Friday, February 19, 2010
Another *new* ad agency.
The hell’s going on. 24dp is directors gone wild, starting an ad agency. Crazy! In times like these, too. (You might remember them as a collective of directors who auctioned off their services on eBay last year.) The model is based on a more simple approach of delivering TV packaged around one-stop shopping for creative services.
Realistically, they claim what every new shop claims when starting out: Less bloated, small, nimble. The proverbial hungry creatives leaving a large agency to go it alone, right? Brands who need a smaller creative agency with solid TV experience would seem to be their sweet spot then. Not sure that’s a bad thing, especially for a client looking for TV without the budget a BDA requires.
24dp handles everything in-house because that’s what they’ve done for agencies. Logically, it makes sense going it alone. Whereas a Victors & Spoils built their model around crowdsourcing overseen by an internal creative team, 24dp focuses on keeping it all in-house.
But no shop launches without buzz. And where V&S got a New York Times piece, 24dp is featured on Fox Business. This covers the two biggest obstacles in launching: Exposure and clients.
For the climate change now affecting the industry, where what a brand needs at any given time appears to be the focus, I wouldn’t bet against having TV and video content as my base. (TV ability easily transitions to online webisodes.) Compare the work for their first client Flatrate, and tell me it’s not better or worse than a lot of what a Best Buy runs—a much larger client which probably pays a lot more.
Another point to consider is that fair or unfair, starting out with TV chops is likely going to get you more respect from brands than *just* being a purely digital or social shop without any. (Or any agency that positions itself as exclusively digital or social.) Conversely, labeling your shop *creative* means you need to deliver in those other areas too.
TV or not, the first challenge for any new shop is to stay in business, then they can see whether nimble turns to bloated or not.
(Follow them on Twitter too.)
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2 comments:
Ah yes, the small nimble hungry shop.
This is so true: "I wouldn’t bet against having TV and video content as my base." And add to that list radio. And you might as well add print.
The disparaged platforms of yesteryear are going to be bread and butter for all but the search shops. They all translate to web, and it's not like people stopped watching TV or seeing OOH when Facebook came into being.
That's a fun spot. And I would cast that woman in anything. I love how you can tell exactly what she's going to ask long before the words come out.
Our story was picked up by BBH Labs, PSFK, Adage and others (which was fantatic!) but beyond who 'discovered us' the focus quickly became delivering signficant value to a range of customers and all that buzz soon fell away in terms of importance. The interesting dynamic is you can say you're nimble and creative etc but what each customer requires from you tends to differ and you have to roll with those requirements, whatever your stated positioning...and show me an agency that doesn't think they're creative...surely a 'creative' agency would come up with a different positioning than that ;-)
Andrew
http://www.AgencyNil.com
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