For decades, advertising agencies have walked into client conference rooms and preached the gospel of differentiation. Know your customer better than your competition. Find your distinctive position. Stop trying to be everything to everyone. Take a stand.
It is good advice. Agencies have legitimate case studies showing how they’ve not only done this for clients, but have achieved great success. They have charged significant fees to deliver it. And then they walked back to their own offices and ignored every word of it.
I took this photo out our apartment window in Seattle this week. One sailboat in open water, and behind it, a few thousand identical windows.
It's almost a literal metaphor for the idea W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne laid out in "Blue Ocean Strategy" (except this is Elliott Bay). Most agencies are one of those windows, stuck in the red ocean: competing on the same axis as everyone else, indistinguishable at any distance. Blue ocean thinking says stop fighting for share in that crowded, bloody water and find the open space where no one else is sailing.
I was reading Arthur Brooks in The Free Press recently on Gen Z’s retreat from risk. A summary of the article is that drinking, dating, marriage, taking financial risk, are all down. Brooks traces it to rising anxiety and a collapse in social trust. Only 13 percent of Gen Zers say most people can be trusted.
This isn’t a judgment on Gen Z. But think about whether your agency actually understands what’s happening with this cohort? Not at a surface level. Not from a trend chart you saw on eMarketer or a podcast you half-listened to on a flight. Do you understand this generation deeply. Provably. In a way none of your competitors can claim?
In 2011, Barkley partnered with Boston Consulting Group to conduct original research on Millennials. Not a Google survey. Not a recycled trend report. Original, proprietary research with 6,000 Millennials, working to understand who they were, what they valued, and how they made decisions. From that work came books (Marketing to Millennials), white papers (Millennials and Healthcare), and speaking engagements from Pittsburgh to Perth. For several years, Barkley owned the Millennial conversation in a way no other agency could touch.
That’s what it looks like when an agency does what it tells its clients to do. That’s an agency finding its own open water instead of jockeying for position in the same crowded channel as everyone else.
There are three places an agency can plant a flag. Only three.
The first is Category. What industries do you know better than any other agency? Not where you’ve done work. Where you have real, provable advantage. The kind that lets you walk into a prospect meeting and say things about their business that stop people cold. Pick the categories where your knowledge runs genuinely deep and stop apologizing for not being everything to everyone. And candidly, the fewer categories, the better. No one believes you have deep category experience in multiple categories. Brain surgeons don’t do colonoscopies.
The second is Audience. Which human beings do you understand more completely than your competitors? The Barkley Millennial research wasn’t valuable because it was interesting. It was valuable because no other agency could say what Barkley could say about that generation with that level of evidence behind it. Insight others cannot claim. That is the standard.
The third is solving a Strategic Problem. What do you solve better than anyone? This is the hardest one for most agencies to answer because it requires moving past “we do great work” to something specific and provable. “We help regulated industries find growth without losing compliance.” “We help regional brands compete against national ones.” Something real. Something narrow. Something true.
The agencies that can’t answer any of these three questions are invisible. CMOs can’t find them. Agency search consultants can’t tell them apart from the other forty names on the list. They become commodities before the conversation even starts. Windows in a building, red ocean, all of them.
Here is the hard truth. Most agency CEOs know this. They have known it for years because they have said it out loud to clients more times than they can count. Applying that same thinking to their own business is apparently another matter entirely.
Take Gen Z as just one example. The collapse in trust and risk tolerance among an entire generation is a flag sitting in open ground. The agency that invests in understanding it at the depth Barkley understood Millennials will own that conversation for years. And it is only one opportunity. Every category, every audience, every strategic problem has a flag like it, unplanted. Open water, waiting for a boat.
The question is not whether agency CEOs know what to do. They do. The question is whether they have the courage to sail out of the harbor.