The winter of young love

By Wenlei Ma | 12 July 2013
 

Forget the agency turf wars. Let’s leave that to the upper-ups who want to argue over who owns what platform or which part of the client’s budget. For the younger generation, it’s a love-in between the media and creative types as youth industry organisations NGen and Youngbloods team up.

Drawing inspiration from their decades-ago forebears, the NGen-ers and Youngblood-ers will join forces as an über-group. It’s not just about media planning, buying or selling. It’s not just about creative. It’s about what you can achieve when you come together like an awesome adland version of Captain Planet (coming soon to a movie theatre near you). Or an agency from before the Big Divorce.

What NGen and Youngblood are hoping to achieve in an industryfirst workshop on 25 July is a holistic conversation about mobile (of which AdNews is the media partner). And if what they say about Gen Y-ers and their phones are true... then who better? “It’s great that we can work together and start to pave the way for industry-wide collaboration,” said NGen chairman and MediaCom client communications planning manager Andrew DaSilva.

“We are the only ones stopping this from happening, so this initiative is to try take the first step towards working together.”

DaSilva’s counterpart at Youngbloods, Tongue business manager Gary Elphick, agreed. He argued collaboration, especially in areas such as mobile, was key. “Yes, collaboration is important in every aspect of our industry but none more so than when we look at mobile,” he said.

“We have no industry best practice and only by working together will we achieve big mobile ideas that make our brands look better and engage our time-poor audiences.”

At a time when the agency model is been increasingly assessed for its future viability (um, full service debate, anyone?), the burgeoning partnership between two youth industry groups is encouraging to see – and not just because the communications industry could do with more communicating. And who knows? Maybe, soon, their parties can be twice as raucous with double the costumes.

This article first appeared in the 12 July 2013 edition of AdNews, in print and on iPad. Click here to subscribe for more news, features and opinion.

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