Navigating the Pressures of Agency Work: Unveiling Huge’s Transformation and the Power of Purpose-Built Technology
Brent Trimble, VP of Advisory Services at Kantata
The agency business is incredibly diverse, spanning digital transformation, product design, communications, social, digital media shops, and more. One thing is universal today — agencies are under rate, cost, and workload pressure. Client procurement trends, the implicit desire to over-service, drive extra-creative cycles, and innovate are conditions that squeeze agency growth, talent, and profitability aspirations.
The digital transformation of the last decade has exacerbated the challenge of adapting to tremendous market and platform shifts while remaining indispensable to client partners. The effect of this balancing act — for many shops — is a taxing effort in managing deliverables, expectations, and profit. In addition, the intrinsic need to remain relevant, modern, and exceed client expectations further compounds pressures in agencies today. The resulting conditions prevent many from achieving and realizing full potential.
After diagnosing this business shift in his first book, Madison Avenue Manslaughter (2017), Michael Farmer was a “fly-on-the-wall” during the transformation of Huge, IPG’s Brooklyn-based, global digital creative operation. With a heritage of digital transformation and activation, Huge experienced many of the factors common to the industry with executive changes, slow growth, client churn, and marginal profitability.
Farmer’s new book, Madison Avenue Makeover, chronicles Huge’s change of mission, its new product strategy, reorganization from twelve independent global offices to one single global operation, and revolutionary three-dimensional pod organizational structure involving client partners, crafts and products.
Earlier in their transformation journey, Huge realized that their existing technology was creating operational blind spots and couldn’t keep pace with growth across multiple disciplines, offices, and talent. They needed a solution that would provide near-real-time data for informed decision-making and standardized processes.
Huge implemented the Kantata Cloud™ for Professional Services – designed to give agencies in-depth insights into every aspect of their operations, as well as the complete control needed to make meaningful adjustments that set teams and clients up for success. With Kantata, Huge was able to streamline their business processes across a global workforce and increase visibility and coordination across teams. As a result, Huge was now better equipped with insights needed to assist in making business decisions.
In an recent webinar, Michael and I discussed his observations, the issues and trends shaping the advertising and marketing industry, and lessons other agencies can take away to ensure they are successful, enabling customers to be successful as well. You can watch that session on-demand here.
To learn more about how Kantata can help you manage agency operations at scale, ensuring that as your organization grows, your teams have the tools they need to do what they do best even better, click here. To read more about how Kantata helped Huge standardize business processes and become more efficient, which is critical in growing and scaling, click here.