ForbesPro
This year is characterized by challenges and surprising opportunities in the high-tech industry as well as in the digital marketing worlds, says Doron Dvir, founder and CEO of international digital company Menta Global: “We are living in a very interesting time. A time when vast professional knowledge is being expelled into the market following waves of layoffs, but also due to changes in the world of employment and the undermining of the current employee-employer models”.
Dvir, a digital marketing expert with over a decade’s worth of extensive experience in startups, including such household names as Elementor, Lemonade and Lili, believes that the currently-emerging new order carries immense potential both for talents ejected from the salaried job market and for companies looking for strong professionals to support their business activity. “The world of professional service providers is experiencing one of its heydays. Service providers’ quality and the level of the service provided are on a whole new level today compared to the past”.
Why is that, actually?
“The main reason for this is that service providers today are highly experienced professionals, as opposed to the past when, in most cases, they were go-getters intended to substitute for an in-house team. The job market has never been as overflowing with so many talents who simply don’t want to work as salaried employees anymore”.
What are the reasons for the changing employee-employer model and for employees choosing to outsource their services rather than hold a salaried position?
“There are probably many different reasons – from the undermining of salaried employees’ job security, through the real necessity of diversifying your sources of income, diminishing professional challenge, to, naturally, potentially more promising remuneration and professional and personal self-actualization as a self-employed worker, that nowadays prevail over the historic fear of employment instability – which today is no longer felt even by salaried employees. The belief that a salaried position guarantees stable employment and income has turned out to be an illusion. As a result of all these, the global trend of the growth of self-employed professionals, which began in the COVID-19 period, has significantly accelerated”.
What other trends are you detecting in the field, and what advantages do these trends pose?
“Concurrently with this trend of transitioning to outsourced services, and perhaps even as a result of it, the world of professional service providers has undergone a facelift and today provides companies with easily accessible international talents as service providers. Nowadays, a company can enjoy external marketing services by professional alumni of unicorn companies with an impressive record of successes – for a cost not much higher than that of an in-house team.
“It’s a kind of win-win, an equation where everyone benefits. Professionals provide their services to a variety of clients, thereby also maintaining a very high and up-to-date professional level, and on the other hand companies can afford to work with talents whom they probably would not have been able to hire as salaried employees.”
“Then there are the challenges companies face in creating and maintaining an in-house team. That’s a very costly endeavor with small chances of success and it requires constant work on retaining and hiring the team members, for the very reason I mentioned above: It’s hard for a company today to meet the full needs of high-quality employees – neither professionally, financially in the long term, nor providing them with the self-actualization and freedom to lead their lives in a balance suitable for them. For startups, this actually means diverting their focus and energy to the wrong places, rather than focus on growing their venture”.
To what extent do the dynamic nature and rapid pace of new technological developments affect the changing trends in the job market and the adoption of outsourced services?
“In the not-too-distant past, one of the arguments favoring creating your own in-house team was the demand for retaining intra-organizational knowledge. In today’s world, where professional knowledge is changing at a dizzying pace and what was true a month ago may not be relevant today and will certainly not be tomorrow, retaining the knowledge inside the organization is no longer such a ‘must’, not to mention that the turnover of salaried employees has become so high and intra-organizational knowledge has become highly difficult to retain and maintain as it is.
“We are living in a very interesting time. A time when vast professional knowledge is being expelled into the market following waves of layoffs, but also due to changes in the world of employment and the undermining of the current employee-employer models”
“When I founded Menta Global, about two years ago, the vision was to efficiently make the extensive experience I’d amassed more accessible, so I hired my old teammates from Lemonade to my new team. Today, companies working with us effectively “hire” the original digital marketing team of a unicorn which they probably would not have been able to hire as an in-house team at their own company, and we provide them with significant added value that could not be provided by juniors in the agencies of old. Remember that I myself served in senior marketing positions both at Lemonade and at the Lili digital bank, so I have a very good understanding of the position of the people we’re working with in the organization and I always try to provide the added value I can give them to help them achieve greater success”.
Subheading: “A unicorn’s digital marketing team turned independent agency”
Dvir says that “It’s no secret that the digital agencies have a bad rap, and for good reason, after many years of mediocre conduct and level of service and professionalism”. But according to him, this world has undergone a major facelift.
“If in the past, digital agencies were where professionals would start their careers as juniors and effectively gain their experience at the expense of the agency’s clients’ budgets before going on to work at the client’s side – nowadays, at least for us at Menta Global, things are the exact opposite. At our agency, the professionals are seasoned talents who have already worked at the client’s side and who today are placing their vast experience at the disposal of the agency’s clients. Accordingly, we define ourselves as “a unicorn’s digital marketing team turned independent agency” and I think that’s the most succinct definition of what Menta Global is.
“Calling us ‘just another digital agency’ is simply doing us wrong. We have to rebrand this profession’s definition. I should add and reiterate that part of the job requirements for being hired to Menta Global’s team is a proven track record of successes and abilities to bring to the table significant business added value for our clients.
“The belief that a salaried position guarantees stable employment and income has turned out to be an illusion”
“The ‘ailments’ of the old world of agencies, such as constant employee turnover, a low professional level and poor service, are giving way to a new world of professionalism by service provider who know how to bring significant added value to the table”.
Where do you think this field is expected to go in the coming years?
You can’t ignore the global trend of freelancers taking over the job market. Employers, too, have to realize this and change their tune. Once they do, they’ll find they can benefit from the skills of top-tier global talents, but as external service providers; and they’ll come to realize and accept the fact that they will probably not be able to hire the same talents as in-house employees. People also have to understand that high-quality professionals very quickly realize that they won’t be able to achieve their full professional and earning potential in a salaried position – no matter how rewarding – and will strive to attain professional, financial and personal independence.
ForbesPro is Forbes’s Promotional Content Brand
