Feb/102
There’s A Need For Integrated Social Media
Disclaimer: I started this post over a month ago and just never got to finish. Hopefully, it’s still halfway relevant.
If we’re being honest, I started on my path in marketing under the impression that I was going to be concepting billboards, television spots, magazine ads, working with emerging technology, etc. Partially because that’s what we’re taught in school, and partially because I was addicted to Mad Men (congratulations on the third Golden Globe). Nonetheless, it wasn’t so much that I was enamored with the idea of traditional advertising. It was that I strongly believed in integrated advertising. I still do.
I now find myself in social media marketing. A fairly new discipline, many times separated from the rest of the action by clients. And unfortunately, the problem is two-fold.
Social is usually cutoff from the rest of the marketing mix and placed on a petri dish, insulated from the outside world. And like a child who’s sheltered their whole life by anxious parents, it doesn’t socially develop properly (no pun intended). Social won’t ever learn to properly integrate with marketing plans unless it’s included from the jump. That’s not to say it can’t work any other way. Social’s been shoehorned into plans many times before, but how often has it felt like it was an afterthought? Or even worse, a social program shares no common messaging with the overall integrated campaign.
That’s only one part of the problem. The bigger issue is that social isn’t easy enough for brands and large agencies to adopt. They like the idea of social, and they’ll dabble in it; kick a program or two off. But the fact that social itself isn’t integrated is reason enough to understand why brands aren’t emphatically jumping at the opportunity to include a deep social program in their campaigns.
As you might have read in my About Me page, I work(ed) for crayon. That is until Powered came along. Powered used to consider themselves a technology company. They had clients and they did social media workshops and the like, but their claim to fame was their white label community platform. They purchased crayon, Drillteam Marketing, and StepChange Group to become the “first full-service social media agency of scale.”
We’re going through our growing pains right now, and working on integrating our various services to create a lean, streamlined organization. But in theory, this kind of organization is what social media marketing needs. After hearing our CEO, Ken Nicolson, tell the vision of the organization, I began to realize how worthy of a cause this was.
Currently, the main way clients handle full-scaled social programs is by hiring 2, 3, or 4 different shops to get the job done. This creates the problem of “too many cooks in the kitchen”, and it becomes a clusterfuck of a situation. I don’t blame companies for being apprehensive in getting involved in such a fiasco. After all, they’ve never had to go to so many different people to get a campaign done before. Why should they now have to interact with four different companies, who do four different things, to get one job done. Sure, they could go to a large agency who could subcontract the work out to four different shops on your behalf, but then you’re paying for added overhead.
The point is, the need for an integrated approach to social media was long overdue and desperately needed. We need fewer individuals talking about how smart they are in the space, and more individuals banding together to serve our clients better.
Nov/092
Jeff Howe Didn’t Mean To Be An Asshole
I briefly met Jeff Howe during the kickoff party for his book Crowdsourcing. He’s a good guy. Very charming, very intelligent. It’s not his fault he’s an asshole, having coined the term “crowdsourcing”.
I read an opinion piece on PSFK today by well-known author, blogger, critic, and fabled ad man, George Parker. In it, he pretty much lambasted the Boulder, CO-based agency, Victors & Spoils, for further perpetuating the argument of “What are agencies for?” To their credit, however, according to @BBHLabs, they’ve already gotten 5 letters from Fortune 200 CMOs in the first few days of them opening their doors.
The great debate of the effects of crowdsourcing on ad agencies is something I’ve always been fairly agnostic about. I was always a supporter of Jeff Howe, so I didn’t immediately write it off as the bane of creative agencies. But after hearing George Parker’s criticisms of Victors & Spoils, I think I might have to side with the agencies. And it’s not because I think agency creatives would be out of a job otherwise. There’s more to the argument than that.
First off, crowdsourcing your work does NOT guarantee quality product. Fast Company’s Cliff Kuang published a piece that took a look at some of the mediocre work that has come from crowdsourced efforts. I’m not suggesting that crowdsourced work can’t be good. And I’m not saying that it doesn’t help in shining light on many talented people who might otherwise be overlooked. Honestly, at its core, I don’t believe crowdsourcing, as a marketing vehicle, is such a bad idea. It promotes consumer interaction; celebrates their creativity; and all that other good stuff we like to say about the benefits of crowdsourcing.
Where I’ve decided to put my foot down is exactly where Victors & Spoils has decided to venture: crowdsourcing all of your work as a creative ad agency. I was impressed by the attention that they’ve been getting, but after further thought, I’m not so sure it’s well-deserved. Under this business model, can they legitimately call themselves a creative ad agency? I’m not so sure. If anything, an agency of producers and project managers sounds more apropos. Isn’t that what they essentially boil down to? And that’s the problem that Parker cited in this business model.
If you act as though getting agency quality work is as easy as logging onto crowdSPRING, then what the hell are we being hired for? Clients have their own project managers to oversee crowdsourced initiatives if they really wanted to. I don’t think the creative ad agency will go the way of the Dodo, especially considering there’s simply a different grade of work you get from dealing with “accredited” (for lack of a better word) agencies. I just think that it’s a bit pretentious to put yourself on a high horse and label yourself as forward-thinking when in reality, you aren’t doing any of the heavy lifting.
Having started my career at a creative digital agency, I naturally have a high respect for the work that goes into agency developed creative. I don’t think agency creatives have anything to worry about. Out of work art directors and copywriters aside, the best either already work for someone, or consider themselves too good to essentially work for free. And for those designers who do compete in crowdsourcing competitions, it’s a good way to get noticed, and perhaps find yourself with a job where you don’t have to forfeit valuable hours of your time contending with dozens of other designers working for nothing.
I’ll leave you with this comment from V&S’ announcement blog post:
You guys are kidding right?
You are not changing an industry you are helping hammer one more nail in its coffin. For years we fought the idea of advertising by committee and you are legitimizing it.
You are not calling creatives with spirit you are calling all those willing to be underpaid while you guys reap the rewards.
As John Lennon said, “How do you sleep at night?”