The Uber of Agencies: Why Marketers Want to Ride With a New Kind of Shop
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The agency model of the future might just Uber.
Over the last decade, agencies have kept up with emerging technologies by snapping up companies with expertise in digitial, social and mobile. But Kimberly-Clark Chief Marketing Officer Clive Sirkin has said the industry is changing too fast to keep pace by buying things. Instead, he suggested an Uber-like approach: managing the traffic without owning the ride, or in the case of agencies, owning the relationship with a client, the strategy and data without owning the execution. Though Mr. Sirkin, himself a former Leo Burnett executive, said he doesn’t want to tell the agency holding companies how to run their business, if he were running one, he would ask: “What’s the Uber look for us?”
Keith Weed, Unilever’s chief marketing and communications officer, and Mondelez CMO Dana Anderson at Cannes almost simultaneously sang the praises of Uber and similarly asset-light Airbnb (renting but not owning housing), Alibaba (the huge Chinese e-commerce player that mostly aggregates smaller retailers) and Facebook, a huge media company that doesn’t own much of the content it publishes.
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