Wie können Agenturen zum wirtschaftlichen Mitgestalter werden?

Herzlich Willkommen zurück zu einer neuen Folge von "Agency Life Deutschland" und damit auch zum zweiten Teil unserer Spezialfolge live und direkt aus Belgien. Michael Farmer hat in der letzten oder im ersten Teil unserer zwei Folgen darüber gesprochen, was sich in dieser Branche verändern muss. Er hat drei Kernpunkte angesprochen am Ende der ersten Folge. Die sind: Kunden wachsen nicht, was passiert? Agenturen werden abgebaut, Kosten werden gesenkt usw. Es ist ein Kernpunkt von Agenturen in der Agenturbranche, den Kunden wirklich beim Wachstum zu helfen. Ein zweiter Punkt ist, kein Diener zu sein, sondern wieder Partner auf Augenhöhe als Agent zu werden und als Experte dazustehen, Innovationen zu liefern und wirklich zu helfen. Und der dritte: Agenturen sollten immer Gebühren für die geleistete Arbeit verlangen. Das heißt, alles, was geleistet wird, ist trackbar. Alles, was geleistet wird, hat einen Wert. Und auch das muss eine Agentur dem Kunden darstellen und auch abrechnen. Erst dann wird das Ganze auch wirklich wertvoll und kann einer Agentur helfen, sich wirklich zu verändern und größer zu werden. In diesem Sinne schalten wir wieder zurück zu unseren belgischen Kollegen von "Agency Life" und hören rein, was sie im zweiten Gespräch mit Michael Farmer zu besprechen haben, wo sie noch tiefer in die einzelnen Thematiken reintauchen werden. In dieser Folge "Starten" möchten wir euch zunächst erklären, worum es uns und unserem Partner Teamleader in diesem Podcast überhaupt geht. Wir laden in jeder Folge spannende Persönlichkeiten aus der deutschen Agenturszene ein, die mit ihren Erfahrungen und ihrem Wissen andere Agenturen inspirieren und motivieren möchten. Und genau dort setzt Teamleader mit seiner leistungsstarken Agentursoftware an. Diese hilft bereits über 4.000 Agenturen dabei, Terminfristen einzuhalten, Budgets zu kontrollieren, Gewinnmargen zu steigern, Kapazitäten zu planen und vieles mehr. Damit ihr euch voll und ganz auf eure Kreativität konzentrieren könnt. Von Agenturen für Agenturen. Und los geht's mit unserer heutigen Folge. So, welcome back to Agency Life, Mr. Michael Farmer. Robin and Luis, thanks for having me back. We had so much fun a couple of weeks ago talking about agencies. Indeed. At which time I said they were broken, but I didn't want to leave it there. I said that the agency business as it is being conducted today is not delivering the value that agencies are capable of delivering. And that although it's broken, these pieces can be put back together in a different way and create a flourishing and necessary industry. So that's what I would love to talk about is what agencies can do to get out of the situation they're in today. And help deliver much more value for their customers. And help deliver much more value for their clients. So, shoot away. I mean, love to answer any questions that you've got about that so that we can understand better what's involved. We ended the previous episode with three things that you think need to change to get out of this situation. So I think we want to go deeper into each of those things today. But just as a recap for our listeners, what are the three main things that need to change in the industry? Well, I think because the evidence shows that clients are not growing. And when they are not growing, clients focus on cost reduction to widen their margins. And when they go through cost reduction programs, that means they're cutting advertising. Advertising expenses or media expenses. They're cutting their agency fees. And therefore, if agencies are suffering because their clients are not growing. Then agencies have to reorient their practice and say, do you know something? We should be in the business of helping our clients grow. We should focus all of our capabilities, our creative capability. Our technological capability. Our relationship building capability. Our execution capability. Our production capability. Our strategic capability. All of our capabilities should be focused on helping clients to grow. So number one, agencies need a mission to help their clients grow and to focus all of their capabilities on that. The second thing agencies need to do. Is to stop just being servants of their clients. And doing whatever their clients want them to do. And to become partners again. Which is what they enjoyed during the commission era. Where, you know, agencies really were running brands for their clients. Agencies really were the people who decided or recommended how much the client should spend on media. And how the media should be used. You know, agencies were well known proponents of television advertising. In the years, you know, in the 60s and the 70s and the 80s. And that did tend to drive a lot of brand growth. Today, agencies don't say very much about what should be in their scope of work. They pretty much accept what the client tells them to do when they do it. And it turns out that that work is not driving growth. So it's just logical that if that's the case. Then given all the experience and the