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....

Saving Journalism

There is a lot of discussion in the press right now about the demise of the print newspaper. Print circulation is right down even though total readership is up. Online versions of the newspapers are seeing soaring rates of dedicated users however no one pays for content so how is this model sustainable? Who is going to pay for the journalists to go out and do what they do best? Advertising revenue pays for some of it but with the declining CPM rates how is that sustainable or profitable in the long run without compromising good editorial content? Some talk about subscription models - but we, the consumers, are now convinced that we don't need to pay for news content so how do newspapers change a mindset that is now deeply entrenched in our culture? What is incredibly interesting to me about this discussion is how did Apple convince the world to pay 99c for a song? Why is this not a model for news content - quality news content? Maybe its the payment system and the fact that still as yet, it is rather clunky and lengthy online experience. What if we were just to pay one cent every time we accessed a news site? Or every month we paid one dollar for access to NY Times.com of the FT.com? Would love to know what peoples thoughts are on this topic....???