Blogging for food

Alastair Duncan

75% of the world’s top advertisers and 80% of the UK’s are working with Facebook, says Blake Chandlee at today’s FT Digital Media conference [#ftmedia]. I love getting predictions right. Now the debate has moved on. It isn’t about getting it, it’s about measuring it. Doh. Instead of reach and frequency, we should be measuring interactions and engagement. Doh. Expect to hear more of the phrase ‘user connections per year’ in the coming year. Doh.

Now over the past couple of years in my companies we expended hours of angst and technical effort to build models that link online advertising activity with website traffic. It’s amazing to me how separate these [still] can be in the corporate world. Especially when it comes to business audiences, who spend most of their time online using client (that’s a technical term) communication tools. Interestingly, the 20th century model of agency infrastructure – a more generous definition than ‘BDA’ perhaps - created discipline specific revenue generating lines that often struggled to combine forces and do the right thing for the Clients' brands.

The Clients (the ones that pay the bill) were excited by these efforts. But not everyone was. The new measurement system exposed some quite glaring weaknesses in the world according to GAAP (that’s my personal definition of Generally Accepted Advertising Practise). Oh, how we argued wth all our other agency colleagues. We had simply set out to get a better bang from the online buck, we said. We weren’t planning to solve world peace or reorganise the entire marketing communication process. But in the end, that’s what's needed, and that's what's happening too.

I’m not keen on creating yet another social media discipline-specific argument. I am interested, however, in how brands go to market, how media is organised, how consumers engage with media, and how consumers engage or ignore brands. It’s clear from Facebook’s numbers that brands getting it isn’t the problem. brands are having a go. If you’re not online, you’re not on the map. It’s a more a question of how much control the brand's prepared to give up in the process, and who to turn to for advice.

George Parker on this site been railing at the average adverati’s incompetence with these social technologies and facile obsession with the next big thing bandwagon. He’s right (with notable exceptions on Brand Republic, of course) in the sense that there aren’t many agency CEO types who write their own blogs or twitter much. Funnily enough, a survey in October last year by Sapient* put understanding digital as a top priority for global CMOs, and agencies that understand digital as a DNA thing rather than an acquired thing should do well. I’d argue that there’s a starker truth behind this. Clients don’t want to pay agencies to learn on their paid time.

Reflection from the digerati at the FT conference so far is positive, and notably setting the agenda for everything else in adland. Plenty has happened in the last year that elevates the argument about common metrics, engagement, redefining media, redefining content and the role of the brands in providing the financial oxygen upon which media has traditionally depended. We have a long way to go, but it’s good every now and again to recognise how far we have come.

*Sapient is an interactive agency. Survey results: unsurprising.
*Sapient’s numbers look quite good at the moment.

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