Friday, March 13, 2009 12:25 PM EST

New Media, Meet New Agency

by Rob Hoffman, Guest Blogger

There’s no debating that the distribution model of music, television, film, and advertising is forever changed. It can be easily summed up in one word: iTunes. But what about the way media is created? Not just by whom but through what methods? The production models for television and advertising remained relatively unchanged through the late 1990’s. Desktop publishing was the first shot across the bow. Then the dot-com boom of the early 2000’s shook the foundation. The advent of broadband seems to have been an additional kick in the nuts. Finally, social networking just may be the death knell of the way things were.

I first got my foot in the door as a tape librarian (the post-production equivalent of the mailroom) in 1992 at MTI; a midlevel studio that catered mostly to cable networks. National, Windsor, and Post Perfect were several of its now defunct competitors. The post-production studio was king back in those days. If you wanted your spot edited on ready for broadcast 1" reel-to-reel video, you needed to work in a studio that had an engineering department. Booking a room for $350 an hour was the norm. Then a non-linear editing system working on a Mac started taking hold. Its name was Avid and it started a revolution. Seemingly every editor in New York was opening his own “boutique” shop. Rates plunged while creative opportunities blossomed.

Pretty soon, broadcast networks and ad agencies realized that they didn’t need to outsource their post-production at all. They could simply convert a closet into an editing bay and the concept of in-house editing and finishing was born. As the major production houses started sinking in the late 90’s, talent began to freelance on a much larger scale. Out was the staffer that would sit around and wait for a job to come to occupy his/her room. In was the freelancer, available to be hired on a “just in time” fashion.

While the broadcast networks were quick to embrace this change out of economic necessity, the ad agencies seemed to dig their feet in the sand and more or less hang in there. It wasn’t until this latest economic crisis that their collective backs were seemingly broken. The “luxury” multi-tiered agency approach for creating an ad campaign is starting to have a hard time competing with the collective approach of on-line contests and virtual team building. Why pay an agency to come up with several concepts when you can enlist a limitless pool of talent to get you there for a fraction of the cost?

In these lean times, the indulgence of a Madison Ave. or Soho address is turning into quite a burden. As a matter of fact, the indulgence of having an address at all may not even be necessary.

What would happen if a creative director could build a team overnight to suit a pitch or project then disband when the project was over? What if that team needed to be built again 6 days or even 6 months later? How could this be accomplished? Good freelancers don’t just hang around waiting for the phone to ring. If you were lucky enough to find this person the first time, surely you won’t be so lucky the next. Then what? If you are using a vocational networking tool to build up your network ahead of time, you may be in luck. And you may be on the forefront of the virtual team building model that will dominate media for the next 10 years.

There is a new breed of networks using this web 2.0 model that caters to virtual team building. Sites such as the upcoming www.reelpost.com (full disclosure – this is the site that I founded), www.whoscreative.com, www.postfolio.org, and www.geniusrocket.com are enabling media creatives to congregate, show off their wares, and their references.

For the print and design world, there are contest sites such as www.99designs.com which enable the user to create a design contest for a set price. The creatives on these types of sites (many of them real professionals with a little time on their hands) then compete to come up with the winning look. How many layers of bureaucracy does an agency have to go through to get a logo design approved? And at what cost? This is easy math.

So where do we go from here? Is the agency dead? I’m not ready to start chiseling the tombstone but I am ready to visit the hospice. The music industry has been dying this slow motion death for the past 10 years – victim of file sharing and social networks. Ad world, take note. Nobody wants to do a job for less pay but many will, so get used to it. Many more opportunities will be created for those that previously had none. Some will see this new opportunity, realize that the time is now, and run with it.

See you at the finish line.

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