Ad Agencies: A Dying Breed?

A week ago, I came across an article published by Ad Age about how some agencies have dropped off a bit and aren’t necessarily performing up to clients’ standards.  In my opinion, if agencies aren’t so vital to clients anymore, it’s their own fault. However, this has a negative effect on all agencies and the industry as a whole. This got me thinking about a list of “commandments” that I have from a great marketer, Martin MacDonald, and how he would correct this debacle. 

As some of you reading this may or may not know, a few weeks ago was Martin MacDonald’s birthday. Unfortunately, he was taken from us too soon and his loved ones weren’t able to celebrate it with him. For those of you who don’t know, and as those who knew him can attest, Martin was a great marketer and an even greater person. I had the pleasure of meeting and spending some time with him when I was a teen living in Dallas, TX. He worked with my father, Mark Miller, at Rapp, a successful marketing/ad agency. While I will unfortunately never have the chance to work with him, the fact that he has had such an influence on my blossoming marketing career demonstrates how truly impactful his personality and creativity was.

If all of us were to take the approach to marketing and the workplace environment that Martin displays below (whether we’re creative or not) and apply those concepts to both life and marketing, I whole-heartedly believe that agencies would become indispensible and flourish.

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I’ve had teachers, executives, and HR managers all tell me this semester how great it is that I have all this energy and passion for marketing and its practices; they attribute it to my youth and my readiness to apply what I’ve learned. While those may be true, what I really hope is that I can maintain that energy and passion throughout my career and that the print-out of Martin’s words-of-wisdom taped to my work station will help to keep me on that track.