“Agencies don’t get it” was the clear response that marketers gave to TMS Media Intelligence/Cymphony in the research firm’s survey of sixty client side marketing professionals. Adweek’s Brian Morrissey has a nice little article on this. It got me thinking about some things and I’ll cut an paste.
“Clients are placing more emphasis on mastering social media but find their agencies ill equipped to help them succeed in that space”
This means clients are ahead of the curve and that agencies have not taken the time to come up to speed to learn beyond the basics of social media. Upper level management has not taken the time to integrate capabilities into their offerings and organizations. That’s because agencies
“typically treat social channels like blogs as traditional media…their ideas are not backed up by practical skills in the area..agencies have little of their own experience using social networks or video-sharing sites for themselves.“
This has been a major problem that’s been going on for a long time. Whenever I talk to high level agency people, they seem to treat social media as something that they’ve gotta start getting into or they dabble in, applying those traditional tactics and thinking that they’ve got everything covered. Don’t establish a practice – no, we’ll shove it off to the young people and tell them what to do. Tradtional agencies don’t seem to understand that social media is a different animal. It’s not a subset of what they already do.
Why don’t they get that? The answer comes quick:
“They are mostly driven by their compensation models which are made for closed media.”
This let to survey findings showing that marketers viewed agencies as simply not having the skills and culture to develop the type of strategies that are needed for today’s social media. But,
“They put up a good presentation about what social media is, but when you get to implementing campaigns, the day-to-day management skills are not meeting the marketers’ expectations.”
This never ceases to amaze me. I’ve seen surveys, discussions, and reports like this for years now. I can only conclude that agencies look at social media the same way so many others look at marketing: Anyone can do it. We’ll do it. Use our young people. And make money for the top. Outdated. And potentially fatal.
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