AdNews asked industry figures for their assessment of 2022 and outlook for next year
Gareth O’Connor, Managing Director, Harvey Cameron
2022 has been a good year, but it’s certainly come with its challenges. Demonstrating our value and then realising it seems to get harder with every passing year. Our role as partners to our clients, helping them create future demand and future business success is as strong as ever, but margins are getting smaller.
We can hold ourselves accountable for a lot of that as we have and indeed still do give away our biggest assets, like thinking and creativity for knockdown prices, or worse, for free, which only devalues those areas of our industry further.
This won’t get any better anytime soon. Certainly not in 2023. Based on what our industry is experiencing, and what clients are telling us, there’s a few things we can expect in the year ahead.
1. Economic uncertainty
With economic uncertainty on the horizon, marketing budgets may get cut, and/or clients may need more support, time, and ammunition to sell in ideas and campaigns to their leadership. Given that’s not something we can usually charge for, it all adds to the ‘realising our value’ tension. There is no denying the value of marketing in times of economic uncertainty, both in helping to keep the lights on through it, and ensuring a business comes out of it stronger. It just requires a good understanding of how your category will be affected and how marketing can help.
2. Cost vs investment
Let’s be honest, as an industry, we are seen as a cost by most and certainly not an investment often enough. But marketing is an investment in a clients’ business, we just need to get better at justifying it, particularly as we move into 2023. We should be seen as an investment in generating greater future demand for our client’s products and services, while fulfilling more than their fair share of current demand.
3. Resourcing and skills
One area on par with realising our value, is having the capacity and resource to deliver on all the potential work that’s out there. Finding enough good people to do the work is something that will continue through 2023. This might mean the good people we already have need to do more, or risk work being turned away. It might mean some people say yes to taking on more and then dropping a ball or three. We are running the risk of burning out an awful lot of bloody good people as we work through ways to manage this issue that has plagued us all through 2022.
So what do we need to do about this?
As we move into 2023, we need to sell our value to our clients, to our people, to the industry. We need to sell with pride our role as value creators worth our clients’ investment.
We need to invest in our own businesses, invest in our people, ensure they feel valued, challenged, driven, directional, and rightly rewarded for their efforts and passion.
We need to make the industry appealing, rewarding, and fun again. We need to attract good talent, and ensure we retain the talent we have. But we also need to open our doors to a good amount of new talent to help us all fight the good fight.
In short, 2023 should be a year when we collectively dial up the sheer force of our expertise and power in creating value, in creating connection, in creating positive business and consumer outcomes, in realising the value of it all.
Will we all do that? Time – and value - will tell.
Have something to say on this? Share your views in the comments section below. Or if you have a news story or tip-off, drop us a line at adnews@yaffa.com.au
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