capabilities that agencies have. Shouldn't they say, we have a point of view about the work that we should be doing. To meet our mission of helping your products grow. And therefore, they've got to have a goal of restoring partnership to their client relationships. And then finally, it's silly for agencies to be patient. It's silly for agencies to be paid on some guesstimate of man hours. Agencies should know how much work is in their scopes of work. And they should charge fees based on the amount of work they do. That is not the case today. Agencies are paid fees based on an estimate of man hours for an unknown quantity of work. And the third thing they need to do is to be paid for a known quantity of work. Because they start keeping track of it and documenting it and measuring it in proper ways. That is eminently doable. I want to call it the technology for measuring scopes of work exists. I've been doing it for 30 years with my clients. And it's common sense. But it just needs to be done. So mission, partnership, and what I call productization. Which means get paid for the work you do. Those are the three keys to changing the nature of agency relationships. And it requires very senior executive leadership at agencies to bring about the type of transformations that make that possible. Well, you just said, Michael, that it's eminently doable to measure all these things. What would you say to people who say, well, no, you can't measure what it takes to create a big idea? Well, I would agree. I've sort of been in the big idea business on my own, having written a couple books and a lot of articles. And I know that they come out of nowhere. Sometimes if you're doing some gardening on the weekend and you're planting a plant, sometimes the idea for the book pops into your head. All right, that's true. However, you can know within reasonable limits how much effort it takes. How much effort it takes to do agency deliverables. Because agencies are in the business of delivering ads to the marketplace. To their clients. They deliver ads. They deliver strategies. And you can count them. I call them deliverables. A TV ad is a deliverable. A TV ad that is created. And then leads to four cut-downs or pull-outs or adaptations. It's measurable. That's an origination and four cut-downs or four adaptations. You can count these things. And I go into agencies all the time with my consulting practice and gather up whatever information they have about the work they're doing. It's on PowerPoint. It's in Excel. It's in Word documents. Maybe it's in their project management system. But you can add up and say, oh, okay, I see you're doing 1,300 deliverables for this client. Do you agree with that? Here's our view of the list. Do you agree with that? And they'll look it over and they say, yeah. I said, well, okay. You're doing 1,300 deliverables. Now let's take a look at the type of deliverables. You've got originations. You've got adaptations. You've got TV, radio, print, direct marketing. You've got online videos. You've got Facebook posts. You've got Instagram posts. You've got email marketing. You've got all banner ads. Let's add up the workload of each of those. And there's ways that you can measure the size of a typical deliverable so that you can add it up. It's like I tell -- Agenturen müssen öfter miteinander reden. Und nicht nur über die schönen Dinge. Genau mit diesem Ziel hat das Agency Live Team die letzten Wochen und Monate damit verbracht, all das auf Papier zu bringen, worüber sonst viel zu selten gesprochen wird. Dabei herausgekommen ist das erste Agency Live Magazin. Sozusagen ein Liebesbrief in Magazinform, das das Leben einer Agentur in 135 Seiten widerspiegelt. Dynamisch, vielseitig und leicht chaotisch. Darin verbinden wir Agenturen, klopfen ihnen auf die Schulter und liefern Zahlen. Haben wir dein Interesse geweckt? Dann bestell dir jetzt dein kostenloses Magazin. Den Link dazu findest du in den Show Notes. People, it's like we're gonna measure the weight of a scope of work. Like you're doing a 1300 deliverables and that weighs 20 kilos. Of agency effort, creative effort. You can do that. But here's the problem, they don't even keep track of the number of deliverables, really. Ask the head of a client at an agency how much work you're doing for the client, how many deliverables. They'll say, when do you need this information box? Because they know they're gonna have to spend a couple weeks trying to figure it out. So, and that is universal. That is across the entire industry. I've worked with every single major agency in the last 30 years. And none of them keep track of their scopes of work in a measurable way. So they could charge their clients based on the work they do. That's a huge failing of business practices. That harms an agency's creativity. Because agencies are doing too much work with too few people. And therefore there are too few creatives on it. Too few technology people. Too few strategists. Too few client service people. And the work isn't great. And the work isn't driving growth. It feels like you're a huge promoter