These are based on what I saw and experienced, and hence more subjective than objective. I’m restricting it to three aspects that bring out some good and some not-so-good points.

Relationships: (Client, Partners) I have seen some fantastic relationships with clients and partners, based on mutual trust. Add to this, a great view of publishers and platforms (both traditional and digital) and the agency is in just the right place to make a difference to the client’s business. The flip side is that many a time, these relationships are taken for granted, by both sides. Campaign based thinking and last minute briefs coexist with half-hearted work cobbled together while waiting at the client’s reception. This extends to the agency’s partners as well. One possible way to fix this is to set expectations clear on both sides and understand long term implications of short term choices, but there are constraints, especially in an age when agencies are willing to undercut and bleed to get business.

Scale: (Industry, organisation) In many cases, the agency handles huge budgets, across diverse platforms. Once again, this puts them in the perfect frame to bring about changes that can alter the course and behaviour of entire industries and to begin with, at least their marketing domains. But I haven’t seen that happening a lot. One possible reason is that the agency structure is rather silo based and there aren’t a lot of people having strategic and operational experience across traditional, digital and social platforms. The interoperability of these silos is not really the best. Therefore, whether the current setup is capable of providing one cohesive, platform agnostic direction aimed at business outcomes is a question worth exploring.

I also think that the concept of value has somehow been irretrievably tied to scale, probably a baggage from the traditional media era. The themes of the digital era – experimentation, agile marketing, brand storytelling on digital etc – are reduced to near-zero significance in the narrative that the agency presents to the client. From the agency perspective, to quote Stalin (or Mao/Lenin/Trotsky!) “Quantity has a quality all its own“, but whether it adds the best value to a client’s business future is a question often unasked. When the agency itself is hesitant and rather unwilling to change, where does that leave the client?

Talent: (Workforce, Skills) One of the reasons I decided to explore the agency side was for the experience of working with multiple brands across domains. That remains a huge advantage this side offers. I have also seen GroupM do a bunch of things to expand and sharpen the skills of its workforce. The issue that I noticed is that the sheer scale of the organisation makes smooth implementation a challenge. Also, both discovery and navigation are far from easy. For example, there might be great work done on some brand, but how easy is it for a person to know and then attempt to be a part of it? The other challenge when all sorts of verticals and horizontals (account leads, domain experts, regional bosses etc) collide is accountability. To create systemic checks at this scale is not an easy task at all, and this might be a downer for a lot of people who are used to different standards.

So, why would you join the agency side? I can provide a few scenarios based on career stages. Early in your career (0-5 years) if you’re relatively young and would like to get some cross domain exposure of how a brand and its media vehicles function before you specialise, this would be a good place to explore. If you have 5-10 years of experience, but would like to shift your domain (say, from traditional to digital) an agency stint could help you do that. After a decade of experience, if you want a different perspective, exposure to more domains, or even a reduction in pace, the agency could offer that as well. As with every other job, a lot depends on your intent, but my take is that irrespective of the career stage, you will need at least 2-3 years of investment before you can start driving your agenda. Before you ask, it doesn’t work that way everywhere, I have had three jobs that taught me otherwise.

If I had to sum it all up – agencies and the clients they deal with – at the risk of generalisation, I’d have to go with

Meanwhile, though Twitter lists will add a new dimension to search – people, content etc, like I mentioned in the last post, and create perceptions about people (basis lists they appear in), there are already directions which make me feel ambivalent (country lists, and I agree largely with this take). Even as they try to balance utility with threats like spam, I wonder what features Twitter will add to lists – feeds of lists, search (and advanced) within list tweets or add this option in existing search, one click DM to all members of a list (at least by the creator for starters),  or at least a way to send a tweet to only a list (so that I can be more pertinent to specific kinds of users – eg. there are those who hate my godawful puns, but like the links I share )

(Let me know if these exist in some form – even on apps, and add on the features you can think of)

Another line of thought occurred to me while on Twitter lists – brand communication. It started off by me wondering whether we’d now see brands occupying Twitter backgrounds of relevant lists (considering the web interface is still the most used source of tweeting) say, Star World on a a Heroes/Lost fans list, Kingfisher on a beer fans list. (all of you brands pay Twitter and the list creators, please) Taking that further, would we have brands create lists? Hopefully, not just something as vanilla as their fans, but say, a relevant common interest topic.

This led to a larger picture of how brand communication’s distribution would evolve. This also fit into last week’s post – aggregation of content and serendipity. How would brand communication fit into the varied methods of content consumption, aggregation and discovery?

Even as new distribution and consumption patterns develop rapidly, the identity of the traditional distribution means i.e. mass content creator-aggregators (newspapers, TV. and even web entities) as just a platform for vanilla advertising (and that includes ‘innovations’ like force-fitted editorial) has been changing for a while now. For example, Yahoo, even as it takes steps in creating and curating content, is also making deals “to help marketers creatively incorporate their brands into original online programming. The programs will appear exclusively throughout Yahoo!’s network of leading media properties including News, Sports, Finance and Entertainment.” ESPN Sports Center worked with Toshiba to create advertising that illustrates specifically how ESPN fans could use Toshiba TV sets and laptops. But all that’s still only creating more context. Seemingly seamless content and advertising, tricky territory, that.

To compare it with say, Twitter lists, the latter already have the context and the audience in one place, and these are created by the audience themselves. Isn’t that at least a step ahead. Meanwhile, there’s another way of looking at it – the Google way, using Social Search, and that includes not just Google’s own services like Reader, Profiles (and that means all your other service details you shared there and your respective networks), Mail contacts, but also Twitter. That means, when a person is searching for information, Google can now give him socially layered real time results, quite a good start to a man+spider filtered way of search. I have to wonder (again) how long the SEO way of making sure the brand website appears on top will work.

All of the above – traditional content platforms, social platforms, search are different kinds of people and content aggregators, and options for brands to create/share content (self created or UGC) in. While it might look challenging, it offers enormous possibilities of tailoring content according for the brand’s different audiences and their needs. They have varying sets of positives and negatives, several parameters will decide the medium, but as far as the message goes, interesting content is now, increasingly and thankfully mandatory.

Brands have always been experiences. Brand communication has sought to build/reinforce/manage perceptions. In an unconnected world, the audience had to rely on the communication, and the small set of experiences that they knew of – their own, and those of their circle of friends, relatives etc. In a connected world, the audience will experience in many more ways, and the content they create will be shared and distributed in ways they deem fit, across a much larger audience. Perhaps, now, the experience is the message, and the audience is the medium.

until next time, medium, message and mob mastery