Global thinking or market shrinking?
Like in many industries throughout this country, the 1990’s was awash in mergers and acquisitions. PR firms, ad agencies, web boutiques, and media companies absorbed into multinational networks to better position themselves, strategically, for the global marketplace and competition. But is it realistic? Admittedly, synergy in MarComm has grown tremendously over the past decade. With time-to-market for new products and services going from years to months, communications had to evolve to adapt to needs of the global marketplace. High-profile clients with global marketing objectives demand like-minded service capabilities. While networks look great on paper, we understand the utilizing all of the components within a network rarely occurs. It is merely the benefit of the alliance — being aligned with a name, that most companies look at for pedigree, but at what cost? I don’t have an answer to the question, but with the undulating global economy, and the somewhat skittish approach by companies to spending marketing dollars, I believe that the overhead of globalized networks is somewhat of a hamstring to independent industry growth. Industries rely on fresh talent and ideas to spur growth. New ideas, new dynamics that elevate the ways and means of communication, that networks tend to dilute through uniformity. Selectively piecemealing segments of business to a few groups in the network pool, while neglecting others is prohibitive of neutering new talent and ideas. While the purported advantages of global networks to global clients seems obvious on paper, can it prove successful in all markets to all people? |
When
you look at the marketing communications landscape of today, there are
very few new players.
This is due to several factors, but the biggest being the corporatization
of America.