The Unknown Future of Media Agencies

I watched an interesting "3 Minute Ad Age" video on Tivo about reinventing media by a company called VivaKi, "a global media services network of Publicis Groupe." Tim Hanlon, SVP, discussed that we must re-envision the role of media agencies. Historically an agency has been a useful and necessary component for creating and delivering content. As marketing becomes more organic and grassroots, agencies will have to think about what new and innovative content they can provide. With the craze of social networking sites, marketing and brands can manage this themselves, and directly and intimately engage with their consumers through mediums such as facebook. How do agencies buy social media and does it make sense? It's seems as though a lot of brands have found very creative ways to engage their customers anywhere from creating your own M&M to creating your own commercial (Dove did this nicely). There are plenty of fun and useless iphone applications out there too that could be quite an engaging medium. Perhaps agencies will need more programmers and video game developers for this form of interactive content.

This made me think about the world of market research, and the variety of free tools out there like Google Insights, which pose a threat to the research industry as well.

Nothing is constant, everything is always changing, and we must learn to adapt and move forward, otherwise we will fall behind.