The Old Story Has Run Its Course—New Perspectives for the Communications Industry

Communication projects are becoming more complex: more specialists, more markets, more touchpoints. During the industry panel discussion, experts shed light on what this means for collaboration between clients and agencies from various perspectives.

To mark the launch of the GOT YOUR BACK GROUP, we invited Prof. Dr. Maren Rottler, Professor of Business Administration—Trade Show, Convention, and Event Management at DHBW Mannheim, and Thilo Huys, Head of Marketing & Portfolio Management at Bechtle AG, to jointly examine current challenges and identify potential solutions. Moderated by Aljoscha Höhn, they discussed with the four founders and Jürgen Korzer, Managing Director of the GOT YOUR BACK GROUP, how new forms of collaboration can emerge to ensure clarity, accountability, and the ability to act despite growing complexity.

Watch the video to see why an empty chair played a central role in this discussion.

It all began with an empty chair. By the end, it was taken.

Today, there are experts for every task. But who actually keeps an eye on the big picture? The empty chair represented precisely this role, one that is increasingly missing in many projects: the role that consolidates responsibility, brings decisions together, and ensures that many individual contributions result in a shared outcome.

We brought this topic to the theater stage—the very place where our industry learned its craft. Invisible interfaces became red woolen threads; statistics turned into a line of people. We didn’t just want to discuss the problem—we wanted to make it visible.

Thilo Huys offered the client’s perspective: “Shrinking budgets, shifting resources, hyper-specialization, extreme coordination efforts, and numerous stakeholders—this means a great deal of responsibility, both internally and externally. With this rising complexity, some things inevitably fall by the wayside: strategy, deliberation, and the time needed to approach and manage things thoroughly.”

Aljoscha Höhn wanted to know more about it: Are these isolated experiences, or is there more to it? Prof. Dr. Maren Rottler provided a scientific perspective: “Only 11 percent of the companies surveyed believe that their current agency model will meet their future needs. What clients need is a structure that enables specialization without fragmenting responsibility.”

We demonstrated what such a structure might look like during our discussion—and on stage. At the end of the talk, Jürgen Korzer took a seat that had remained empty until then. He was there representing the GOT YOUR BACK GROUP, which offers a new form of collaboration: specialized agencies that remain independent while working together within a cohesive structure. The group brings together expopartner, JOKE Event, ottomisu, and PHOCUS BRAND CONTACT, creating a structure that connects many experts internally while establishing a clear framework of responsibility for clients externally.

For Andreas Weber (CEO, expopartner), Christian Seidenstücker (CEO, JOKE Event), Jörn Huber (CEO, ottomisu) and Anja Osswald (CEO, PHOCUS BRAND CONTACT), the industry panel was their first joint appearance as founders of the GOT YOUR BACK GROUP. A joint production, a joint result. That’s how we want to work on your projects, too.