We had the Italian booze pitch that I mentioned a few weeks back. It went well; fingers crossed.

We also had the workshop for the pet food brand that I mentioned a couple of weeks ago. It also went well! It had a strong shopper marketing/category management/in-store focus, which is something I’ve only dabbled in before, so it was interesting to see how people with that background approach things – and hopefully also useful for me to be able to bring a different perspective.

It strikes me that it’s really hard to get those different perspectives when working for an agency. If you work for an advertising agency, there’s the opportunity to go deep on advertising and to learn from people who are very experienced in it; likewise in a branding agency or a packaging design agency or a social media agency. But there’s no opportunity to learn about other disciplines and other parts of the marketing mix. One of the things I’ve been consciously trying to do since going solo is to fill out those gaps in my own experience, and to get first-hand practical knowledge of the things that I previously knew only theoretically or indirectly.

It also strikes me that this is one of the consequences of the increasing specialisation of agencies in the past couple of decades. It’s easy to look back with rose-tinted glasses, but it’s incredible to think of the responsibilities that ad agencies of the 1960s and 1970s had – or perhaps the responsibilities that they took. The example of Mr. Kipling is instructive; the brand was entirely the creation of the agency J. Walter Thompson. JWT figured out the business strategy, ran the consumer research, defined the whole product proposition, named it, gave it an identity, and produced the ads for it. Nowadays that would be the job of five different agencies, and would be inferior for it.

That links neatly to my recent thinking about the future of agencies, which looks bleak to me. It feels like a really interesting and exciting time to be starting something new or thinking about changing directions, though. The new models of the next ~20 years feel as though they will emerge over the next 1–2 years. I hope I can be involved in shaping them – or at least that I can anticipate what they might be.