Social Activity is the new era of advertising. Check out the full study at www.appssavvy.com/virtualgoods and see how brand advertisers are achieving 2x awareness and purchase intent.
Do Clients Get the Advertising They Deserve?
Or is the system designed to produce the lowest common denominator? Ad Agencies are controlled by massive holding companies that answer to shareholders.
Holding companies are a collection of agencies designed to satisfy the client’s every whim - in house, under a single P&L. This also enables the holding company to maintain healthy cashflow. Take the client’s money on the 1st and pay vendors on the 31st. Make no mistake - the interest on this cash flow is a business unto itself.
The creatives may be skateboarding down the halls but they’re called brick layers by the accountants. They’re paid a brick layers wage and are expected to lay bricks.
Marvin Davis, former CMO at Comcast, wrote, “the keys to great advertising (are to) be focused (and) take risks.”
So how does a brick layer take risks? By pushing a button.
The problem arises when the ad agency attempts to invoice the client for button pushing. No one knows how much it costs to push a button! Or how much revenue pushing that button generated for the client!
The “2010 Digital Marketing Outlook” report found that 81% of the brand executives surveyed expected an increase in digital projects in 2010, and one-half will be moving dollars from traditional to digital budgets.
Senior marketers reported that social networks and applications were their biggest priority for 2010, followed closely by digital infrastructure. But “unpaid / earned / proprietary” media spending has seen the sharpest rise, with nearly one-fifth of respondents reporting increases of more than 30%.
Climbing unpaid-media spending is likely an effect of the increased emphasis on social networks, where the most effective efforts are earned, not bought.
Marketers are looking closely at measures of engagement. Respondents considered time spent on a site to be the most important performance metric, followed by unique page views.
“Digital agencies must avoid complacency at all costs and continue to focus on driving innovation as well as engaging consumers with relevant dialog in uncharted and fast-moving channels,” said Steve Wages, interim executive director of SoDA, in a statement.
Risk and reward don’t travel together by accident.
