Frankensteins Agency

Our new head of Digital Engagement will see you now Mr Fowler...

It’s been a busy few days here at Chez Fowler. Too busy for me to find the mental energy to slap a thousand or so words together in a cogent form for this blog. I’d offer my humble apologies dear reader but I can’t be arsed with that arslikan nonsense.

The “busy” has been getting in the way of the thinking I have to do around the whole digital marketing industry shift. It’s a lot to think about, globally five hundred billion dollars is spent on marketing and a very large percentage of that half a trillion dollars is rolling online and into the interactive space. This is a vast, nay, mind boggling pile of money and when confronted with numbers which are this large there is a tendency to treat them as fantasy figures and to partially disregard them for less scary numbers and respond accordingly. These aren’t fantasy figures and the shift is already happening. For example P&G just bulleted 1600 staff from their marketing department to reflect the move to social marketing (read about it here:  P&G to lay off 1600) and social marketing isn’t even the primary digital marketing channel, it’s just one of them!

Obviously this is a movement to be taken seriously and the new wave of digital agencies are all over it but the systems integrators have been strangely quiet until now. It’s no surprise the digital agencies are slamming into this field, it’s more of the same for them, or so they think anyway, and it’s their bread and butter trade. So what about the SIs? Well we’re going to hit the space just as hard or even harder than the digital agencies because the movement to digital marketing isn’t just about new content channels like the digital agencies and P&G think. It’s about data. Data in literally vast amounts (for example Adobe have 21 Petabytes of data in the Omniture cores and add over 5 trillion transactions a quarter! Ridiculous numbers) and a labyrinthine nest of plumbing as we wire the new channels into the data, into all the data, not just the pools of web analytics. To realise the full potential of the succinct statement made by Rob Toguri of Capgemini, “we’re fusing content and data to make money” we need to get access to all the corporate data we can. This is where the SIs will reign supreme, we’re high quality plumbers in a way that the digital agencies aren’t, we understand the importance of the non functional requirements and we understand how to change businesses, change processes and help people change. 

This isn’t the space a digital agency can play in much, but us SI’s aren’t exactly known for our deft touch with Photoshop or our innovative video editing and currently we’re not really looking for talent who is. Sure there are SI’s who will buy digital agencies and spend a lot of money on it, but the DNA of a digital agency and the DNA of a systems integrator are radically different. There is a different perspective of risk, a different perspective of scale, of reaction time, of unit billing method and of delivery. In short a digital agency is more about individual talent than an SI which is more about methods, templates and industrialisation. When an SI buys a digital agency it’s usually a convoluted method of taking a few hundred million dollars and throwing it out of a window.

It might be easier said than done but there is no reason an SI and a digital agency can’t work together. It’s perfectly possible to partner and deliver everything a client needs without becoming a some strange Frankenstein organisation and this is how we’ll address the digital marketing opportunity. We won’t dilute our strengths or pretend to be what we aren’t, we’ll find partners and we’ll work together to deliver the change. Vendors, digital agencies and SI’s. A strong triumvirate.

And on that portentous note, I'm off for a beer. TTFN