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Razorfish APAC boss: What clients want from digital is alien to most advertising creatives

Vincent Digonnet Ad agencies are struggling to find their way in the digital world because they are trying to “shoehorn” digital into the traditional advertising model, the outgoing APAC boss of Razorfish has said.

Vincent Digonnet, the Asia Pacific executive chairman of Razorfish, who moves to London later this year and a global role at the digital agency, said in an interview with Mumbrella that the biggest issue with ad agencies is that they persist in replicating the offline model of delivering communications and advertising on the internet.

In answer to a question from Mumbrella on what agencies are getting right and wrong in digital, Digonnet said that it was “easier to talk about what they’re getting wrong.”

“They’ve missed the point of what digital brings in terms of business transformation. They are still fundamentally in the business of advertising. So digital becomes a tail-in,” said Digonnet, who spent more than seven years of his career at APAC boss of Euro RSCG, now Havas Worldwide.

He recalled: “When I was at Euro RSCG, we tried to transform the business, but this is difficult when 80 per cent of it is still traditional.”

“Real transformation comes from the outside,” he said, pointing out that ad agencies are still focusing their energies on developing traditional campaigns – which he said is a declining market.

“If you look at campaign development, there’s less and less money to do that. If you look at traditional creative people who are producing creative content, it’s very expensive and takes too long to deliver,” he said.

“The sort of content clients now want has to be constantly changed and updated. But for most creatives in traditional agencies this is alien, and they push back against it. They’re not good at producing the sort of content that’s needed around e-commerce, for example.”

Digital marketing is, according to Digonnet, a “publisher’s game”.

He said: “It’s a publisher’s game now, and ad agencies need to move into content creation at a very different level. They need to be hiring people such as journalists and photographers with less of an ego, who are more collaborative.”

“The problem is still essentially about ad agencies trying to shoehorn digital into a traditional model.”

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