of growth in all aspects. I mean, growth for the results for the customer. Growth in the quality of the work delivered. And then growth in both revenue for the agency. And work-life balance and just being happy with the work they're doing at the agency side. So I only hear positives in your story. Well, I think there... Listen, there is a complication. Because we live in a world today that says that more growth means more burning of fossil fuels. More pollution. You know, more stress on planet Earth. And so there are many people who say that the... Humankind has always been a proponent of growth in every dimension. And that that needs to change. I'm not smart enough to figure out how we live in a no-growth world. I do know that if you're running a company, that it's very hard to run a company that isn't growing. I mean, first of all, I was... Before I got involved in doing advertising consulting, I was with Bain & Company and I ran three different offices. Now, just you take an office like the Belgian office, the Belgian office of Bain or the Munich office. I ran the Munich office for a number of years. If you are not growing, then you cannot recruit. If you cannot recruit in a growing sense, then you're not creating career growth prospects for the people. And the only way you can start to bring people in at the bottom and train them is to get rid of people at the top. On the other hand, if you are growing at 10% or 20%, or 30% per year, then every year you're bringing in more people at the entry level, you're training them for the next level, and you're giving them promotion prospects. You're giving them salary increases. You're giving them more responsibility because you're growing. And it was... For a consulting firm, it's devastating not to grow. As soon as you shut down the recruitment pipeline, at business schools or universities, people hear, "Oh, I hear Bain isn't growing. They're not recruiting this year." And then everything's, "I wonder what the problem is. Are they not being successful with their clients?" And then your competitors get the best talent. So I know in consulting, and it is also true in the agency world, you need to constantly bring people in and train them and give them career prospects. And that is not what's happening today. I mean, agencies really have been in a no-growth situation for quite some time. And what do they do? They bring people in, and then they downsize every year. You know what I mean? And there's a constant turnover, which is not good for the culture of a company. It's not good for developing its creative and technological capabilities or its client development capabilities. The workloads are still growing. And so, you know, the quality of the work goes down. It's just not a healthy situation. You have to focus on growth. You have to believe that growth, as long as we know how to, as long as we're in a branded economy, then you have to have growth. Now, I'm not saying that's the best thing for planet Earth, but I'm just not smart enough to figure out how planet Earth can both help the poorest nations and the poorest people develop a better life if there isn't some type of growth. But I don't know how you square that with pollution and the growth of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere or any of the other things. I just don't know how to do that. So I guess I'm sort of wedded to helping people want to grow and hope that we'll figure out the bigger questions later. We'll figure that out in the next podcast. I think we can make like 20 podcasts if we want to, but that's for later. Yeah, on that issue. Michael, I'd like to get super practical here. The agencies that are listening to this podcast, what should they do tomorrow? What is the first step they can take to get started working on their scopes of work and changing things around in their agency? What can they do? Well, I think, first of all, most of what I'm going to say is directed at agency chief executives because they are the only people, man or woman, whoever is running an agency, the chief executive is the only person that ultimately has the responsibility for the long-term health of the agency. That's their job. Their job isn't client development today. Their job is not to figure out what kind of cost reduction the agency needs today. An agency CEO or the CEO of a major corporation or the chief marketing officer of a major marketing operation have a long-term responsibility to ensure the health, the ongoing health of the organization. So much of what I'm going to say is for those folks. And I'd say you have to know what is our current situation. You have to be ruthlessly honest about what your current situation is. And what would that mean? Let's take a look at our client base. How many of our clients are long-term clients and we are growing with them? Versus how many of our clients have been with us for a year or two because we just brought them in? What is the average duration of our clients and how has that changed over time? You know what you're going to find if you answer that? More and more of our clients