Indie Shops Reap Digital Profits

http://www.adweek.com/aw/content_display/news/agency/e3i6478fc41cf5464a5a945efbd72a978c8

It's not just that independent, owner-operated ad agencies are offering digital and interactive services, finds a survey released this week by Worldwide Partners. Many are making a profit on it, too.

The global survey was conducted last month among CEOs at agencies that comprise Worldwide Partners Inc., an international network of owner-operated shops. Sixty-nine percent of respondents said their firm offers digital/interactive services in-house, with another 22 percent saying they outsource such work. Forty-nine percent said digital work is "currently profitable for the agency." Just 15 percent said it isn't profitable, with most of the rest saying they don't separately track the profitability (or, as the case may be, unprofitability) of digital work.

Among those who do track digital separately and get a profit from it, just over one-third said the profit margin is better than 20 percent, while a similar proportion said it's in the 11-to-20-percent range.

Even in a period of widespread retrenchment in the advertising sector, 59 percent of respondents said the number of people they have working on digital has increased in the past 12 months. Looking ahead, 88 percent said they expect their digital staffing to increase in the next 12 months. Atop the list of digital job categories in which respondents expect to add staff in this period are project managers, Web-site designers, content developers and interactive media planners/buyers, as well as statistical Web analysts and social-marketing experts.

As things stand, the respondents' agencies rely on a mix of "dedicated" digital staffers and people who work on digital and non-digital projects alike. In creative, for instance, 34 percent said they have dedicated staff for digital work, while 54 percent said "creative people work on all kinds of creative projects, including digital."