the minds of business planners.

That, in essence, is why despite the predictions of digital pundits, the TV industry has continued to prosper.  Through a series of disruptions—cable, DVD and now streaming video—programing has continued to evolve.  Now, with the cable business model starting to unravel, we can expect an explosion of creative energy that will usher in a new golden age of TV....