What is Agency2.0? Several of us at Ascentium have been working on the definition of for some time and it is at the heart of how we define ourselves in the future. Last year Peter Kim (who is also presenting with you at MCONN08) at Forrester Research put out a paper entitled, Help Wanted: 21st Century Agency, in which he posited that as corporate marketing organizations reinvent themselves and become customer centric, they will need more and more help from their agencies, not just in traditional ways, but increasing as trusted advisors helping clients “capitalize on emerging channels and technologies.”

This spring he followed up that paper with another good piece called, “The Connected Agency”, where he argued that agencies now need to help their clients listen to customers rather than just shout at them. Peter and I were at a forum together in Toronto in May and spoke about the new role agencies can play helping clients engage with clients, which means multi-directional rather than either the traditional one-way push advertising of most of the last half-century or the bi-directional construct embodied in the 1:1 marketing movement of the last decade.

While I’m not holding up Forrester as the be all and end all in marketing thought leadership, I agree with Peter’s basic tenets that the new style of agency has to be a resource that enables companies to engage. And that engagement is defined by the customer experiences that are generated, managed, monitored and acknowledged by the client. And that it is up to the agency to be a creator of those experiences.

For the agency to be able to create those experiences, they have to be able to bring to bear not only the traditional skills of brand, strategy, research, account planning and creative, but now they need to be able to excel at analytics, technology and business intelligence. This new combination of skills is what defines agency2.0, or at least how we should define it so as to own the space.

Once you’ve defined the space in that way, the agency engagement model you describe of black-box delivery and risk- sharing make sense. I don’t think most marketers are ever very concerned about the internal organization of their agencies as long as they have clear lines of communication and a single throat to choke.

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