Social Media & the Strategic Opportunity for Advertising

Martin Thomas @crowdsurfing

Hype Shows No Sign of Diminishing

Advertising & Social Media

o Contradictory messages

o Change drivers

o Reinventing the agency model & approach

Death of Advertising May have Been Exaggerated

£250k for 30 second spot

High Speed v High Production

v

Ad of the Year?

Big Media v Big Society

v

Highest rated ad during 2011 Superbowl

$20m community fund replaces Superbowl ad

Change DriversSocio-Cultural & Media Landscape

o Trust deficit

o Dispersal of authority & expertise

o Collective self expression

o New technology

Which media owner has larger audience than all these combined?

Change DriversEvolving Client Demands

Fastest growing brand in category without any advertising support

Fastest growing brand in category without any advertising support

140 m viewers, no media investment140 m viewers, no media investment

Expert sourced creative campaigns

Expert sourced creative campaigns

Breakthrough social mediaBreakthrough social media

Change DriversShifting Creative Economics

Visit Britain saved over £200k £200k on photographic costs using Flickr

“A few 19 year old students … can design & produce a brilliant campaign in a few hours that once would have taken weeks of late-night creative work by 50 people to produce”Jerry Della Femina (original Mad Man)

Change DriversEmerging Collaborative Business Models

o Tapping into spirit of collective self expression

Opening up radical new business models

Community Commerce Self-sustaining creative community

Members submit designs => 80,000+ submissions

Opportunity to pre test beta versions Community votes => 800+ designs Designers receive $2,500 + marketing advice +

retain IP

No professional designers, no salesforce, no distribution, no market research, no advertising=> $30m revenues … high margins

Community Commerce People-powered mobile network (from

O2) Members receive points for recruiting new

people, making suggestions & solving problems => converted into cash

20% actively involved Aim that 25% of members will get half of cost of

calls returned to them for contribution to community

Plans to involve community in pricing & marketing decisions

Not reliant on call centres, expensive marketing & product support

Reinventing Agency Model & Approach

Reinventing the Agency

o Coming to terms with collaborative creativity

Crowd/Expert sourcing

Reinventing the Agencyo Learning from the software industry

Cathedral = traditional, tightly controlled innovation model Bazaar = loose, open source approach, harnessing the skills of the wider developer community

Not particularly effective at originating concepts, which still rely on the spark of individual genius to make them happen Very effective at testing & improving them

Reinventing the Agency

o “Living life in beta”

“If something looks too perfect, consumers won’t touch it as ‘it leaves no space for me” Clay Shirky

Brand owners should “allow their work to get ‘messed up”Alex Marks at Microsoft Advertising

Reinventing the Agency

o “Living life in beta”

Authenticity & topicality more important than production values

Reinventing the Agency

o Creativity in real time … all the time

o … something that the PR industry has always taken for granted

“365 day creativity” rather than concentrating on 1-2 monolithic campaigns every year Robert Campbell, Beta

Reinventing the Agency

o Need to learn/relearn additional skills

o Aided by client demand for “intelligent rebundling”

Reinventing the Agency

o Core creative skill remains critical

o Further emphasised by rise of social searchEmphasis on content rather than tech

Reinventing the Agency

o Truly embracing new media opportunities without recycling old ideas & techniques

Multi-screen Mobile

Need to avoid “trying to do today’s job with yesterday’s tools & yesterday’s concepts” Marshall McLuhan

www.crowdsurfing.net@crowdsurfing