As an agency, doing what you are good at is good. Its great fun, relatively easy to do and keeps the clients paying their bills. Well that seems great but is it? It pays this month’s bills but what about next year and the year after?
A few years ago, I presented to my key clients a vision of the future. We called it ‘staying ahead of the innovation curve’. It was a look at our vision for where the future of Product Visualisation was going. It involved realtime technologies such as UE4 and WebGL.
The message wasn’t ‘let’s jump into to these now for live projects’. It was more about us showing them our R&D plans and saying that we believe we know where the industry is going and that we will make sure that we move our clients in the right direction.
In the following months we worked hard developing our capabilities and talking with out clients about the future. We are now seeing the hard work pay off and not only are we doing new work for existing clients we are also working with new clients.
Today I got an e mail from a senior client who was in one of those presentation two years ago, he said
“Great progress. Congrats and thanks to you guys and team……. we should take confidence and pride in everything achieved to date. We now need an absolutely flawless launch …… across Europe. And roll this out across the range. “ We have gone further and taken it global!
So in Mid-November we will help this client launch their product across the global using our new realtime solutions. We will certainly make sure, as he requested, we deliver flawlessly.
As I said, it is not just our currently clients that are benefitting from our forward-looking approach.
I have been talking to potential client around the global and all of them are blown away by what we are showing them. I was in Brazil recently where the C.O.O. of a major digital agency sat down and said “F%$£ Me!” then spent 10 minutes apologising.
We find that the ‘traditional’ CGI work we do is loved by our current clients but for new clients it becomes a subjective discussion around “do I like yours more than the agency I currently use” I describe this as a Beauty Pageant, where we ‘hope’ the client likes ours more. Even if they do, we then have the pain of departure, where they know that their currently partner and the partner knows them. Even worse, it become a commodity and price is then the deciding factor. This is then a race to the bottom, as margin gets slashed and long-term financial performance spirals downwards.
Doing great work is always important, doing great work with craft and creativity even more so. But to be successful now and in the future you have to have a USP, something that sets you apart, something that avoids commoditising your product….something that makes people say “F%$£ Me”!
The challenge is then to be able to take that product/service and turn it into a solution to a client’s challenge. It is vital you do this and focus your efforts. Innovation for the sake of it is wasted effort. You need a roadmap that identifies technology developments, consumer trends and clients requirements. The challenge is to find the sweet spot where these and our capabilities meet.
We use three Cs as a check list;
Are we Capable? Do we have the skills/can we grow/find the skills?
Are we credible? Is it a product or service that clients would see are us being experts in?
Is it commercial? Does it fit a client needs and do we know the clients we want to talk to?
If we can pass all three C’s then we have a winner.
So 2020 is just around the corner and what does it hold for the agency? We have many challenges but the two main ones relating to Innovation are
Build a sustainable and robust production pipeline for our realtime work that can be delivered globally for any client
Look for the next stage our realtime innovation (more about this in a future blog!)
All this whilst maintaining our current projects and ensuring current clients are happy to keep paying the bills.
by Richard Wright
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