Why advertising agencies need to be salmon not sharks.

Being a great white shark can’t be all bad can it. Your one of the top predators in the sea, you live for a really long time and just roam the sea looking for dolphin sushi or a seal pup that just so happens to wander by – basically life is pretty good.

(Image from flickr)

Now take the salmon, everyone is trying to eat you because you taste damn good. To reproduce you have risk life and fin and swim for thousands of miles back to where you were born – it’s a pretty tough but determined life.

(Image via flickr)

So is it better to the be the shark of the salmon? Well just as long as the shark is getting good food then there is a clear winner, but what happens if the supply chain of food runs out – or worse your being fed rotten food. So turn this analogy to advertising where the sharks are the advertising agencies – they are fed a steady supply of product advertising briefs  and do so across all the channels they have.

A few years ago this would have been fine – a big TV commercial resulting in lots of exposure and hopefully lots of sales. But then the internet kind of happened and then this whole social media thing kicked off. Now that google includes live twitter feeds directly into searches, the truth about a product has never been easier to guage by a consumer.

So whats the problem? Make great products and the advertising will take care of itself (the apple approach?). But happens when there is a bad product? The answer is don’t be in the position of advertising bad products. Trouble is, as your the shark, your just there casually swimming around waiting for the next big meal so you don’t have any say in this.

The salmon hasn’t been waiting around to be fed, he’s been battling long and hard swimming upstream to get the source of all the ideas and products. Getting involved with product teams to make future products better of even instigate new products. This breed of agency might even taken on briefs to market the products they’ve co-created with the client thus cutting off future food for the sharks.

So don’t be a shark, be a salmon. Just watch out for those bears.

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