Have you heard of Zoe Sugg? Ben Phillips? What about Gavin Free or Daniel Gruchy?
Allow me to help. Ms Sugg is the 24-year-old fashion blogger from Brighton better known as Zoella – her various YouTube channels have 9m subscribers. Gavin and Daniel are The Slow Mo Guys – they produce pieces like Giant 6ft Water Balloon, which has amassed over 70m views. No wonder they feature prominently in YouTube’s recent ad campaign.
Ben Phillips is simply Ben Phillips. His primary medium is Vine, where his six-second snapshots of life in Cardiff have attracted 1.3m followers and over 250m loops.
New communications channels stimulate new modes of communication, usually with their own distinct vernacular. As the numbers above show, people have a huge appetite for these, which obviously make them increasingly important to advertisers. According to The Telegraph, Phillips can earn £12,000 by promoting a brand within one of his Vines. There’s also a guy in the US called Jerome Jarre who reportedly commands $35,000 for sending a single Snapchat message. It’s nice work if you can get it.
The rise of these vloggers and social stars are indicative of the disruption that is happening in the advertising and marketing worlds. Things will only accelerate from here, which poses a key question for agencies: how do we evolve our structures and staffing to ensure we play a full, creatively-leading role in these spaces? How can we catch up to this kind of disruption and ensure we stay ahead of the curve?
The answer, I think, is diversity. It’s a prerequisite for evolution, as well as being a product of it. If we’re going to adapt effectively, we need to find new ways of breeding diversity into our businesses.
The diversity we require comes in three main forms. The first is operational. Whether we admit it or not, agencies are guilty of having a top-down and heavily centralised command and control mentality. We need to find more fluid, agile and diverse operating structures geared to the demands of this consumer-driven era.
The second is commercial. Most agencies are keen on innovation and experimentation, but we generally look to charge full rate for such work. We need to develop more diverse financial models, especially for edge services, that allow us to share both risk and reward with our clients.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, we need to ensure that our staff recruitment and retention plans are specifically focused on encouraging variety across ethnicity, age, experience and education. Any agency based in the UK – London in particular – is incredibly fortunate in terms of the gene pool at its disposal. We need to find bold new ways to tap into this resource and create the purposeful diversity that will us allow to survive and thrive in the age of Zoella, Ben and The Slow Mo Guys.
For all of these reasons, Arc is a big supporter of the MAA’s diversity programme. It is an uncomplicated and commercially smart way of continuing our drive to find great talent that will help future proof our business and challenge us all to embrace new modes of communication.
More on diversity brought to you by the Marketing Agencies Association
• Diversity in agencies: how and why we ‘do different’
• Diversity in agencies: the benefits of an international outlook
• Diversity in agencies: exploring the idea of ‘doing different’
• Why working mums deserve bonuses, not biases
Michelle Whelan is managing partner at Arc Worldwide
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