Asked about agencies claiming technology can replace institutional knowledge, Richard Temple says leaning on tools makes people stop thinking about brands.
…of true because everybody ends up looking at the lens, saying, Right, how's the tech solve this? Well, tech solves it, and everybody gets a sort of techie product plan that's got Google, Meta, and if you're lucky, some in-house programmatic stuff. Um, and that we could do better than that, I think.
…who can operate the tech kind of thing. You know, this institutional memory, don't worry about that. We've got forward-deployed engineers who will scrape that together, put it into a second brain that will be a tech platform, and we'll be good. Talk to me about what you're seeing at the moment.
Well, I think what we're seeing from clients, particularly on the techie side of things, don't get me wrong, everybody talks a good game on proprietary technology and yeah, without sort of name names on the whole code. I think there's one who I would argue has got to, if you look at their success on Globescale, they've got it right. There's a lot of other people, and if you actually talk to the people, and I interview candidates a lot of times here, I think it's really important. I've seen candidates come here, what you see is again, oh, yeah, we got this. Yeah, well, they sold this in America, but actually in EMEA, it doesn't work because the data protection laws don't work. So, the media plan solving just can't work here. So, you end up with an absolute chimera of a media plan. So, it's what? And that also assumes it works. And again, I'm not going to mention names that are very able so I might get sued by someone, but actually, you hear people saying, Oh, yeah, we've got this our own proprietary tech planning tool. Yeah, it never works. None of us has to…
I mean, actually, the creative industry has done very much the same. And now the whole industry is going to need to backpedal and put much more value on the thinking end of things, which is again why something like the underdog advantage can help with that, because it puts the strategic thinking…
Talk to me a bit more about that, David. Your observations currently of how that thinking is being sort of outsourced to AI and the critical thinking muscle.
The way that I've described it, and the way that Thames and I discussed it is that there are largely two, maybe three buckets of work within any agency, right? So the least value bucket is solving problems with finite solutions, which is organizational, for which there's a right answer. It's a…