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September 11, 2006
Interactive in the Agency - Rekindling An Old Flame
Saw an interesting post today on the Hill & Knowlton blog about Interactive getting rolling again around the ad agency / PR world.
http://blogs.hillandknowlton.com/blogs/lisawalker/archive/2006/09/08/4515.aspx
Good stuff. My stock is up then.
In the daily Marketing Mag email, I see there's a posting for a "Web 2.0 Evangelist" at Kamelio. (It must all the rage again, techy terms that confound clients are starting to flourish ... old habits die hard I guess.)
Myself, I'm partial to well-executed interactive coming out of the agency where a lot of the creative marketing thinking gets done. But that's easier said than done. Interactive hasn't paid many bills for agencies and more often than not it's been the other way around so it's kind of fallen off the radar in favour of focussing on other avante-garde service offerings. Better off figuring out how to ward off strategy-slinging management consultants vying for the ear of brand-conscious VP of Marketing.
Ah... interactive...
The rage came, the agencies bolted on the services thinking the world would change overnight, there was more integration theory than practice, superlatives abounded and everyone lost money. Integrated advertising with strong digital components are a tall order and it's the reason that really smart, well-rounded & strategic interactive shops are going to be able to take work away from agencies for the foreseeable future.
I need to post on this again, but I think the right structure is a very important ingredient in getting good integrated marketing out the door. Don't treat interactive as a separate thing. Get it inside the agency.
In the meantime, as the web comes back into vogue again (and it is and will continue to) it'll be interesting to see if we've learned anything from the last time around.
I did...
Posted by Derek Leverington at September 11, 2006 11:25 AM