Hitting close to five years at Thinkerbell and landing my new role, on the bus on the way home I reflected on how the agency has reshaped my view of marketing and communications, and how fast our industry has transformed.
The rise of AI, the dominance of social-first thinking, and the ongoing amalgamation of disciplines have made one thing clear: clients need faster, smarter, more efficient solutions that drive behaviour change and build brand for the long term.
The old silos are crumbling. Every agency, regardless of its label, must be able to stretch beyond its traditional comfort zone.
A PR agency should be capable of building a creative brand platform. A creative agency should be able to develop a social idea. A media agency should be able to craft a brand strategy. You don’t have to be perfect at all of it, but there’s a growing need that everyone should be more hybrid in their approach and play across the marketing spectrum, with your specialism guiding how you make it work.
Here’s the brutal realities we need to accept:
● A creative agency without earned or social thinking is disconnected from culture and can’t insert brands into it.
● A PR or social agency without creative or brand strategy isn’t building brands — it’s chasing headlines or viral moments that fade fast (as we bend things to make it more appealing to a journo or audience, whilst losing the brand).
● Any agency without paid and publishing capability can only recommend, not deliver.
● A brand developed without CX implementation is mullet marketing — tidy at the front, a mess at the back.
There’s lots more examples of the above but I hope it gets my point across. You can have a deep specialism at the core of your agency but you need to kill solos and build out your product, get it integrated, or you may collapse. You can’t survive as a single-specialism agency anymore. The industry doesn’t need more silos; it needs integration, capability, and executional depth. Build out your product, connect your teams, or risk irrelevance.
At Thinkerbell, we’ve been pushing toward this integration since day one. It’s not easy. It challenges habits, structures, and egos; but it’s the only viable future for our industry. It’s hard and people have natural resistance, but it’s the only way for brands to achieve success in our changing world.
Taylor York is the national head of Earned & Owned at Thinkerbell.
