Video Agency Model

At TwentyThree, we also get to work with a lot of agencies, and that's one of the areas that we have our first announcement on. We work with incredible video agencies and digital agencies around the world that are supporting companies and the change to video. But today we want to move it further. The last year we've been working with a select group of Video Agencies, some of the best Video Agencies from around Europe on creating a model for a dream of what the video agency could be to stop the gap between video agencies and the companies. And today we are announcing it and releasing it as open source to inspire everyone to have the frameworks to really move and build the video agencies into what they can be, but also to serve the needs of the customers. So the gap is that currently the video agencies do very little of what a company actually does on video. So all our customers are saying we need support. But the video agencies are only doing mostly production. But there's a lot of other things that you need to do to do video. So there's a big gap between these two actors. The companies should demand other services and buy them, but nobody wants to sell them to them or supply them. And they say they don't want to buy. Right. So we're in sort of a catch-22 in this. So this is one of the key things to make Video the Now, that we need to move this forward. The first thing on the video agency model is agreeing on a name. And at TwentyThree we love category names because they're so important, right? We coined Video Marketing Platform, which now is the industry term, eight years ago. We had to coin Personal Video because there were no language to describe when video became personal and not broadcast, right. And today here we've been working with all our agency partners on the idea that we need to agree on one name, because if we don't agree on a name and are doing here... We were just running last night actually through updating what all the agencies can be called, right? Live production agency, production house, TikTok agency, creative content agency, full service video agency, video marketing agency, webinar agency, video studio, content studio, Production company, video production agency. Then people get a little bit confused and categories move when we come together, right? So number one to the agency model is that we call it a video agency. And then at some point you'll need to differentiate and then you will start going in that direction. But we can't get to create that connection between the companies and agencies if we don't even agree on what type of agency we are, right. Number two is really loading up the need for the services that you need to do. And this is where we come back to the three circles. Something very similar happened with digital agencies in the, in the late 90s, where we suddenly had a model. I don't even know who created it back then. But we had the three circles. So we have the content production that is, you know, at core the creative, hopefully also creative and not just production. We have the strategy. That we have a video agency that can build a plan for a company, a video plan, a video strategy, a webinar strategy, and really think strategically and organizationally. And lastly, the enablement that a lot of the things and this is where there is a big gap between agencies and companies. Companies want training. They want their people trained to do good webinars. They need studios. They need gear. They need a lot of different stuff. That is not about producing a single video, but it's about enabling the organization, right. And just as the old strategy, design and and technology for the digital agencies in the 90s, obviously it's the magic when you push these things together that you have some very efficient means of moving a company, creating change when these three things come together. So that's the model. It's open sourced. We hope it'll go into your pitch decks tomorrow to start driving that story and come on that journey from the agency side to supply to the companies and on the company side, start requesting these things and buying these things because all the agencies really want to do it. But they say you don't want to buy. The agency says otherwise, right? The last part, as part of the video agency model, is moving from ad hoc and one offs to long term relationships. So today, 80, 90%, or even more for most agencies are single projects. "Do ten videos for me." It might be a 1, 2 month project if it's a big project. And it's a really hard way to build value. It's a really hard way to build the business. Also, if you're going to hire a lot of people. Also, why a lot of agencies, video agencies are still very small compared to actually the need and the demands out there. We're tracking more than 10,000 video agencies across Europe. Realistically, probably there should be fewer and a lot of them should be bigger instead of being in still sort of a single digit employee count, right. And some of the largest video agencies are 30 to 40 people still nationally based. No international, really international video agencies, at least very few of them. So we have a very immature category compared to a lot of other agency categories. So it's so important that we make this shift - also once again on both sides, that we're buying retainers, we're buying long term relationships where we're putting a budget on something, and then we're going on a journey together and plotting in the things we're going to do. On enablement and strategy, on production and building a long term relationship. It's much better for the company, it's much better for the agency. And it's what's required to make video to now.