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UGC allows for brands and consumers to interact directly--outside the reach of the ad agency. However, and crucially, this direct interaction does not undermine the role of the agency. In fact, as brands cede control and embrace interactive marketing, the agency emerges as a critical component of this process. In this new marketing model, the agency can offer clients education, guidance and innovation.
Agencies can work with brands first to establish comfort in embracing the consumer as a brand's chief marketing agent. If they do not already, brands will come to realize that supporting a customer's ability to have a voice online--whether positive or negative--is effective marketing.
Agencies will play a crucial role in guiding clients and consumers through this transition. We can provide research, experience and proven results to ease a brand's launch into the uncertain.
This comes through the creation of new and better forms of interacting, identifying successive phases of UGC, assessing its impact on a client's brand and integrating UGC effectively and appropriately with a brand's message. Clients look to their agencies to navigate these changes.
The creative role of agencies will also remain valuable in this new environment. There will always be instances where the interaction between brands and consumers needs a spark.
In a UGC universe, agencies can and do provide the brand platform, overarching messages and creative elements--then let the consumer take it from there.
User-generated content is ultimately an advanced form of organic marketing where the consumer is also a publisher and a personality with an audience and voice of their own.
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Your comments on the role of agencies in UGC/Branding initiatives are dead-on. We have done a bunch of these campaigns for folks like UPS, Denon, Boston Acoustics, Vespa and Chevy, and the one truism is that agency engagement is critical to campaign success (although agree with Ran's distinction between traditional and interactive agencies).
Agency engagement touches areas like creating good seeded content so initial visitors aren't met with an empty site. It requires well thought out creative that reconciles what engages consumers to create and submit content with the underlying branding and marketing goals of the campaigns.
Further, agencies drive a holistic approach to ad buys and marketing efforts, building awareness of and driving traffic to the UGC campaign microsite, all the while cultivating viral spread offsite.
Netting it out, UGC campaigns are the quintessential example of managed chaos, an area where agencies excel.
Regards,
Mark Sigal CEO vSocial – Say it with Video! www.vsocial.com