are coming in through current client development activities. Fewer and fewer of our clients are with us in the long term. In other words, we are being thrown out of clients at an increasing rate. Our client relationships are lasting shorter and shorter. When I started business 30 years ago, when I say business in the agency world, agencies that I talked to worked for their clients for 40, 50, 60 years. Particularly J. Walter Thompson. I mean, they worked with Ford for a very long time, Unilever for a very long time, etc. And over the evolution of the last 30 years, clients have become very fickle. Clients have become very cost-focused. Clients routinely fire agencies every three years and to get not so much people who do better work, but people who will come in and do it cheaper. And that's because, by the way, clients aren't growing as far as they're looking for cheaper solutions. They should be looking for people that will help them grow again, but that's not what they're looking for. They're looking for people that will do the work at lower cost and can get the work done. But they're not saying, I want someone that's really going to help us grow again. If so, it would be a very different business. So I'm talking to chief executives in this message. You have to know what your situation is. You have to ruthlessly look at what is happening with your client base and how it has changed over the last five years. Then I'm going to say, the next thing you should look at is what has happened to our workloads on those clients over the last five years or more. Now here they're going to run up against the problem I run up against as a consultant. Their client heads do not keep track of work. However, let's assume they have the data. If they had the data, they would see the following things. Number one, scopes of work have been growing very dramatically since the advent of digital and social. That's number one. The second thing is, the scopes of work have become smaller. I mean, not the smaller, the delivers will become smaller. Instead of big TV ads and big print ads and radio scripts, clients are doing email marketing, ad banners, online video postings and that sort of thing. And they're doing a huge percentage of adaptations for social purposes and not originations. Then the next thing they would look at is, what about our resources? Have we grown our resources at the same rate that we're growing our workloads? Answer is no, not at all. Resources, you know, the number of head count is grown at a lower rate than our workload. So our people are doing more work per head. Then the thing you might look at is, what about our clients? How are they performing in their marketplaces? If you take a hard look at that from public data, it shows that major advertisers have barely grown in the last 13 years. 21 out of the top 50 advertisers have barely grown at all in the last 13 years, despite their major investments in digital and social media. So maybe that kind of media isn't really working for them. But they're doing a lot of work at the same rate that digital media isn't really working very well. Anyway, I'd say, this is getting back to your question, Robin, about, you know, and Louise, about practically speaking, what would you tell an agency they need to do? They need to assess their current situation in every dimension that they can. Clients, workloads, number of people they've got, their fees, satisfaction of the work the turnover of their departments. Like, you know, agency people used to stay and get promoted and make more money and have satisfying careers. 30 years ago, today, there's a turnover of 50% in departments like the creative department. So there's a lot less satisfaction. And if you took, listen, if you do this assessment of a current situation, by the time you're done with it, you know what you need to do. Because the current assessment lays out a list of problems that each need to be solved if you're going to have a healthy organization. If you are on a ship that sinks, that is sinking, and you get into lifeboat, the first thing you do is, what is our position? You know, you hope you have navigational equipment where you can figure out where you are. Then you know what course that you have to take to get to safety. But if you're just out there floating in the ocean, then I don't know what you do. You know, you have to know your current, you have to put a pin in the map and say that's where we're starting. Now this is what we need to do. So instead of looking at that next big client that needs to fill the coffers of the agency, they have to self-assess, do their own diagnostics and really address the problem first from their side. Yes, I think so. And the other thing is, they get so busy with trying to make their budget numbers this year for the holding company that that occupies all of their energy, all of their thinking time. So I'm not saying CEOs are lazy and they're doing nothing. They're working very hard. They are behind on their budgets with their holding companies. They have clients that are prepared to fire them or