Message v. subject: execution v. idea.
Earlier this year, I participated on a panel at PSFK’s San Francisco conference. The topic was Social Media. The goal was to provide practical advice to people on how to bring social media into their companies. In a potentially business-limiting move, I suggested that marketing firms ought to get out of the way when it comes to social media and let their clients speak for themselves. To me social media is simply another channel for customers to form relationships with people at the companies they do business with. The last thing they want is some puppet-master marketer controlling or orchestrating the conversation. To compound the damage, that evening at an after party, I did my best to persuade a very nice lady from Starbucks that she didn’t need our help (p.s. If you’re reading, I’m an idiot and we’d love to work with Starbucks).
Yesterday, Barry Judge from Best Buy said basically the same thing in a speech he gave (ironically) at the AAAA Creative Summit. One of my partners, @caerickson, was there at the event and noted that there appeared to be a bit of anxiety over the role of the agency in all of this.
For an industry that is based upon crafting and delivering clients’ messages for them, social media is indeed a disruption. If, as I believe, the adoption of social media by all companies is inevitable, what role does the communications agency fulfill?
To me this is another symptom of an industry that can’t seem to address the fundamental problems with the basic assumptions upon which it is founded. It’s easier, I suppose, to pretend that it’s the tools or nature of communications delivery that have changed rather than facing up to the fact that communications, as a product, is losing relevance. It’s easier to talk about channel neutrality and being digital while not actually addressing the fact that all you’re talking about are different ways to craft and disseminate messages.
However, I think that this relentless focus (purposeful or otherwise) on communications also blinds agencies to larger opportunities that are emerging. Clients may not need help talking to their customers but that doesn’t mean they don’t need help. After the channels of communication are established and after the pleasantries have been exchanged, customers will want something to talk to companies about. The best things to talk about are things that the company is doing to make their products, services or experiences better. It seems to me that there’s still a lot of demand for help in improving our clients’ core services and making them more marketable. For applying marketing thinking to operations. Personally I find it’s actually far more rewarding to do this kind of work because you’re actually collaborating with your clients on things that are lasting and have unquestioned (rather than questionable) value within their organisations.
I also think that agencies focus on communications and their belief that they should be paid to create communications prevents them from giving their clients the right advice on social media. For most agencies, there’s little if any profit in telling their clients to get involved in social media. Even if they are helping to get the ball rolling in some way, there’s very little production or execution money associated with giving your client tips on how to follow followers on Twitter. The real money is going to be in doing Twitter for them which is exactly the wrong answer. Agencies may retreat to the sanctity of “content creation” but the idea that your livelihood is based on creating content which the clients then transmit and disseminate and share with their customers sounds just as precarious to me.
Sadly, I’m starting to believe the communications industry is rotten to the core. It’s chief product and it’s chief source of revenue are at odds, in a dramatic fashion, with doing the right thing. How then can it thrive and be honourable at the same time?
