The Ad industry is bursting with brilliant creative and
commercially strategic minds. But this brilliance is most often only applied
to, or just under, the glossy veneer of businesses when it should be at the
centre.
Our industry also suffers from being in relationship,
rather than partnership, with our clients. The word 'relationship' covers a multitude of
sins whereas partnerships are necessarily built on mutual respect – at their
heart are shared agenda and belief underpinned by shared risk and reward. Sadly, the reality of our industry is that partnerships are killed by fees and award ceremonies.
As a result of this partnership scarcity, the creation of
brilliant new products and services with brilliant simple ideas at their core
will only ever exist at the periphery of today's Ad Agencies. A rare and recent example is McCann Erickson's Widget for UPS, but this is an exception. The bottom
line is that IP simply can’t prosper at the periphery; it has to be
at the centre. And that's because it's not a new discipline, it's a
new mindset. A mindset that must challenge a Client’s expectation of unlimited
ideas for monthly fees regardless of whether they are for posters, business
changing widgets or the next killer format for ITV.
There are only a few companies that have fully embraced
this notion – Anomaly and Erasmus are two that come to mind. But the industry is skeptical, everyone asks the same question - "how can they survive without fees
when equity is a long game?" The answer probably lies within a hybrid of
the two, but regardless of the exact answer, it is clear that the existing fee based
model is in trouble and the only way out is by becoming cleverer with
Intellectual Property.
Cleverer doesn’t have to mean building walls – on the contrary, I believe that today’s
spirit of collaboration, twinned with increasingly pressured client budgets could lead to the emergence of The New IP – Intellectual Partnerships -
joint ventures between Agencies and Clients with absolute shared risk and
reward. It's the only way everyone can win, and it might just trigger some of
the best new products and services we've seen in years.

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