to go into review. They have to defend their existing clients. They have to go out there and get new clients for the ones they've lost. They're anxious. Maybe they feel like they need to change some of their top management, so they have to get involved in recruiting. They're very, very busy, but the fact that they're very, very busy with the short term defines the real problem because they're not supposed to be doing that. They're supposed to be pulling together all the information that allows them to assess where they're going to be in five years and what they need to do about it today. That's not what's happening. In fact, I think they spend almost all their time on new business development, trying to win pitches. So let's say I'm running this agency. I've done my self-reflecting, looking in the mirror. I've assessed the problem. Now I'm ready to have a conversation with my advertisers about it. What do I do? How do I start? Well, I don't think, Robin, you're ready to talk to your advertisers about anything. Because what you have, if you are a chief executive of an agency, is a whole management team, several offices, and thousands of people that are doing business in a way that ought to make you uncomfortable if you've done this assessment. If you've done this assessment, you say, you know something? We are not really, we don't really have a successful operation. We don't really have a successful strategy for the long term. We're just making do. And so what you really need to do is, well, you need to continue to do the business that you're doing because you need to generate income and you need to do the work for your clients. That goes without saying. But at the same time, you've got to be developing the seeds of a transformation plan that says, while we're flying this plane, we have to be rebuilding it at the same time. And that is, boy, that's a tricky job for a chief executive. Because on the one hand, you need to be working with your top management team and you need to acknowledge what we are doing isn't working. What we are doing is not creating the kind of success we need. By the same token, we need to keep doing it this year. But at the same time, we need to be building something different, which is very different from what we're doing. So the chief executive really has to be a little schizophrenic. And there's a balancing act between how much energy you put into doing the job that needs to be done today and how much energy you put into developing the transformation. And it takes the full focus and commitment of a chief executive to balance those two things. Run the company, fly the plane, and change the way the plane is configured for the future. That's three very different, very difficult to-dos in one go. It sounds like... Well, and I'll say this too, Robin, there will be disruption. In other words, you may not be successful making your budget this year. You might find that in negotiating with clients or getting new different types of clients, that it is not all smooth sailing. And maybe you won't make the same sales target that you agreed with the holding company. And, you know, that is very likely. Like, I think two weeks ago, we talked about making omelets. Like, you can't make an omelet without breaking eggs. And one of the eggs that gets broken is the egg that is dedicated to running a smooth business today to deliver results for the holding company. And that's for holding company agencies. Or, you know, running the agency smoothly for the owners of the agency. That is going to be disrupted. And everyone needs to accept the fact that it's going to be a little rough. If you are sending new rocket engines into space, you're going to blow a few up on the launch stand. You know, as Elon Musk has found, you know, in the last several months. But it would be better to break the eggs and face the difficulty rather than be sitting in this pool of, yeah... Well, the thing about... One optimal... Yes, Robin. If you do an honest strategic evaluation of your current situation, you're going to realize that you don't have a long-term future if you keep playing the game. For example, if work keeps going up and fees keep coming down and you are downsizing to make a margin on those declining fees, pretty soon you're going to have no people to do the work. Or you're going to have too few people to do the work and your reputation for quality is going to suffer. So... And that is the industry, by the way. The industry has growing workloads and declining fees. The industry has shorter client relationships because clients aren't happy. Those things do not add up. Things do not add up to a future for agencies working the way they're working today or for clients working the way they're working today. So something has to change and there hasn't been enough change in recent years to give you confidence about that. So I think the rate of change must accelerate. And I think that artificial intelligence, which is going to come in and steal man hours out of the system, steal away fees, is going to be the catalyst to force people to say, not only