According to The Wall Street Journal, ad and marketing agencies are under enormous pressure to reinvent themselves as the velocity of change has marketers questioning whether the ad business is equipped to deal with the new landscape.
“We can no longer just acquire firms; it’s just not good enough,” says Bob Jeffrey, JWT’s chief executive. It’s not good enough, presumably, because acquisitions deepen the digital bench but they don’t necessarily change agency culture. In other words, there’s still a lot of learning that needs to occur.
That’s why some big agencies are setting up online and in-house workshops that offer courses in social-media marketing and mobile marketing. Others are shipping executives off to take classes at digital ad schools such as Hyper Island, a Swedish school that recently opened a branch in New York.
As part of its program dubbed Zed Academy, Wunderman recently brought 19 students from a Singapore school into its fold. One of the students recently created a video to promote graphic design software from Microsoft. Wunderman says the student completed the task in three days–a job that typically takes three weeks.
And there’s a lesson right there–we need to produce more stuff in less time.
