Commentary

Social Unrest

SocialFTR_OM_0311

Agencies are always adapting to new media, but what happens when the medium is the people themselves?

On occasion, I like to use a visceral device to give readers some perspective on the way Madison Avenue looks at the media universe. It involves a simple piece of paper. So if you will, grab a sheet - perhaps this very page if you are reading this article in print.

Now imagine the page represents the entire world of media - I mean everything that anybody reads, watches or listens to. Now take the page and fold it in half. Then fold it in half again. Until recently, I would have told you that what you are now looking at represents the portion of media - about one-quarter - that Madison Avenue actually thinks about and tries to influence. It is this portion that represents the kind of mass media that is sponsored or carries advertising or branded content. In the parlance of our times, it is the "paid" or "owned" portions that have dominated mass media for the past century. But lately, I'm starting to wonder if I have the metaphor wrong, and that the part that really matters, is the other three-quarters of the media universe: the part that Madison Avenue historically has had little or no direct control over. It's the part that represents what people say directly to each other. It's also the part that people on Madison Avenue suddenly care very much about, because they believe they finally have the means to directly influence the entire communications process, including the conversations people have with other people.

Of course, Madison Avenue has always tried to influence "the conversation" on behalf of marketers' brands, but in the old model it usually relied on "big idea" advertising and sponsorships that would spark "water cooler" talk, or the kind of publicity tactics by public relations agencies, which were more art than science, yielding unpredictable effects. That's all changed with social media. And never mind the fact that social media - especially big social networks and platforms such as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter - don't actually reach everybody. Nor do they reach those who actually use them all of the time. Social media has become a proxy for how to influence people by influencing the people who influence them. And that is influencing the way Madison Avenue thinks about itself.

The problem is that it is almost the exact opposite approach that most big Madison Avenue agencies were built for: big, standardized ad messages pushed out via efficient and scalable mass media. And the realization that agencies need - or depending on your perspective, finally have an opportunity - to reinvent their model, is producing a combination of anxiety and euphoria across the advertising industry. Regardless of the perspective, getting social media right is Madison Avenue's new imperative.

"Whoever gets social media right will set the bar and redefine the advertising business for the next 10 to 20 to 30 years," says Joshua Spanier, the director of communication strategy for Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, an agency, which to all outward appearances, has gotten social media right more often than it has not. In fact, you'd be hard-pressed to look at one of Goodby's campaigns in recent years, many of which have won some of the industry's most coveted awards and not find a social media component central to its core. Even so, Spanier counts himself among Madison Avenue's young media turks who are both anxious and giddy for the shifts that social media has wrought.

He's nervous, he says, because social media is altering communications models so fast and the ad industry has only recently worked its way through version 1.0 of the digital revolution: the shift from linear, one-way mass media models to the kind of interactive, iterative and highly targeted communications enabled by the World Wide Web and online search. As painful as that transition was for many agencies, Spanier believes the effect social media will have on Madison Avenue may make the last 15 years of online media seem like a piece of cake.

Spanier is not alone. Most agencies are trying to transform their business models, their structures and even their talent pool based on the impact social media is having on how people interact with brands, or as the case may be, do not. In some ways, it's like déjà vu all over again for advertising agencies, because just like the early Internet, many are not sure where their social media expertise and practices should be housed and how they should be integrated within their organizations. The problem is that the ad industry hasn't done a good job of defining what social media actually is, how it relates to its existing marketing services models, where it should sit and who should sit on top of it. And to a large extent, they are letting others, including a new breed of social native agencies and third-party social marketing platform developers, define it for them.

In fact, Madison Avenue's de facto economist, Brian Wieser, who oversees global ad forecasts at Interpublic, doesn't even define social media as advertising. Never mind that some other experts believe advertising on social media networks already is a $3 billion to $4 billion category, Wieser says it's a different kind of marketing service function that doesn't even belong in traditional agency advertising silos. That hasn't stopped agencies, including many of Interpublic's, from trying to retrofit their business models to tap into the rapidly expanding universe of social media users on behalf of their clients' brands. It's just that they all see it as being something different, depending on their unique vantage point and the types of services they already provide.

To some, social media is a new, discrete communications practice. To others, it is an outgrowth of other more established forms of marketing communications: public relations, crm (customer relationship management), branded content, product placement, sponsorship or even search.

