The New Advertising Agency

I recently worked on a social media campaign for a rather large technology company.

The campaign was a B2B focused initiative targeting those folks in an organisation that are responsible for IT. IT people have shown an unflinching propensity to dislike advertising and our prognostication during the early stages of the campaign was that what they really wanted was useful, intelligent 'conversation and content' that helped them solve specific business problems.

So we did something we usually don't do - instead of using all of our media buys for performance based advertising we used it to distribute relevant content, targeted at various segments of our audience. We became, in essence, both an aggregator and a publisher of content. We wrote and produced our own content, we corralled an army of bloggers - and no we didn't pay any of them - to help us shift perception of our clients products in the digital marketplace and answer any questions from our target audience as and when they arose.

We familiarised ourselves deeply with our clients products and services so we could become part of the conversation and indeed help drive solutions to the problems our clients customers were experiencing.

And then we measured every action and reaction.

Media planning and buying, transferring value from the owner of inventory to our clients, is our core business. However this campaign showed us that ad agencies have evolved and have the core capabilities to be a valued partner in content creation and a significant component of the distribution chain.

The data we were able to pull from this campaign was phenomenal.The insight gleaned from analyzing this data is already driving major shifts on how we will be planning, buying - and creating media - for our clients future campaigns.

Pretty exciting stuff....