Connecting to a Connected Agency
March 12th, 2008 by Hugh Kennedy
As much as I admire and like a lot of industry analysts we talk to (we’re actually a Gartner customer: makes me feel wistful that some of these people get to think about one industry niche 24 x 7 x 365), there’s always a Cassandra-like note in their reports, not unlike a Tom Peters book. Something along the lines of, “If you don’t undertake these 11 priorities this quarter and reinvent your business process platform by end of year, you’ll be seriously behind your competitors or pushing up the daisies. Et cetera.”
Which would be a serious problem if a lot of companies didn’t have those ‘job’ things to do. One antidote to these pronouncements came recently when I was interviewing a CEO about recent job cuts and whether he was worried about retaining his big stars. His response: “Most of them don’t have the option to go, honestly. And of the few that do, half of those are subject to the same inertia that everybody is subject to, so they’re not going anywhere.”
As you probably know, Forrester now creates a lot of reports for “marketing leadership professionals.” Or as I thought to myself on first seeing one of these documents, “Oh, great. They’re not satisfied making my clients feel guilty about falling behind; now they’re doing the same thing with agencies.”
All this throat-clearing aside, I have read and can recommend a recent report called The Connected Agency by Mary Beth Kemp and Peter Kim that’s getting a lot of buzz (and yes, you can check the records: I did pay my $279 for it).
The logline isn’t hard to locate, given the Executive Summary: agencies will move from “orchestrating campaigns to facilitating conversations.” That’s something I think we see a lot more of in BtoB, since we target very small markets to begin with (business intelligence software analysts, anyone? proteomicists? electrophysiologists?), but it’s a good point. Ninety-nine percent of marketing has always been lousy – agencies are, believe it or not, the harshest critics of marketing – but with so much else to do, like watch the weather forecast on your Wii, traditional advertising looks a lot less interesting and relevant than it used to. There are crowds to be sourced, after all.
Of course, another point the authors make, that consumers expect that ads will speak to them but are almost always disappointed, is right on the money. From a planner’s perspective, it’s symphonic to my ears. On the other hand, have a look at an Advertising Annual issue of Communications Arts. The best of the best is still superlative and moving and relevant, and always will be.
On their point that friends, family and colleagues are really the endorsement well that matters, I have to agree, except that the friends, family and colleagues who formed and passed along the opinions had to form them somewhere. That means that marketing content still plays a vital role.
Marketing integration is another great point. You don’t get integration by tacking a Web site onto a traditional program, and no client should accept it. Just today I was having lunch with the president of a large social networking company who was bemoaning the lack of ROI data about social networks and how grafting on old measures from traditional media (clickthrough, etc.) just doesn’t get you there. I think we’re all running as fast as we can to keep pace on these fronts.
The authors also predict a trajectory of we agencies involving, promoting, and then becoming part of the community by 2013, rather like reporters embedded with the armed forces. Though in my opinion this is what a resource like Communispace is doing very well already. Once you’ve got the product or insight or new market space identified, though, you’ve got to communicate about it.
All in all, this report is a great capture of the increasingly fragmented world we live in, though I continue to maintain a simple argument: wherever it appears, from wherever it appears, whether it’s delivered in a terrific ad or in a customer community or via some mobile transmission that knocks our socks off once the service providers get out of the way, great content never goes out of style.
