Aquarius Advertising Agency: Case Study

Aquarius Advertising Agency: Case Study

1) Aquarius’ 5 Contextual Variables:
Environment – the business environment for advertising agencies is variable and always undergoing changes. In particular, it is common for these agencies to lose and gain large numbers of clients frequently. In regards to the advertising services Aquarius provides, their employees need to adapt to new industry trends often and no consistent routine exists for serving the various clients they encounter.
Goals – Aquarius strives to be a respected agency in the advertising industry. They try to achieve this by being responsive to changes in the industry, flexible with clients, innovative, and efficient. Aquarius’ specific goal it is trying to achieve with structure redesign is to improve cooperation, coordination, and communication among their different departments.
Culture – the services Aquarius provides are tied into an industry that revolves around creativity and art. As a result, many of the employees strive to be independent and do things in an original way in order to stand out. The personnel are highly knowledgeable towards industry trends and advertising practices. Employees need to be creative and innovative; therefore, they can sometimes be seen as daring or arrogant. Some employees who have a more functional role in the company (i.e. the account executives/manager) feel that the other employees can seem overconfident or egotistical.
Size – Aquarius is a medium-sized advertising agency that offers two services.
Technology – Technology is always changing and providing new ways for advertising agencies to operate and perform. In terms of performance, traditional forms of advertising such as TV and radio have not been improved by technology for quite some time. However, new Internet technologies like social media are revolutionizing the advertising industry and Aquarius has had to adapt to those changes. In terms of operations, technology has been improving the ways organizations communicate with their clients and how departments relay information throughout the organization. Email is very common these days, however, new information systems and database software are changing the way all organizations of any kind deal with all data.
2 and 3) Matrix structure or not?
A matrix structure would not be appropriate in this case because the functional departments under operations deal with each other and the functional departments under marketing deal with each other. The functional departments from operations don’t interact with the functional departments in marketing enough (applies vice versa) to warrant a matrix structure. Also, the functional departments in operations and marketing are too varied from one another to benefit from a matrix structure. The operations departments need to be managed by an operations executive and the same can be said about the marketing departments. The horizontal relationships between operations and marketing need to be vertically controlled for efficiency. However, Aquarius still needs to solve its problem of innovation and flexibility.
My restructuring solution would be to add 3 new positions. Aquarius claims its services can be grouped into two categories: one for customized plans and one for complete plans. Therefore, I propose they group together the account executives dealing with clients asking for common services. Also, group together the account executives dealing with more custom and specialized services. These two groups would then report their needs to the other new position called the Accounts/Specialist Liaison. This liaison would act as a permanent integrator between the two account executive groups, the marketing VP, and the operations VP. The two account executive groups relay their resource needs to fulfill customer demands through this liaison. This liaison, knowing the resources and capabilities of the marketing departments and the operations departments, would then approve or deny the account executive groups’ requests.

Although this restructuring plan would be considered to be adding more vertical integration with a single centralized liaison, it still adds flexibility and a divisional structure. The account executives are arranged in a way that one group of executives deal with common services and the other group deals with customized services. As a result, the group dealing with common services will generally have more standardized and consistent requests to the liaison. On the other hand, the group dealing with customized services will have more variable requests. One group would comprise of executives who serve more of a functional role, while the other group would comprise of executives who serve a more creative/innovative role. Either way, everything these two executive groups request, in order to service their respective clients, will have to be approved by the liaison that checks with the two VPs to see if their requests are feasible or reasonable. The liaison also communicates with the Accounts VP often to get a good understanding on special or specific clients and how much they mean to the agency. The liaison relays this information to the two account executive groups.