Mediaweek held its inaugural Power Lunch in October, celebrating the successes of the media industry and the people who make it.
Simon Rutherford, partner and CEO of independent media agency Slingshot, made #26 on the Agency 50.
Rutherford caught up with Mediaweek about marking 14 years in business, achieving best places to work nominations, managing complexity in the industry and the agency’s continued investment in their culture.
Mediaweek: Congratulations on making the #26 spot on our Mediaweek Agency 50 list. What was your reaction to your placement?
SR: What, only 26th? On a serious note, as it was last year, it’s incredibly humbling to think that I have or am seen to have a level of positive influence on our industry to make this list alongside so many other amazing people who make this industry great.
MW: How does your position on the list reflect the achievements made by Slingshot?
SR: Slingshot will be 14 years old in April this year, 14 years in any business is a feat in itself, so to think we’ve been going strong for this long is an amazing achievement.
We have had so many incredible people working for Slingshot over the years, without them we couldn’t have achieved what we have to date, including being nominated as one of the top twenty best places to work for the last two years running. Our culture and approach to business is something that I have always been proud of.
MW: What are three industry issues on your mind, and in your opinion, how can they be solved or achieved?
SR: The most obvious industry issue, and most recent is the explosion of AI. As with any business in our sector we will all be grappling with how to use AI to improve our products, services and outcomes for clients. Taking that thought further, many of these tools will fundamentally change the way marketing is done.
Having explored many of the tools, they will still need human overlays and thinking, but there are any number of tools that will significantly impact on efficiency and time saving. The key will be how to integrate them into pre-existing businesses with legacy systems.
The next year or so will be full of disruption, including the battle between Google and Microsoft and it’s influence on SEO, and therefore SEM will be very interesting.
Agencies will be forced to reshape their offerings, and I suspect there will be the birth of many new AI agency offerings to further fragment things.
This leads into the second issue, which is ‘Complexity’. Our industry has never been more complex than it is now, further fragmentation and the exponential rate of change is now at break neck speed. It’s genuinely hard to keep pace with the innovation as a business, let alone for our people to keep pace with it. The winners will be those that can simplify and cut through the noise.
That leads into the third issue… people. All of this change takes its toll on people. Covid has thankfully woken many businesses up to the fact that we have a duty of care and responsibility to do what is right for our people and their mental health and well-being. That will continue. If you can do that, a lot of the other issues take care of themselves.
MW: What is your outlook for Slingshot in the year ahead?
SR: We have an exciting year ahead. We made the decision to consolidate a few things at the end of last year, so we could go into the year with a full team of people, a new structure which was introduced late last year and a number of new business opportunities circling us. We’re back in the office, energised and ready to go.
We are quite an entrepreneurial business, we are absolutely leaning into AI, and looking at how we incorporate AI tools into our products, services and processes. We are also looking at creating a number of our own products.
We will continue to invest in and maintain our amazing culture.
MW: What are your hopes for the industry in 2023?
SR: The geo-politics of the world will ultimately drive the agenda for global businesses in 2023. I hope common sense prevails, indirectly further disruption across Europe and Asia will have the most significant impact on our industry.
Against this context, a flat market in 2023 would be a positive, however I suspect fear will get the better of most businesses, so we might be in for a rocky road.
Businesses will reshape again, I hope we don’t see the blanket job losses we did when Covid hit. If you can spend through a downturn or recession, you only come out stronger.
Overall, I hope agencies continue to innovate, provide good value for their clients, focus on the things they can control and prosper.
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Top image: Simon Rutherford