The lines surrounding social have become so blurry, that Madison Avenue has even begun mashing it up, coining terms like "social mobile," or its inverse, "mobile social," to describe new hybrid marketing services practices that are trying to emulate the increasingly mobile nature in the way consumers use social media. From yet another Madison Avenue vantage point, social media could be construed as a new form of sponsorship, and many of the emerging social media marketing ventures - companies like Ad.ly, bat, MyLikes, and others - have built platforms enabling agencies and marketers to pay social media users who directly influence other users on behalf of a brand.

Social media has also emerged as a new form of cause-related marketing, one in which the users, not the brands, determine what causes they get behind. The most obvious example of this is PepsiCo's ambitious Pepsi Refresh Project.

So in many ways, social media is evolving much the way the early Internet evolved on Madison Avenue, where big agencies initially did not understand how to use it or who should manage it. In an industry speech during the mid-1990s, David Verklin, then general manager of Hal Riney & Partners, and now CEO of Canoe Ventures, explained the dilemma well, noting that the agency initially thought of Web pages as a new form of brochures or catalogues, putting its early Internet practice inside the agencies' collateral department. But it was the agencies that embraced the Internet as their core mission that really got it right and they were either digital native startups or born again shops that saw the Internet as a natural extension of what they were doing. Many of those early Internet pioneers were agencies focused on B-to-B marketing, especially the technology industry, so it's not surprising that industrial shops like Poppe-Tyson, Freeman Associates (now part of Aegis Isobar and Carat units), or Bronner Slossberg Humphrey (now Publicis' Digitas), took the World Wide Web and ran with it.

To a certain extent, that seems to be what's happening again with social media, where the public relations or CRM units of agencies have been most aggressive at establishing it as a dedicated practice and are working to define the new business models around it.

"When people say, 'Who owns social?' I say, 'Who owns television?' Nobody really owns the medium and everyone has their own perspective on how to maximize the medium," says Stephanie Agresta, executive vice president-managing director of social media at Weber Shandwick, the big public relations agency that is part of agency-holding company Interpublic.

Agresta, who has become the de facto social media lead for PepsiCo, believes social media is a natural outgrowth of what PR people have always done - spreading word-of-mouth for companies and brands - but she also believes that it has changed the way marketing services organizations work with each other and work together on behalf of common clients.

"The question isn't who owns social media," she explains. "The real question is whether all the experts in each organization are talking to each other and sharing how to maximize it from the point of view of the brand."

That's how client PepsiCo has been approaching the process, says Agresta and her client counterpart, B. Bonin Bough, a former Weber Shandwick executive who is now director of digital and social media at PepsiCo.

"It is going to be a talent war, because there's not enough talent to go around that know digital," says Bough. "The war isn't how you capture all the digital talent; it's how you transform the talent you have to become better at digital."

The problem, he says, is that as good as anyone is on the current state of the art of digital marketing, it will constantly be changing and that process will be constantly disruptive for advertisers and agencies alike.

"We are now in an age of continual experimentation," he says, calling it "an entirely new model" for the advertising industry, because, "It is the first time when the early adopter is more the norm and it's hard to see where we're going."

That requires a new way of thinking and working, says Bough, calling the foreseeable future "an era of constant disruption," which requires agencies and marketers to build a "framework of constant experimentation."

Easier said than done for many agencies, which have already stretched their resources, systems and talent pools to deal with the hyper fragmentation of conventional advertising and media. For them, he says, "It's a new wave of, 'Oh no, now what?'" Not surprisingly, a new breed of social native entrepreneurs are seizing on that disruption as an opportunity to build new agency models designed for era of constant disruption, or at the very least, to develop planning, buying and messaging systems designed for the age of social media.

"Most big agencies are doing it wrong," says Harry Gold, CEO of Overdrive Interactive, a 10-year-old agency that was founded on the premise of social media marketing. "They look at it much too simplistically. They're thinking, 'Well, if we put a Facebook button on our page, we're participating in social media.' But they fail to understand the underlying reason why people are using social media."

To do that, Gold says you have to ask yourself, and your client, a serious, soul-searching question. "It's the most important question of all," he says. "If you're a brand, you have to ask yourself why anyone would want to be your friend?"

For some brands, Gold says the answer is obvious, because consumers already feel they are friends of a brand. He cites his client Harley Davidson's brand, which consumers quite literally use to brand themselves, tattooing the motorcycle maker's logo on their bodies.

"For Harley Davidson, the answer may be obvious, but if you're a technology company like Computer Associates, the answer might be more difficult," he says. But not impossible. And that's where the new Madison Avenue social expertise really comes into play. In essence, Gold says the fundamentals of social media aren't really that different from other media or communications strategies. You simply need to understand who your consumer is, how they relate to a brand and what kind of information they'd want from that brand. And of course, the right way to craft a message around it.

