The SIG Column – 17 January

With rumours circulating that Octagon is in trouble, Drew Barrand,
head of media at Sport Industry Group, assesses the agency’s current
status…

“It’s never nice to watch an established business hit the skids but it does
hold a certain morbid fascination for its industry peers.

The seeming demise of sports marketing agency Octagon, if industry gossip is
to be believed, is one such story that seems to have got everyone talking in the
last few days.

The news that Octagon was to sell its CSI broadcast division to rival IMG may
not have come as a huge surprise given last year’s announcement that the
subsidiary was up for sale but it smacks of the latest symptom of an agency
that, to those on the outside, appears to have lost its way.

Octagon CSI was the agency’s most valuable single asset but it was not what
it had originally made its name on – sports marketing’s hallowed twin peaks of
athlete management and sponsorship consultancy.

As a business, Octagon was not built to be a media expert – the creation of
the CSI brand was merely a reaction to market moves of the time – and the
emphasis on TV rights so prevalent in the 90s has become more lukewarm this
century with the fragmentation of media channels.

In this light, the decision from Octagon’s hierarchy to refocus on what the
agency was originally conceived to do holds merit. The problem is that it
appears that Octagon has forgotten how to do the basics.

Looking from the outside in at Octagon, observers seem confused as to what
the agency actually stands for. Is it a talent management specialist? Does it
deliver events? Is it an expert in sponsorship evaluation? Does it simply drum
up PR?

As a network agency of considerable size, the answer to all 4 should be a
resounding yes. The answer people get appears to be maybe.

It doesn’t appear to be immediately obvious as to whether Octagon can
actually deliver the necessary creativity on all fronts in the way that other
agencies have been able to convince the market they can. Being all things to all
people is a complicated business and you need to convince clients that you can
deliver as good a service in each area of business as the client would if it
went to a group of independent specialist agencies.

It’s too early to tell as to whether Octagon can survive this supposed
crisis. But, with CSI offloaded and the consultancy arm leaking business, not
many would predict a rosy future. Staring over the edge of a cliff is the phrase
that comes to mind. 

Some observers are even suggesting that the agency’s European operations will
have shut down by the end of the year although this would appear to stretch
credulity.

As mentioned at the start of this column, you wouldn’t wish a
negative scenario on any business but it does make for morbidly interesting
observing. As ISL proved in the late 90s, no agency is too big to go under. Nor
are such high profile demises limited to the agency sector. Think ITV Digital or
Dickins and Jones.

The neutral hopes that it doesn’t end in tears but from the outside it looks
a long way back for Octagon.”