Clients challenge Agencies to change

"In the old world, agencies were way out in front of clients.
Now, clients are ahead of the agencies - and the consumer is ahead of all of us."
    - Mary Beth West, chief marketing officer of Kraft Foods

My lovely wife is an avid reader of the Financial Times, which basically makes me a fan of the FT if I want to stay on her good side. This morning I was reading the paper and was a little surprised to see a marker for an Augmented Reality experience in such a publication with the quote from Mary Beth West challenging agencies to catch up to consumers. 

Here is a link to the full article:

 

"I can't think of many other industries where the fundamental process of producing the product hasn't changed for 40 years," says John Ferrell, until last month a member of Publicis' executive committee.

The article goes on to read, "If agencies are to avoid longer-term decline, experimentation in new models of remuneration and agency structure is only going to increase."

I think in the long run this is good for both agencies and clients to have a third party like the Financial Times call them out and get them to re-focus. Some agencies are already trying new models but need some clients to catch up, and other clients are already seeking new models like crowd-sourcing strategies and ideas.

Comments

[Jerry Holtaway]

have you paid FT to use this copyrighted content? :-)

[Griffin Farley]

No, but thank you for pointing that out. I did see their Copyright note:

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009. You may share using our article tools. Please don't cut articles from FT.com and redistribute by email or post to the web.

I hope that they realize that I'm 'teasing' the audience with just bits of the article and that they go to their page to read the whole thing.

If anyone from FT is upset please send me an email from your server to [email protected] and I'll happily remove it.

[Jonas]

in all fairness, the image gives no way of reading the text and the lines you inserted are just quotes.

there can't be any problem right?