The rise of the “Creator Economy” is probably the most important new development in our industry in the 2020’s.

As mass-market Linear TV audiences shrink, and consumers of all agencies move online, individual content creators are building huge audiences online through platforms like YouTube, the Facebook/Meta platforms and TikTok.

These influencers and KOL’s wield enormous power and can make or break brands and new product launches in seconds.

Today, the sector is still quite unstructured. Content creators need a range of specialists with different skills, to grow their audience, improve their engagement, develop fan interactions, and leverage commercial opportunities through advertising, apps and gaming. Martin Cass’s new company, BBTV, brings all these skills under one roof.

But the creator economy is not a niche – it’s something which every kind of marketing and communications agency needs to understand and to participate in.

If your agency is not already in this game, you will need to get with the play.

Much about our industry has changed in the last two years. However, there’s one area of exception; how agencies charge for their services. So, in a moment of flux, isn’t now a good time to examine how your agency makes its revenue? Could you be making more by adopting a pricing model that better reflects the value you bring to a client relationship?

Social media and influencer marketing are probably THE two areas where it’s most important- and most challenging for agency people to stay up to date. So much media coverage is driven by what big companies feel they ought to say, and what the global platforms want you to hear. But this is an independent, unfiltered guide to what’s really going to happen this year.

33% of your clients’ marketing budgets are wasted, through poor agency briefs and mis-directed work.

Who says so? Marketing clients themselves say so, in an eye-opening new report.

This report is based on brand new research and analysis by two of the world’s top agency strategists, Matt Davies and Pieter-Paul von Weiler; supported by Vaughan Flood of Flood Research in London.

How would you categorise your agency – B2B or B2C?

The truth is that from a client’s perspective, most agencies are B2B because they sell their services directly to organisations and not individual customers.

So, can applying the principles and sales techniques found in B2B marketing, improve an agency’s new business conversion rate from both existing clients and new business prospects?

Gillian Rightford, Founder of Adtherapy, in South Africa thinks so.