Agencies have been slipping down the value chain and in order to climb back up they need bring in the best people and approach challenges differently David Fox, CEO of Ogilvy Australia claims.
In order to put this into practise in Ogilvy Australia, the agency announced this week that it would be expanding brain science unit, #ogilvychange into the Australian business, in order to face some of these challenges in the agency landscape.
“All our competitors are more than agencies, they're design agencies, they're media agencies and everyone is heading to the same place, content, data, publishing, newsrooms, it's all heading that way,” Fox said.
“But how you then populate that content and data is extremely important, so with #ogilvychange, we feel gives us a fresh perspective of the mind of the consumer, customer or shopper, which lets face it the world is trying to get constantly.”
Fox believes that in the short term #ogilvychange will give the agency an competitive advantage in order push it back up the value chain.
“A lot of companies and a lot of agencies, until the the platform starts to burn no one starts to act,” he said.
“Until you start to realise that you've been pushed down the value chain with clients, where agencies used to play in the C-Suite and then the CMO, now they're playing with brand managers, you've got to pitch to get back up.”
“So we felt that the whole behaviour change piece was a catalyst to really drive a better and deeper understanding of the consumer, customer and shopper and by that we can have better conversations with our client.”
Sam Tatam head of the #ogilvychange practice in Australia said that utilising brain science, and in turn behavioural economics, will bring schools of thought such as evolutionary psychology and cognitive psychology into boardrooms.
“If you think of traditional marketing theory it is built on the classical economic model, in that people do things through an expected utility, but what we've found looking at consumer behaviour is people are not always rational, they sometimes behave in a predictable irrational way, a lot of ways that go against traditional economics, so this looks at it in a different perspective,” he said.
#ogilvychange will sit in the "agency brain" aka the strategy arm of the business.
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