The evolution of Advertising Agencies in an ever-changing marketing and technology landscape

The Loud and Clear podcast by Omnicultural ad agency LERMA/ is born from the need to trigger a conversation about advertising that not just anybody is comfortable bringing forward. The notion that ad agencies have been in turmoil in the last 15 years due to drastic changes in technology and media consumption behavior. This, in addition to the changing landscape of the composition of the United States, makes it a good discussion to have. We are advertising and marketing professionals from all over the world bringing a fresh perspective to the advertising landscape.
 

Podcast has been on the radar of the leadership team at LERMA/ for years. In fact, 20 years ago, we started a podcast at another agency called LATINCAST. Today, podcasts have taken unprecedented relevancy with an estimated growth of 100 million listeners by 2024 according to Statista's advertising and media outlook. But despite the data, observing consumer behavior where users are oversaturated with media and messaging stimuli and format that does not require more than one sense, makes sense. Especially when the hours of the day are still limited to 24.
 

As an ad agency, LERMA/ is constantly exploring new media spaces and formats on behalf of our clients. In fact, we sometimes use our own brand to test these spaces. That is how Loud and Clear came about and the idea stuck. We got support from the team and have built a small team of hosts, producers, researchers, and writers to bring each episode to life. As an ad agency, we have found that we have many of the resources internally at a low cost and in some instances at a very low cost. Well, time is expensive and that is what we are committing. But some of us are so passionate that we also use part of our personal time to bring the podcast to life.
 

Several things.

We create a space of thought leadership. This allows us to trigger conversations that benefit our clients and our industry in general. It serves us well to open up a safe and neutral space to discuss sensitive topics and it also allows us to form friendships and relationships with people from the industry in general.

To this date, we have not really done any sponsorships but just recently we did open up the platform to do some sponsorships, we just have not found the right match to promote and we are not keen to do just any promotion. We do not wish to generate any conflict with our current clients or compromise the content of any of the podcasts due to conflicts of interest.
 

We are basically in a constant mode of recruitment for hot topics or talent that is able to sit with us and share their experiences. Normally culture or things that happen at the agency define the topics of discussion. Our industry is an outspoken and often controversial one.
We use different software but in pandemic times we rely a lot on TEAMS and ZOOM. We edit on Audition and we did start out with Audacity.

We use shared tools like Dropbox Paper or Google Docs and we also use our own Art Directors to help out with the look and feel of the material. For promotion, we have in-house social media teams that are rockstars at promoting each episode.
 

As we said above, most are done organically. Our social media team has developed a deployment strategy that seems to work quite well. We also include our digital and social media newsletter that goes to clients and agency friends. Most importantly, we have our own employees that share and comment on each episode, making the podcast part of the LERMA/ family and way of thinking.
 

Do it.

Sometimes you stop yourself thinking there is similar content out there but you would be surprised how much your own perspective brings to the table. It is fun. It is relatively fast. It is powerful.
 

You can go to our agency website https://lermaagency.com/podcast/ and you can also follow LERMA at any of our social channels.