The Boom in Creative Agencies

You’ve no doubt heard the term, but what exactly does a creative agency do? What’s the difference between a creative agency and a traditional advertising agency, or a digital agency? Read on and find out.

Creative communications and marketing has always been important, but the scale at which it was in demand before the world went digital is in sharp contrast with today’s reality.

Nowadays companies, organizations, universities and pretty much all and sundry have a plethora of platforms on which to get their message across, whether it be through video, audio, text, photos or all of them put together. It used to be that the cost and gatekeepers kept a check on how much content was delivered out there. Technology too limited the media through which content could be consumed. But no more. 

In today’s world, anyone can publish, diffuse and broadcast content to their heart’s content. What this means is that getting your message out there is no longer the issue, as it used to be. The issue today is the quality of your message. That’s what matters. 

In comes the creative agency. “Creative agencies often provide what traditional advertising or communications agencies do not: turnkey solutions,” says Lucas Chambers, Director of Smart Cuts Video & Animation, a video production company turned creative agency based in Lausanne and Geneva, Switzerland. “That’s what we realized quite quickly as a video production service riding the wave of new technologies,” he says. “Specific offerings, like video production or animation, even if it involves a variety of derived services, like virtual or augmented reality, social media video and so on, is simply too narrow a service for a lot of the type of demand we see nowadays in communications and marketing.” 

Pete Jennings, Head of The Magic Pen creative agency in London agrees: “The boom we see in creative agencies is a direct result of a spike in demand for all-in-one solutions coming from companies and organizations. With a workload growing ever bigger in marketing and communications teams, they don’t want just a video production or an animated film. They want a strategy, from A to Z for a certain campaign, service or product. That may mean video, and of course a social media video complement, but also graphic design, editorial work, and an end-to-end project management solution.”

So to conclude, creative agencies are on the rise because the demand for comprehensive communications and marketing solutions is on the rise. Add to that the enduring need to stand out from the competition with something new, fresh and, well, creative, and you have a clear impetus for growth in the creative agency market.