B&T, in partnership with Seventh Street Media (SSM), is proud to bring to you a new podcast mini-series featuring four different agency bosses talking all things about their business, the industry, and themselves.
Hosted by SSM chief executive Luke Girgis and part of the publisher’s Fear At The Top series, the first episode features OMD boss Aimee Buchanan, who talks about the ways the media agency (and B&T Awards 2017 finalist) is tackling industry challenges such as in-house models.
“I’ve got no issue with in-house models. For the whole time I’ve been in the industry, there have been in-house models of some sort,” she says.
“I don’t think you can fight it – if a client wants to do an in-house model, it’s [about] how do you support it and make that work.
“Our point of difference is that as the landscape shifts, clients need different capability, [and] we’re not precious about the model. So, if some’s in-house, some’s with us [and] some’s with another agency, we’ll make that work.
“We evolve our offering to deal with the landscape as it shifts, [and] it’s really hard for clients to do that, because that’s not their core competency or focus.”
However, Buchanan believes the biggest challenge agencies are grappling with is attracting, recruiting, retaining, and evolving talent.
“You might hire seven or eight programmatic people, but they’re not going to stay with a brand forever if they’ve bought into wanting to do that,” she says.
“They’re going to want career progression, they’re going to want training, they’re going to want evolution.
“What we’ve found is this huge surgent of people coming back to OMD – what we call ‘OMD Boomerangers’ – where they leave and then come back, and I think that’s okay. Sometimes you need to grow them and then let them go.”
Buchanan also discusses why a lot of agencies are churning work out these days, putting it down to a few reasons.
“They need to get it out and don’t have an appetite. Sometimes its [because] our people haven’t been empowered or trained to go ‘What am I trying to solve? What’s the real issue we’re getting at?’,” she said.
“We’ve tried to put a bit more focus around that and then [figured out] how do we use our craft to solve it.”
For those who want to listen to the rest of what OMD’s CEO had to say via iTunes, you can do so here.
Stay tuned for the next episode tomorrow featuring HM Communications Group founder and principal Virginia Hyland!
