Ten years on from the dotcom crash I wonder how many people in the business are old enough to remember it. Stupid amounts of money were pumped into ridiculous website ideas that we would try and view on snail-like dial-up internet connections and the first bloggers started to emerge.
In those days the web was pretty simple. There were sites, micro sites and forums. The big innovation has been the democratisation of the web so that any granny or toddler – and everybody in between - can express every shade of opinion for free and in some cases be taken seriously. And quite often from a mobile phone.
The web has moved in the five years that I’ve been blogging and two years I’ve been on Twitter let alone the last 10.
The internet is a complicated place that can’t easily be squeezed into one box as Television, pay TV, cinema, newspapers or magazines can be. It’s a bit of all of the above with some added spice mixed in.
The difficult thing to work out is who or what kind of agency a marketer should turn to for digital advice. Even designing a website is fraught for many with IT focused developers charging tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars for websites which are programmed from the ground up. Then there are the web designers who will produce beautiful but impractical and almost useless sites entirely in flash animation that have lost the viewer before even they have loaded.
In truth the physical form of the website is irrelevant and is really about how quick it is to load, content and functionality. I think it is a media problem about distribution of a brand’s conversations across the web.
The new shape of the website is more blog than anything else, a hub for the various social sites – Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Vimeo (or YouTube) and so on and Billabong is a brilliant example of this and having to live and breath internet marketing to reach its audience.
The question is in this people driven environment what kind of agency is best placed and how brand management should be tackled in this environment?
Ad agencies
Great with big ideas and brand positioning but are they really capable of instigating and maintaining long term conversations with customers? I wonder if they are too uptight in controlling branding
Media agencies
Nowadays some are great at planning the correct audience and targeting ads. But they are limited in the man hours it takes to engage with social media and perhaps aren’t as adept at coming up with ideas and importantly, the kind of content people want.
Digital agencies
Great for designing big expensive websites, micro sites, games and all sorts of applications. But again, social media is a state of mind not a technology.
PR Agencies
Funnily enough PR agencies in generally managing reputation across various interest groups are fairly well placed in terms of initiating contact and creating content. But so many are too digitally backward to be of any great use in the online space. They also fail to understand the communication role of each social site and get spammy once they start setting up Facebook pages for clients.
Social media experts and agencies
These have grown out of blogs and the likes of twitter and forums. They have proven themselves in amassing large numbers of followers. But do they really understand brands and brand values in the traditional sense (which may no longer be relevant for the online world anyway).
There is no conclusion to this post other than there is a new breed, a mix of all of the above – or multi-disciplinary teams – required for the new environment.