For decades, the conventional path on Madison Avenue ran in one direction: young people joined agencies, learned the craft, and occasionally left to do something else entirely. Now a small but growing number of entrepreneurs are arriving from the opposite direction — having first built audiences of their own on social media, they are discovering that brands want not just their faces but their instincts.
Several agencies founded by creators — including Camp Studios, Pufferfish and StudioB — report a notable increase in inbound inquiries and invitations to participate in agency reviews since January, according to their leaders. The trend suggests that marketers, after years of bolting influencer campaigns onto strategies developed elsewhere, are beginning to wonder whether the people who understand the platforms natively might be worth consulting earlier in the process.
It is not an entirely new phenomenon. The advertising industry has always had a weakness for practitioners who seem to possess some proprietary understanding of how audiences actually behave (as opposed to how media planners believe they ought to behave). What has changed is the vocabulary: where once an agency might have touted its "creative intuition," these shops can point to follower counts and engagement metrics as a kind of credential.
Whether this represents a genuine structural shift or merely the latest528 version of Madison Avenue's periodic infatuation with outsiders remains to be seen. The large holding companies — WPP, Omnicom, Publicis Groupe, Interpublic — have spent considerable sums acquiring or building their own creator-marketing capabilities in recent years, and they are unlikely to cede the territory without a presentation deck or two of their own.
Still, for the creator-founders, the phone ringing more often is its own kind of validation. They spent years learning what makes people stop scrolling. Now they are learning what makes procurement departments return emails — which may prove to be the more difficult audience.
Original story published in adage.com: "Creator agencies are winning social accounts - Ad Age"