There is a curious tension in the current agency landscape – a vast mismatch between what clients’ needs are and what agencies are working on, and this gap seems to be widening.

It seems like companies have never struggled with bigger problems, as chief marketing officers face the most daunting challenges of a lifetime, but curiously, agencies seem to offer smaller solutions than ever. Isn’t it time agencies stepped up to the plate?

The internet has been a mixed blessing, a volatile combination of incredible, new possibilities, rampant change and some of the most destructive forces the marketplace has ever seen. On a communications level we have a plethora of new media channels, memes circling the world in seconds, the app of the moment bursting onto the scene, and trends like content marketing, native advertising, and influencer marketing to navigate and leverage. The options seem more bewildering than ever and more abruptly changing, all in a context where attention is moving onto platforms which become even harder to connect with people.

Yet clients’ problems are much bigger than this, as problems are increasingly focused on what new technology and new behaviours mean to the core of their businesses. Car companies are worried about what electric cars and apps like Uber could mean for the long-term business of car ownership. Supermarket chains are sucked into offering delivery on groceries despite history showing that profits are elusive. Over-the-top message companies like Whatsapp are undermining mobile operators’ ability to make money from texts, but also reducing their role to dumb data pipes. Retailers face threats from online shopping and showrooming, and media owners face disappearing revenues as attention moves online. It’s a wonder clients ever sleep.

You would imagine this would have led to large-scale changes in the advertising industry. We’ve seen the press releases, the acquisitions, the new models on slideshows, and the constant stream of white papers, so in our hearts we feel like it has. But the reality of the current agency environment is that actually nothing has really changed, and the few things that have changed have become less ambitious, less valuable and more tactical in nature.

A glance at advertising agencies’ websites and their case studies show our centre of gravity is smaller than ever. It seems a world of cheap media, production and talent has led to a deflation in ambition. We see a landscape of small-scale social media campaigns, a plethora of videos each liked five or six times, user-generated competitions with a handful of entries, hashtags used by a few people for a few days for a small foray into real-time marketing.

We’ve created the long tail of marketing, where each campaign has ever smaller budgets, ever shorter lifespans, diminishing aims, all so wonderfully cheap in execution, so wonderfully proficient in terms of outputs, but so entirely pointless. It’s this maintaining excitement for a Twitter feed of 4,000 people, or keeping the 500 subscribers on YouTube happy that is the marketing of our time. It may be cheap, but it’s a pointless distraction and it’s not solving any of the problems that are keeping our clients up at night.

Advertising people are amazing – we’re some of the best, brightest, funniest, hardest working people out there, we understand people, brands, technology, we solve problems, and we generate amazing ideas. Is our place really to drive Twitter followers up by 2,000 people? Let’s collectively step up to the plate, this is not a time to cut staff, embrace gimmicks and indulge in ever more tactical pursuits, this is the time to think big, take risks, take on management consultants and lead our clients to a prosperous future.

Tom Goodwin is the CEO and founder of the Tomorrow Group. You can follow him on Twitter @tomfgoodwin

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