Beyond Viral: How to Attract Customers, Promote Your Brand, and Make Money with Online Video

Chapter 7. Agencies Searching for Role

In this chapter, you will learn:

• How marketing, strategy, Internet, and advertising agencies are adapting to the emergence of online video and social media.

• How to predict some of the behaviors these companies will exhibit based on their response to the emergence of the Internet as a marketing channel.

• How to improve your investment in online video based on the successes and failures of large campaigns.

Learning from the Past

When consumer preferences for media change quickly, marketing and advertising agencies exhibit three different behaviors: (1) denial, (2) hastened exuberance, or (3) gradual evolution. When I speak to agencies, I liken the rise of online video and social media to the arrival of Internet advertising. Web advertising (banners, web sites, paid search) had similar ramifications to the agency landscape to the arrival of Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. The world's largest brands depend on the advice and execution of several large agency holding companies, which generally operate via loosely affiliated specialty companies.

Similarly, at the millennium's onset, many of these individual companies or holding companies employed one or more e-business experts. What these subject-matter experts possessed in Internet knowledge, however, they lacked in influence or direct client access. The power in agencies is generally relegated to the agency's founders, creative leaders, rainmakers (sales leaders), or those overseeing the agency's top accounts. ...