Brian muses about the agency of the future:
That who you are and why you are motivated to do things trumps what you’re doing and how you’re doing it. This strikes me as the reason it will be so difficult for existing outsourced marketing firms to reinvent themselves for edgework: it’s not what they were built to do. It’s not who they are, how they define their utility; it’s not baked into their practice, their models, their compensation strategies; they don’t run with these kind of people or naturally frame marketing questions in the same way. There is a truism about how hard it is for a leopard to change his spots.
In his post, he touches on a related topic – the lack of decent case studies and examples of successful social media campaigns tied to real dollars and cents. If the agency heads don’t see the ’success stories’ in the pages of Marketing Life Monthly, they don’t believe they exist. Or so the theory goes.
The truth is far deeper. Yes it is true that social media is not a sales channel but a conversation channel, that’s been said over and over again. But agencies have been doing “branding” and “awareness” campaigns for years. And most current attempts to quantify the success (or failure) of marketing programs fall far short of making any sense. I’ve told clients without blushing that one, two or three million or more people viewed the segment, or saw the magazine, or some other meaningless factoid designed to make the program look like it actually worked.
And then we have the low cost of most social media programs. Starting a blog is free. Setting up search terms on Technorati is also free. A video for YouTube or Blip.tv costs a fraction of what even the lowest quality video would have cost even a few years ago. Standing over your shoulder while you write those first few blog posts is easy. Projects like this make perfect sense for small shops and sole practitioners, but for big agencies they are open wounds bleeding money.
There’s a lot more money to be made in building web sites that drive away traffic, commercials that are ignored and public relations programs that have little to no impact but look good in the client’s monthly report. Until that changes, I’ve little hope that most agencies will ever be able to do more than offer a “Facebook strategy” as an add-on to a traditional program.
