nathan williams | simiant.com

When I started working commercially in the internet back in 98 (Oh! 10 year anniversary, Yay! ) the Agency that I worked in then had 5 kinds of people working for it:

Account Managers, Project Managers, Designers, Back End Developers, Front End Developers

That was it. Five. There wasn’t even much of a sense of rank or hierarchy. Look inside a Digital Agency now and it will look something like this:

All those discipline above exist, but may have within them 5 to 7 levels of seniority. The tech Department may have separated into technology disciplines: MS Practice, Java Practice, Data Warehousing etc. The creative department will now contain traditional Designers as well as Copywriters (of an advertising ilk), Flash Designers (not Flash Developers… they sit in Tech), more traditional Creative Teams of two if the Agency is biased towards online campaigns, 3D Animators, Video & Motion Graphics specialists. New disciplines have emerged or transfered form another mediums: Editorial and Content (written), Information Architects, Usability Experts, Usability Testers, Interaction Designers, User Experience Architects……. Planners, Strategists, SEO & SEM experts and so on…

The point is that many of the Digital Agencies that exist today are pretty mature, despite only been 10 to 15 years old. The people who have worked there through this period, now really do know their stuff. Forces to be reckoned with, digitally…. So why are most ‘traditional agencies’ now trying to compete with these guys on their ground? Advertising dollars, no shock there.

If you look at what digital agencies are trying to do, they all want a piece of the Traditional Agencies action… they’re now talking about Branding, Advertising and so on. The reason here not being dollars, but one of ego’s. Digital people now realise it’s ‘their day’, and after ten years of scavenging the crumbs of advertising dollars, want a seat at the table just like their big brother at the Ad Agency. Traditional Agencies on the other hand are now all talking Digital ‘cos that’s the way it’s going isn’t it… uh…. computers’. Both as bad as the other. The point is, both kinds of agency have fathoms of deep expertise in their own areas. Where is the experience deeper? On the traditional side, it’s been around longer.

‘Digital’ people who have grown up in web agencies do know a lot about technology, the internet, the world wide web and the magic therein that can be woven. Where we can lack experience is in a deep understanding of things like Branding, Design, Advertising, PR. Despite what we may think, we still have a lot to learn. It’s interesting that recently both AKQA and Digitas have launched content offerings: AKQA Film and Digitas - The Third Act. Why? Is that what thy are really good at?