PrintPrintThe Riggs agency of West Columbia has torn apart its traditional structure, including doing away with the position of president and creative director. Now the agency will have five equal senior partners.
By Mike Fitts
mfitts@scbiznews.com
Published Sept. 1, 2009
The fashions have changed since the days of “Mad Men,” AMC’s drama about life in a 1960s advertising firm, but the shape of agencies has not. One local firm has decided that today’s media market requires a new style.
The Riggs agency of West Columbia has torn apart its traditional structure, including doing away with the position of president and creative director. That post had been occupied by Cathy Rigg Monetti, who founded the agency 22 years ago in a spare bedroom of her house.
Now the agency will have five senior partners — Monetti and four other longtime staffers — who Monetti says truly are equal. Those will be the only full-time employees. The agency, which at one time had a full-time payroll of 20, instead will use contract staffing for individual projects to meet a particular need.
All full-time employees were offered slots as contract workers, she said. Some were glad to have the flexibility of contract work instead of full time, Monetti said; others found the possibility a poor fit.
The five senior partners each will head their own projects, setting the course with the client and bringing in the necessary talent, Monetti said.
Why redesign the agency in so radical a way? Because the media landscape is being transformed, and advertising must be “culturally relevant, more than any other business on earth,” she said.
Consumers now have all the power of choice, Monetti said, and they select what they want to hear about, from among many media and different networks, whether that’s NBC or Facebook, Monetti said.
It’s not enough to crank out a traditional ad campaign that reflects the advertiser’s message. Now the message has to be intriguing enough to make the audience want to learn more, she said.
“We can no longer interrupt your life,” Monetti said.
Advertisers need innovative content on a huge variety of platforms, including large static billboards and ever-moving social media, and they need it quickly. Monetti said they also prefer to deal with the top management of an agency.
Riggs Partners decided it had to be more horizontal and flexible to deliver all that. The new structure cuts down on layers of bureaucracy and adds the ability to use a much wider array of outside partners to help bring projects to fruition, Monetti said. If a project needs expertise on social media or interactive Web design, the agency won’t be searching its relatively small staff for the answer anymore.
Instead, it will be reaching out to a much larger world of experts who can help with a particular project.
Becoming more flexible was especially important for such a small agency, Monetti said. In a day of such media diversity, Riggs could not hope to have in-house all the resources to meet all its customers’ needs, she said. And in tough economic times, it needed to make itself less expensive for potential customers.
Can such a radically restyled advertising agency thrive, especially with five co-CEOs?
“That’s a really good question, and we’re going to find out,” Monetti said.
Read more in the Aug. 24 issue of the Columbia Regional Business Report.
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