Ten years ago I was sat in a room with Paul Frampton - then CEO of Havas Media - listening to marketing and media consultancy Ebiquity (newly risen from the ashes of Billetts) highlighted consultancies like Accenture were aiming to gain market share traditionally held by media agencies.
Fast forward on a decade to January 2020 and Accenture announces the closure of its media auditing arm to clear the way for further undoubted successes from Accenture Interactive, which last year - for the fourth in a row - was ranked the world's largest digital agency by AdAge, displaying 20% YOY growth.
Meanwhile, Publicis Groupe shares plunged 12% in Q4 2019 as "media agencies struggle", according to The Drum. There's no doubt the landscape of agencies - and even holding groups - is seeing its biggest period of flux since the advent of (and chequebook flurry for) digital agencies in the first few years of the century. WPP CEO Mark Read concurs.
But how to turn threat to opportunity? As ever, it's about being nimble to clients' needs and that means being smart with talent and the technology benefits that resource can deliver, as highlighted by the expansion Omnicom is planning for its Hearts & Science tech consulting arm.
For startups to large enterprises, MeasureMatch is the marketplace platform connecting business leaders with amazing consulting and professional services partners.
McKinsey points to talent being the catalyst, clearly linking roles to returns: "When we ask people if they have enough talent, they almost universally say no. Then they go back to looking at KPIs [key performance indicators] for that quarter’s performance. We’ve created a managerial system and reporting mechanism that disproportionately focus on financial capital, not human capital."
Econsultancy's / Adobe's 2019 Digital Trends report shows just how critical resource agility is to marketing success. The top challenges most likely to keep marketers aware at night range from "lack of marketing technology integration", through "difficulty tracking marketing effectiveness", to "lack of internal resources". The risks posed by every one of the top ten challenges can be mitigated in full or in part through more fluid talent practices.
And this focus on new ways to engage with the workforce gees all the way to the top. At Davos recently, The World Economic Forum presented a paper entitled The Promise of Platform Work: Understanding the Ecosystem, designed to demystify the growth of the platform economy, establish best practices and provide visibility into the potential for platformization across the labor market.
Marketplaces like MeasureMatch enable other organisations to tap into consultants and consultancies at a fraction of the cost and effort of hiring an FTE. It's time holding groups and their agency subsidiaries considered the platformization of the labor market to be a tool at their disposal in the fight to hold and regain market share. As a growing network, we're already being utilised by Havas and Publicis agency subsidiaries, along with high growth startups like Huggg for whom nimbleness is lifeblood
Here’s what one of our network of experts thinks about the benefits of the MeasureMatch platform.
We get this question a lot: “How does MeasureMatch work exactly?” It’s really as easy as 1, 2, 3, but in this quick post I’ll answer that question with three simple scenarios. I’ll post again soon with a visual that d...
A couple of days ago I posted Part 1of a two-part blog post to describe what a buyer [aka a client] can expect from the MeasureMatch service. Below, is a shiny, new, more visual way of describing the user experience...
