last of the independents?

There’s a piece in yesterday’s MarketingWeek (attached above) by David Wethey of Agency Assessments about the rise - and predicted fall - of creative independent ad agencies. He observes that in recent times the independents have been making the running in new business terms and that clients are increasingly trusting big brands to the so-called ‘micro-networks’. Clearly, with global wins from Coca-Cola, P&G, EA Games, the Nike account in China and big local clients here in the UK like Honda and Pizza Hut, Wieden + Kennedy has of late been one of the beneficiaries (or drivers, depending on your point of view) of this trend.

Ad Age meanwhile, in its Agency of the Year issue of January 9^th, headlines its report on W+K with ‘Wieden becomes a global power’ and notes that Dan Wieden believes our independence is the force behind that success, along with the way we’ve built our network from scratch rather than through acquisition.

David Wethey goes on in his article to suggest that the current success of the independents may not last, for a number of reasons: the difficulty of balancing growth with maintaining quality standards, the greed of the founders who want to sell up to a big network and cash in, and influence of the big media groups. He predicts that because of continuing consolidation of media spend into a small number of big buyers, those buyers will increasingly be able to prevail on big clients to combine pitches for media and creative, thereby cutting out independent creative agencies who are not part of the big media houses’ holding companies.

I’m not sure about this.  Our recent experience would suggest that while big clients may want the economies of scale and the reliable distribution network that a big media house with offices all over the world can provide, many of them recognise that when it comes to creative agencies, it’s not about having a lot of talent, it’s about having the best talent.

It’s the talent and the work that’s driving the appointment of the independents. I hope and believe that these things will continue, for a significant number of clients, to be more important than the convenient one-stop shop solution offered by the holding groups. Many of them are happy to split out the key creative and strategic work to a smaller shop and give the administrative international distribution job to a traditional network. (Obviously, this is a bad thing for the margins of the traditional network as, unlike breakthrough creative thinking, the distribution is a commodity service that doesn’t commend a premium. This is probably why WPP, with its Red Cell/Voluntarily United/Whatever They’re Called Now micro-network is trying to create a sort-of independent lookalike within the holding company. “You don’t need to go to Wieden’s – we’ve got our own one of those creative hot shop things.”) And my guess is that it’s that admin part of the business that the media shops might be able to influence clients to move into the same group as their media.

Of course, unlike David, I’m speaking from a point of view of vested interest. I could be totally wrong about this.

I wonder what anyone else out there thinks. Let us know.