MODERN TIMES
The digital world is vast, increasingly important and, for many clients, still confusing. And that’s led to an explosion of digital agencies offering specialised skills and tools.
The digital space has long been seen as a great opportunity for agencies. Historically, marketers have lacked understanding and cowboys roamed the electronic plains. That’s changing and good clients are now increasingly digitally literate and understand the importance of this area if they are to be successful. But there are still so many choices available – and so much snake oil still being sold. So where is a marketer to turn if they hope to keep up with – or, ideally, stay ahead – of the pack, whether it be for search marketing or a complex VR experience.
As Steph Creasy, Digital Arts Network’s managing director, explains: “There has been a gradual maturing and understanding from clients on what the job is at hand and who has the most appropriate skills to get the best result. All our current clients are focused on working with agencies that have specialist skills, often using a mix of different expert partners.”
Digital Arts Network has a 22 year heritage in delivering digital experiences. The agency has a team of 32 strategists and specialists and its service offering includes customer experience design, service design, design coaching and digital user experience, all of which are in demand from clients whose customers increasingly want to interact with them digitally.
“I think it’s difficult to be good in everything digital, and particularly in New Zealand,
it’s difficult to get the scale you need to be able to build deep, exceptional skills across the full breadth of digital,” says Creasy. “Eight years ago we chose to strategically transform from being a broader full service digital agency to focusing on bringing human-centred research and design skills deeply into our work. This has led to better outcomes for our clients and has meant we are able to attract the best talent, and in turn get the opportunity to help clients looking for specialists for their more challenging and complex work.”
There is no doubt that marketers are recognising the importance of a digital component in their plans. While advertising in newspapers and magazines was down
6.9 percent and 14.3 percent respectively in 2017, according to data released from Standard Media Index (SMI), digital had 7.1 percent growth taking it to $338.9 million, ahead of outdoor’s $136.3 million, but still behind TV’S $389.6 million.
Speaking to NZ Marketing, Dave Turnbull, Chrometoaster’s experience director, pointed to clients recognising a skills gap and asking for campaigns that propose both a minimum and an ideal plan for ad spend. This recent trend focuses on minimum plans that are “digital first”, consisting of cheaper, targeted and heavily optimised ad spend. The ideal plans, on the other hand, include conventional advertising that tends to blow up the budget by five times.
Clients are looking first and foremost for customer and business impact, and as the whole ecosystem has matured they are able to discern where they need specialist talent to deliver the outcomes they need. And there’s no shortage of choice, with the term ‘digital’ including a huge range of sub-categories. At the more creative end of the spectrum, the likes of Assembly, Rush Digital, Resn and Gladeye specialise in often complex technology-focused builds. Then there are companies like Little Giant, Heyday and Young Shand that run integrated digital marketing campaigns, and Search Republic, as the name implies, focuses on paid search, SEO and display advertising. Agencies such as Sons & Co focus on designing and building beautiful websites, while Terabyte, which is one of the oldest digital shops in the country, does everything from strategy and discovery, to social media, to managed services.
While many full-service agencies offer digital services, the importance of this space seems to show there is more willingness to find the expertise required to navigate what is an often confusing realm.
“Traditional agencies don’t always understand how to create digital design that connects emotionally with the audience,” says Kate Handley, managing director of Salted Herring. “It is so critical to get the high level of skills that go deep in particular areas.”
“Honestly, 90 percent of our work simply couldn't be delivered by traditional full service agencies,” says Ian Howard, Little Giant’s chief strategy officer. “Our technology team are specialists at integrating complex and diverse technology infrastructures into one seamless platform that's easily managed through a content management system. Most traditional agencies don't have the skills to do that.”
He points to its work on Rocket Lab, which allowed people to book space on a flight into space via a re-skinned e-commerce engine, and the ASB Classic as good examples.
“That ranged from developing this year's creative platform ('A Touch of Classic') to event signage to their communications strategy to building their new responsive website complete with integrated live scoring, ticket booking, weather feed and multimedia content. There are few agencies capable of taking on this breadth of work without compromising on the technical know-how to deliver a worldclass digital asset.”
Traditional agencies don’t always understand how to create digital design that connects emotionally with the audience.