Start a new digital marketing agency
Start a new digital marketing agency i.e. Lateral 2.0
- pro – well at least I know the pitfalls
- pro – lots of great talent around due to the reccession
- pro – many clients taking it all much more seriously ( finally )
- pro – great opportunities to mash up the 1.0 world with the 2.0 and mobile world
- pro – there is still great work to be done
- con – the industry is rapidly becoming commoditised and fragmented
- con – extremely hard to define a broad enough proposition to cut through an already crowded market
- con – pr, direct and ad worlds are ‘properly’ going for it now – even harder to get through to the clients
- con – the practical concerns IE finding an office ,finding clients, finding staff, finding the cash to start it IE helluva lotta work
- con – do I *really* want to do it all again ? Starting from scratch ?
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Don’t do this. You might be all jazzed about it initially, but I honestly think in the medium term you’d be bored, never mind in the long term. I’ve been on the very, very, outside looking in, but it seems to me that you have not been happy for a long time (however great your colleagues were). I think this is because you need to be more hands on: you need projects that are your own, that you can finesse and play with, rather than just being the big strategy hound. I know you find the latter fun in a lot of ways, but I genuinely believe that you found the former (like Convulsion, and Obsolete) where you were actually building stuff yourself, more satisfying.
But I accept I may be well out of touch!
Well suffice to say if I did do it again, I’d do it differently and it certainly wouldn’t be limited to ‘digital’. In the next week or so I’m going to pull together all my work-in-progress on another digital agency to see if there is anything there… not discounting it yet.
Worst.
I would keep myself away from this… competition, also abroad, is insane (see commoditised point). I agree with what you said though, probably in another post, that there is still lot of great work that needs to be done but finding the right clients to deliver it, is getting impossible.