What is a Digital Agency?
The question of what constitutes a digital agency is one that we know well. Back in our first year we grew our company from a bunch of guys doing a bit of web design to what – in our eyes and those of our clients – constitutes a digital agency.
Those of you coming from a traditional agency background will be well-versed in the products and services that such an organisation offers: A traditional agency offers print campaigns, radio campaigns, direct mail and sometimes offline events among a plethora of other print-based services. A digital agency essentially offers online marketing strategies and contains the skill set to realise these strategies in-house.
An Evolving Market
While the offerings of traditional agencies have been honed and refined over the last 30 years, the digital industry is constantly evolving. Often the differentiator between digital agencies isn’t necessarily whether they are the best at a particular service but rather whether they are geared up to offer a cutting edge service in the first place.
A good example of this that comes to mind would be the emergence of mobile as a marketing medium. In the early 2000’s a lot of agencies started wising up to the fact that they would have to start getting into digital or they’d be left by the wayside and bypassed entirely as campaigns started to be run predominantly online with supporting offline elements, so they learned how to build websites and run basic SEO and PPC campaigns to support these.
When mobile marketing started to kick off properly, a lot of agencies didn’t realise the importance of it and most of these agencies now have to outsource a lot of this capability at increased cost to themselves and often to their end client.
Competitive Technology
As has been said before in this post, embracing new technology as it emerges is key to remaining competitive as a digital agency. Above and beyond that, being at the cutting edge of technology is almost essential to being able to call yourself a digital agency in the first place – if you don’t, you’re just another company offering web design services, SEO or some other collection of digital services.
Another key difference between traditional and digital agencies at this point is that while the traditional market uses technology that is mature (litho print, digital print etc), the digital market’s cutting edge is constantly in beta. When we first started working with HTML5 in web design it wasn’t even ratified as a standard yet and indeed, in the time we’ve been working with it, it’s even changed it’s name. Working at the cutting edge is a bit like investing in the stock market: Digital agencies constantly have to monitor technology trends and make educated guesses as to which technologies are worthy of investing time in to add to their portfolio of services.
Often the time spent researching blogs and tech news outlets is as valuable as actually doing client work – with a market that is changing every day, it’s impossible to have a fixed 2-year roadmap like you would with traditional media; instead you need a roadmap that can be tweaked, altered and even change direction entirely at a moment’s notice.
A Young Market
Digital is, as you’ve probably surmised from this article so far, a young market in that it hasn’t been around for very long yet. It’s also young in the sense that most of the people working in it are at the lower end of the age bracket. Digital requires a completely different mindset to print and a lot of designers and campaign planners have difficulty adjusting between the two, meaning the digital market is spearheaded by two groups of people: There’s a few extremely versatile people who come from a traditional print background who have managed to adapt, and then there’s the new generation of individuals who have never worked in traditional media and, at this rate, probably never will.
Versatility is Key
In a digital market, you don’t have time to follow a concept that isn’t working for you. Digital Agencies need the ability to shift their game almost overnight to take advantage of new emerging technology and to keep ahead of the game because if they don’t, there will be someone who does. This makes the market an interesting hotbed of very strange, experimental management structures and working practices as there’s no space or time for excessive amounts of red tape – once the opportunity’s gone, you’ve missed it.
A company in most other sectors will have a time to market for a product of something like 3-4 months. In digital land that number is closer to 3-4 weeks. It’s about staying on the digital edge.
In Summary
This post has been less about defining exactly what a digital agency consists of and more about the processes that go on within one but I feel it highlights some interesting angles that anyone outside the industry may be completely unaware of. I’d be keen to hear some opinions from people still in traditional media to hear what their take on some of the differences between digital and traditional are and how this affects the way they work.