You're not a creative agency, you're a boutique

I should check if Group M’s Rob Norman has said this before, but he said during his speech yesterday at the IAB, and during his a later brief conversation I had with him at the airport that, “Creativity is inherently a boutique business.” Don’t go telling that to the head of a major creative agency. If you take a step back further, to what Norman sees as the future of his own Group M, you’ll see why he might be right—if media agencies are able not only to buy, sell and track campaigns, roll-their-own content and most importantly, aggregate data in such a way as to have their hands at the controls of consumer insight, they also have the fuel that keeps the marketing engine running over the long-term. In that context, creatives certainly are allowed to produce moments of magic, but what they are essentially doing is providing one-off solutions to more immediate positioning problems. OK creatives, it’s time to be pissed off.