Agencies & the power of collaboration

Yesterday DMNews published an article about the major advertising holding companies all making moves into social media. WPP, Publicis and Interpublic, all have recently put in place plans for their own social media divisions, which is not surprising given how hot the topic is right now. No doubt this is a good thing for customers, who will benefit from the increased focus amongst specialist resources in social media tactics, strategy and tools that these initiatives will drive.

However in the past the relationships between agencies and the digital platform service providers have not always been as productive for clients as they probably should. Agencies have all too often tried to handcraft their own tool sets to deliver new digital marketing initiatives for clients, rather than working collaboratively with the software community to jointly bring more advanced solutions to market. Likewise platform providers have not usually taken into account the requirements of agencies in the way they serve and bill their customers, and have tended to try to sell at an enterprise ‘platform’ level, rather than as a tool to enable an agency to deliver a campaign, against a single campaign budget. This lack of flexibility commercially and functionally has increased the cycle of agencies hand crafting their own solutions for particular client campaigns.

Social media marketing is certainly a new space, and there is much innovation that is needed to define the most successful models of engagement across the medium. Right now social media marketing is in test mode, and it is up to service providers and agencies to help clients understand what will work for their business and particular campaign goals. The innovation needed to truly capture the great opportunities that social media offers marketers, will be greatly speeded up if the best minds from both service providers and agencies, actively get involved in brainstorming ideas, and jointly take a workshop approach to testing these new models of campaign engagement across social media with clients collaboratively. Then this feedback is taken and fed directly into the development cycle of the platform vendors, so that we are automating, optimising and streamlining the campaign development process, whilst ensuring the most innovative campaign templates and ideas are supported. It is the relentless focus on innovation that will serve our clients and ourselves best in the long run, enabling the results we know are possible across this medium. So, calling all agencies, if you want to deliver the future of social media marketing for your clients, work with us & let’s get the best brains together…..

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