is the game we've been playing broken, but it's going to be completely disrupted by artificial intelligence because it's going to replace man hours. So we better take a hard look at our total operation and do what's necessary. So I do expect the next several years to be years of agencies and marketing department transformations. Not everybody will do it at the same rate and there will be some winners and some losers. Think about Netflix versus Blockbuster, you know, whenever that was. And Netflix realized that the future was streaming, not mailing out CDs to customers so that they could have entertainment in their home. They understood that faster than Blockbuster did. And Blockbuster doesn't exist anymore and Netflix flourishes. So the same will be true in the agency world. Some agencies and maybe some holding companies will disappear. Michael, in your experience, agencies that have the guts to talk about this with advertisers, with their clients, to discuss the work they're doing, the scopes of work, the fees, etc. How do clients react to that? Because I can imagine that you kind of have to have guts as an agency to have that talk. Well, here's the pity, Louise. The clients are talking to the agencies about it, not the other way around. And I know because I am working with a client right now who has said, this is in the marketing department, they have said, we want our agencies focused on brand growth. We want our agencies to start acting as partners where they have been acting as vendors. We want to pay our agencies for the work we do. And basically they hired me to help facilitate that. Let's just put it that way. And the agencies are understandably nervous about that because there is so much mistrust between clients and their agencies. It's hard for them to believe after 30 years of fee cutting that all of a sudden the clients want the right things from them. And they think, where's the catch? Where's the trick? And believe me, it hasn't been easy to do that. So we are not seeing, and the other thing is that chief marketing officers are not necessarily open to the conversation when agencies do take the initiative. Because chief marketing officers have almost given up on the idea that their goal is to deliver brand growth. Many of them think, my goal is to digitalize the marketing department. My goal is to develop experience in working in all different types of media channels. My goal is to create better opportunities to target specific consumers. Now, those are like tactical capabilities. It's not the same thing as to say, my goal is to grow the brands again. So I think CMOs are not looking more broadly at what their responsibilities are. Just like at agencies, CMOs are not looking more broadly at their things. So listen, don't think that agencies are out there pitching. We want to be partners. We want to deliver brand growth. We want to be paid for product. They are not doing that at all. What they're saying is to themselves, I hope we can keep our client for next year and not go into review. I hope our fees don't get cut. And I hope we're successful in our new business efforts. But believe me, they're not out trying to do more for their clients of the type of transformation I'm talking about. Because they are afraid of disrupting their relationships and creating risks for themselves. They just want to be perceived as nice, cooperative, easy to work with, and they deliver the work on time. That's what they want to be perceived as. Whereas, Louise, what you're talking about is being in a more challenging position of saying, I don't think we're doing the right work. I think we're in the wrong channels. I think we should be more focused in certain types of channels and not do these other things. I don't think our email work delivers value at all. I'd like to drop doing ad banners. They don't want to do that because they're afraid it'll lead to fee cuts. So could it be that it's actually a joint effort or a joint conversation from agencies and advertisers to have at the same time to make this positive transformation a thing? You've put your finger on it, Robin. And it starts with a joint commitment that marketing's mission and the agency's mission are the same mission. We have to get the brands growing again. Therefore, marketing has to be as focused on that as the agencies are. And marketing has to understand why brands' growth slowed down. Well, you'd be surprised how few marketing departments have a handle on that. You'd be surprised how few brand strategic plans have a section that say, what has happened to our brands over the last five years? What are the performance problems that they have and what is the likely cause of them? You'd be surprised. Most of them don't have that. Most brand strategic plans say something like, we plan to continue on the types of media spend that we've had for the last few years. We are not changing the nature or the mix of the scope of work very much, although we may focus a little bit more on, I don't know, on social marketing or something. But they don't really get to talk about the basic