There’s a brilliant brand strategist from London, Eugene Healey, who’s making his rounds on Instagram for his observations on the recent Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity, the world’s biggest advertising and brand festival.
According to Healey, traditional agencies should be worried because the tech companies are eating them for breakfast.
The reason is simple. Niches. Ad agencies got very good at reaching mass audiences that now no longer exist. Tech companies on the other hand got very good at reaching specific communities at scale, the place where attention actually lives today.
In the old days, you could just phone up CBS or NBC, write a single check for millions of dollars, and reach countless millions of people. Now, you have to write thousands of checks to thousands of influencers to reach the same demographic. This means you have to have a certain mental and operational agility the traditional agencies are simply not wired for.
Sure, it’s easy for people to feel a bit of schadenfreude towards the Don Draper types, but it isn’t just them being affected. It’s all of us.
Case in point. The New York Times wrote a great piece about how the Democratic socialist New York mayoral candidate, Mamdani, left the establishment Democrats in the dust and won the Democrat nomination, by applying these tactics in real time. He didn’t soften his message to appeal broadly. He took a very nice far-left political stance and built real connections with other distinct communities: working-class neighborhoods, progressive enclaves, immigrant families.
And his campaign designer, Aneesh Bhoopathy, made some telling choices that helped him out. Rather than default political aesthetics, he created materials that reflected the visual language New Yorkers already knew—subway passes, bodega signs, taxi graphics. The campaign looked like the city it served.
While some may have doubts that imposing a democratic socialist system on a town that epitomized trade and capitalism for nearly four centuries will end well, the politics are beside the point. What matters is the method.
What talented young people like Healey Mondami are increasingly showing us is this new way of reaching people, the “New Agility,” is not a fad, it’s the future. The organizations that are winning are learning to be deeply meaningful to specific groups rather than vaguely appealing to everyone. The old question was “How do we reach more people?” The new question is “How do we become irreplaceable to the right people?”
Scale used to mean reaching everyone. Now it means mattering to someone. |
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