Sticking with the Computer Associates analogy, Gold says there are actually plenty of reasons why the tech marketer's consumers might want to friend, like or tweet its brand.

"People may not be as passionate about enterprise storage or software the way they are about a motorcycle brand, but they are passionate about their careers. And if their careers depend on being in the loop on important technology, then a thought leader like Computer Associates can let them behind their velvet rope, and give them real-time access to important announcements and thought leadership materials," he explains.

The reason why social native agencies like Overdrive have an advantage over big Madison Avenue shops, Gold says, is that those ideas and executions don't scale in a way that is economically viable for big agency organizations.

"Larger agencies tend to focus on things that spend a lot of money, like buying broadcast media. And native social media agencies tend to be a little more scrappy, and rely on innovation," says Gold. "So a small agency is going to think about 27 ways to incorporate social media in everything it does. A large agency is going to focus on doing a great tv campaign and figuring out how to get a Facebook button on there."

That may be a bit of an exaggeration, but even some big agency executives agree that they're not structured to deal with the detailed nuances of social media campaigns the way social natives are. Yet their clients are pressuring them to adapt quickly.

"Right now we're in this place where we're trying," admits Kristen Fox, group media director-social & mobile at Crispin, Porter + Bogusky. "We're saying, 'We have a social strategy,' but it's questionable whether many of us actually do. We're still at the point where we are just checking boxes."

By boxes, Fox means that many agencies are still only going through the motions with social media, and doing things like incorporating Facebook "like" buttons into ads, but not necessarily thinking about it as part of a holistic communications plan or brand strategy.

The problem is being made worse by the fact that many clients have unrealistic expectations of what an agency can actually do vis-a-vis a social media campaign.

"Make mine a double rainbow," she says, alluding to the viral YouTube phenomenon of a video featuring a man who euphorically describes a double rainbow that materialized in his backyard. Frequently, clients will ask Fox to develop a viral campaign like the "Double Rainbow," failing to understand that those things just happen and cannot be created by an ad agency.

Even Wieden & Kennedy's breakthrough "Old Spice" social media campaign, she says, began as a conventional TV advertising campaign, which went viral only when the agency added interactive social media components that allowed users to share and distribute something that had already been inserted into the popular culture.

But some big agency executives think everyone may be overthinking the disruptive nature of social media and see it as a natural extension of digital media trends that have already been reshaping the way Madison Avenue uses media to engage consumers around brands. And in some ways, they think it's really not that different from what agencies have always done best.

"If you think about what advertising and marketing has always been about, it's about understanding what consumers are doing. What their intent is when they are looking for information about things," says Bant Breen, ceo of Reprise Media, the search and social specialty unit within Interpublic's Mediabrands division.

"In the past we used things like focus groups or anthropological research to understand that. Recently, search has given us a really good sense on what people are looking for and social media is kind of like the conversation around that pinpoint intent of search," says Breen who describes the intersection of search and social media marketing as "consumer intent-based marketing."

That, he says, is something that Madison Avenue does know how to scale and can scale it well, by utilizing advanced analytics of the data on consumer intent that flows from consumer behavior online and marrying it to the kind of sophisticated communications planning and branding research that big agencies are especially good at.

The rest, he says, is leveraging good ideas to execute campaigns that resonate with users based on their own intentions.

"If you think about it, social is becoming a form of customer relationship management," he says. "We call it 'search and social marketing intelligence,' and real-time data sources are enabling us to understand consumer intentions where and when a consumer is."

In the end, Breen says that is a better model for all concerned, because it means creating and delivering more relevant messages that deliver what consumers are looking for.

The truth is that social media is not an either/or proposition for Madison Avenue, says Sarah Fay, one of the early Internet agency pioneers who founded Freeman Associates and went on to run Aegis Media's North American operations before stepping back from the industry. These days, Fay, a big proponent of social media is involved in committees and on the boards of a variety of agencies, technology and platform companies. She says that big agencies and small agencies - as well as other third-party social media technology providers - all play a role in the social media ecosystem. But, she says, there is one other really important piece of the social media industry that all of those players need to factor into everything they do: "The consumer. Without them, there is no social media. There is no any media."

In other words, she says, you can now take this page and unfold it, and unfold it again, because it's time to look at the entire media universe. The one that includes everything, everyone reads, listens to or watches.

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