brand problems where brands used to grow well in the past and they don't do today. What do we do? So marketing and their agencies need that joint commitment. And then they have to explore why the brand performance has slowed down. And then they have to explore what's wrong with the existing scopes of work. And what would be a better scope of work. And then they have to focus on how can we pay the agency for the new agreed scope of work. That's a lot of analysis that neither party does today. They just don't do that. So you heard it here first. It'll have to be coming from both sides. When you think about what marketing departments do, they're always sort of thinking about whether they need to change some of the agencies that they work with. And maybe, you know, try to get a different group of people in and pay them less. Marketing is always thinking about how they can do more with less resources because they are being cost reduced by procurement too. Or by the finance director. So marketing is trying to hang on to their budgets. And because they're not growing, it isn't always a successful activity. Within their corporations. And then the agencies that work for them are trying to hang on to every piece of revenue that they can. So they both have to get out of that and say there's a higher purpose to what we should be doing. And let's do that together as partners. Because it requires your efforts and our efforts to do that. But both of them have to have that as the big idea. That is the missing big idea right now in the agency world. That brands aren't growing. And that marketing's efforts and the relationship efforts has to be redirected to focus on getting them growing again. And that means taking a hard look at absolutely everything in the relationship. Let that be the big idea. That is the big idea. I won't say you heard it here first. But I think that that is very different from the kind of big ideas that you have floating around. You know, a big idea at Burger King, which is not a growing chain, was, oh, we have natural ingredients now. We don't use preservatives in our meat. And so, you know, we have natural ingredients. And they had massive campaigns on that. You know something? That probably has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that Burger King isn't growing. That didn't solve their problem. They won many creative awards for showing a Whopper Go Moldy over three weeks because it had no preservatives. The Moldy Whopper campaign was famous around the world and won all kinds of ads. It didn't change the fact that Burger King's sales per restaurant is half a McDonald's. And that didn't change. By the way, I don't know if you guys know this, but both McDonald's and Burger King put their burgers often in wrappers. And this might be the time to just about wrap up. Isn't that right, Louise? Yeah, certainly, Robin. I think after hearing your story, Michael, it's obvious that agencies have their work cut out for them. I'm actually quite curious to see how that plays out in the coming years. I'd like to thank you, Michael, for joining us today. Well, thank you, Louise. And thank you, Robin. And here's what I would just say as final words to the two of you who are doing such fine work for the industry. Buckle your seat belts. We are in for a rough landing here in the next couple of years. AI is coming in to attack the industry. And you already see holding companies like WPP merging agencies to reduce their cost, but maybe not solving their fundamental strategic problem. So I think that we are in for a really rocky ride the next couple of years. And I hope you follow it closely, too, with your podcasts, because I think we're facing a much more difficult time than we have in the last 30 years of agency changes in everything that they have faced. So buckle your seat belts. We're in for a rough time. But there's going to be some good learning that comes out of the people that face their problems honestly. Anyway, thank you so much for having me here. It's been really a delight. And I enjoyed our talk two weeks ago as well. Yeah, thank you, Michael. And we try to ask the difficult questions here as well. So to not always make it just a positive good news show. Thanks for helping us in achieving that goal. Thank you. Louise, I'd like to thank you for being my trusty sidekick. I'd like to thank our listeners for sticking around for the entirety of this podcast and enduring our sometimes weak English pronunciation. Yeah, it must be hard for them. It must be really hard. Next time we'll try to do it in the language of Bredero, Vondel and say one Dutch author. Louise, quickly. Harry Müllisch. Harry Müllisch. Yes, that's it. Anyway, dear listeners, we will be back in a few weeks with a new Agency Live podcast. Until then, you can, of course, enjoy our previous episodes on agencylive.nl.be.fr or agency-live.nl.be.fr .de. Yeah, that's how you say that. Anyway, see you next time, Louise. Yes, definitely. See you next time, Robert. And you, Michael. See you on the flip side. Thank you and goodbye. Thank you, bye-bye. Bye. See you.