Agency board advisor Richard Medley outlines a roadmap for agencies (and their clients) to “do things differently” in 2025.
As most of us would probably agree, 2024 will not be missed, lamented or recalled as halcyon days.
But the year of ‘WTF’ can teach us things that need to be big comms factors for 2025.
Challenge to the status quo on how we do things
Musk. Trump. Rogan. Davey. Jaguar (big tbc on that). Learnings from all are to be had, but the main outcome has to be the upending (good or otherwise) of the establishment. Rules are there to be sidestepped. The personal touch matters more for the audience than a sanitised corporate message push. And it’s less ‘this is the way we have always done it’ and more ‘we need to tap into the mood of the nation’ and/or ‘let’s just plough our own furrow’ to get talked about.
This clearly doesn’t mean following the precise lead of dick-tators, but it does mean listening to those that matter to you and understanding how to show those people you get them.
Channel choice. Opinions that aren’t couched in safety. Visible leadership. Tackling audience challenges with vigour rather than just ‘verbal intention’ that people can see through
It’s being more active over passive at the core of storytelling. And ruffling the feathers a little of those who are actually not your core audience along the way? Why not. It’s good oxygen.
Nimble partnerships
Agencies have closed. Ghosting is up. Agency forecasting is hard. And for clients, investment commitments are necessarily fluid.
So from all sides of the agency-client mix, we need to put more focus on proving and building trust over headline creativity in your partnerships, because the latter will flow more accurately from the former.
Recognise that reinvention, flexibility and people you can absolutely count on (or offer) for positive challenge when times are tough will matter more.
Swap over process and trad habits for fluidity and accessibility. Make your service offer broad enough as an agency (with partners on call) to be genuinely useful and reinvented world profitable.
And when hiring an agency, invest the time in the relationship to allow for open and honest conversations, alignment on the real challenges ahead, and agreement on what proper value should look like.
It’s the shake up that is actually needed, when differentials can come to the fore again.
Proof points rethought
We need less blagging and hope as a measurement strategy, and more collaboration on finding how evidence of success can be shown. Because one person’s impact measure is another’s person’s background noise.
Which might mean more blended client and agency insight sharing that recognises the agency alone can’t always evaluate the big picture. And that some current awareness and reach-led figures mask a truly irritating delivery model that punctures effectiveness – regional media and the nightmare of interruptive ads I’m looking at you for one…
Big figures alone aren’t everything, when understanding the how and why of incoming calls (dangling a juicy contract for example) can tell you so much more about what is working commercially from your comms than vanity measures.
The Hollywood model
2025 has to be about more of the right cast for the right task. Not based on just who has time, but on who has the expertise and proven credibility.
Agencies that build a strategic network of flexible talents on tap land real value because they hit the ground running and know why they are the specialist at the table.
For brands, more advisory boards (or individuals )will help keep perspective on all that matters, with comms thinking especially the glue for internal relations and culture, reputation, leadership credibility and rounded perspective on perceptions vs reality.
Lessons from any year clearly show where reading the room elements have gone missing from corporates sharing news badly, missing the point that ‘everything’ can have a comms impact. Don’t be one of these that misses the humanity when that’s a key test right now of corporate trust. WPP and their four days a week ‘mandate’ anyone? Comms group irony fully at play. Their decision is their decision, but with ten percent of their staff signing an open petition of dissatisfaction that tells of a story (at least in part) poorly told and poorly sold.
Which plays back to the overall challenge for the year.
Finding, bottling and living storytelling, value offers and reality checks that help us thrive in an era of big change, that is less transactional, more lived in the round, more collaborative. And, of course, less WTF. Because that was 2024’s tag…