As marketers shift budgets from traditional media that they buy through advertising to the more labor-intensive social media, it’s natural that media agencies would want to grab a piece of that action. This week we learned from the Wall Street Journal that Interpublic’s Universal McCann and Publicis Groupe’s Vivaki are building out entire divisions dedicated to social media.

But is that a good idea? No, for two reasons that I’ll get to in a minute. But first, a disclaimer: I spend the last year as social-media manager at McCann Erickson (Universal McCann’s sibling agency within Worldgroup). In other words, until I joined Advertising Age last week, I was that guy.

Essentially, I have two issues with what’s being done — where the social media practice is being built, and that it’s being built at all.

Media Buying and Social/Earned Media Don’t Mix
Universal McCann’s expertise is in media buying and planning, an agenda wholly antithetical to everything that is social-media marketing. Yes, media planning should encompass outlets of all types, and thus must take into account planned activity in the social space when allocating funds. However, it’s what UM represents — buying increments of attention through which brands broadcast messages to consumers — that I find so contradictory to the dynamics of social media and, consequently, marketing on social platforms.

Namely, in order to generate the buzz and really tap that word-of-mouth potential, the best investment a brand can make is time. It takes living, breathing, human beings devoting their time to converse with consumers to get a feel for what they want from the brand. It takes time to win their trust. Only after the relationship is built can the strategists and creative teams jump in to leverage that rapport for the purposes of a marketing campaign (or customer service). And even then, the goal is to earn the attention of your audience by providing something valuable, functional, or entertaining, not to buy it.

As such, I was quite surprised to hear that UM is the division of McCann Worldgroup charged with housing Rally and spearheading the social-media initiative for the one-stop-shop. While there are many IPG subsidiaries that may lay a valid claim on social media, Worldgroup, IPG’s “one-stop-shop,” houses only a few viable options. And UM, the branch devoted to purchasing ad units and 30-second ad blocks of attention, is not the one I’d associate with expertise in social media and earning consumer attention.

My only thought is that perhaps as “buying attention” becomes less effective, the intention here is to consciously push UM into a new space via this manufactured evolution.

It’s not that they don’t have a place in the conversation, they do, and it’s in research and metrics or Facebook homepage takeovers that drive to a campaign — areas that naturally flow from traditional media planning — not thought leadership, not campaign development, not strategy. That’s just too far from their core area of expertise. This is why I am utterly confused as to why Worldgroup chose them as their flagship in this space, especially when they are also made up of McCann Erickson and Weber Shandwick, both of which may be much better suited for the role.

Divisions Upon Subdivisions, When Will it End?
Secondly, beyond the confounding undertaking by Universal McCann, we have the industry-wide movement to continuously create new divisions dedicated toward every novel platform or technology as it emerges.

Creating separate divisions like this is essentially admittance that the rest of the organization is too lazy or too stupid keep up, not something I’d like to broadcast if it were my agency. The solution these agencies are looking for is one of education and consistent reeducation, creating a baseline knowledge that obviates the need for entire sections of company to focus on something everyone should understand.

Is there ever reason for bringing in a few specialists when needed? Of course there is, but in leadership roles. And even then, the goal must be to absorb their expertise to the point that it is fully integrated within the work flow structure. The fractal model of building divisions within micro-agencies within agencies is not a solution.

Think about it: As big agencies evolve and grow their capabilities by adding specialist departments, they are simultaneously, and intentionally, building an added layer of separation into the work-flow process. While it may seem like a necessary byproduct, it will only serve to hider efforts and create discord in the long term, and needs to be addressed at the inception point, not as an afterthought.

The more personnel committed to such exacting specialties (the extreme being embodied by these dedicated divisions), the further the agency moves in the wrong direction. The only reason for building out these sub-practices is for branding and positioning. The ultimate goal of these tactics is the generation of additional revenue, not the legitimate development of services or expertise.

Posted by David Teicher on 07.20.10 @ 04:50 PM

First, the bad news: If you want a reliable measure of what your competitors are spending online, you’re out of luck. Don’t bother looking for the kind of reliable methods available in traditional media; the web doesn’t offer them.

Methodological problems throw spending figures off wildly. There is some good news, though: Competitive tools for digital display aren’t useless, and you can glean lots of other competitive insights from the data your agency gives you.

First, let’s talk about how you ought to use digital competitive tools:

Do: Leverage Competitive Tools for Creative Insights

While competitive tools might miss details of competitors’ buys, they’re pretty good at giving an overview of what the competition was running over a given timeframe. You’ll be able to see their banner ads and other forms of display ads, and thus get a fairly good idea of what competitors were trying to achieve with their campaign. Seeing “Click Here to Buy” messages in the frames of a banner ad means the ad was part of a direct sales campaign, whereas a “Click Here to Sign Up For Our Newsletter” call to action means the campaign supported CRM. If a competitor was supporting a brand objective, a social media support objective, or a promotion, you’ll be able to tell from the creative that was running at the time.

True to form, many of the technologies showcased during New York’s annual Internet Week wowed, but what really generated attention were efforts to answer the $64,000 question: How do we measure the value of a Facebook fan, especially since Facebook is a dominant part of a marketer’s toolkit?

Two clever social-media technology companies, Syncapse and Vitrue, took a crack at answering this seemingly simple question. I say seemingly simple because, in reality, the “value” of a fan can mean lots of things such as actual sales value or value as evangelists or value as a research resource in a crowdsourcing campaign.

And given the ad hoc nature of measurement today, it’s no surprise, therefore, that we see wildly divergent answers from these two companies. Syncapse, for instance, assigns the average value of a fan at $136.38, and Vitrue pegs the value of a Facebook fan at $3.60. The wild differences, of course, lies in what you are measuring. Let’s take a closer look.

The Syncapse approach
I got to hear Syncapse CEO Michael Scissons present the findings from a joint, proprietary research study his company did with Hotspex. It was designed to calculate the value of a fan based on a set of attributes as described by Synapse in the study:

* Product spending — Facebook fans spend, on average, $71.84 more than non-fans over a two-year period.
* Loyalty (meaning ability to influence and promote brand loyalty within a target audience) — Facebook fans are 28% more likely to continue using a brand than consumers who are not fans on Facebook.
* Propensity to recommend — 68% of fans are “very likely” to recommend a product to family and friends (as opposed to 28% of non-fans).
* Brand affinity — 81% of fans feel a connection to the brand (versus only 39% of non-fans).

Do you know who the “official” sponsors for the World Cup are?

The world’s greatest sporting spectacle, the World Cup.  You might think from the prevalence of its “Write the Future” campaign on the web and in pop culture, that Nike is an official World Cup sponsor. It’s not. Nor is Pepsi, whose “Oh Africa” has been racking up millions of views on the web since May. Rather, the official sponsors are Adidas and Coke — and both have also produced compelling online videos in association with their campaigns. As we all know, brands often pay significant sums of money to be the exclusive sponsor for high-profile sporting events including the World Cup, Olympics and Super Bowl.

These sponsorships typically include a number of elements and are supported by TV, on premise and promotional support. To their credit, the event organizers themselves go to great lengths in order to protect the value of the sponsors, and the relationship they have with the event. Before the Beijing Olympics, the government assumed control of the outdoor ad space so that the sponsors would be given access to it. For as long as brands have sponsored these events, other brands have tried to ride along on the brand equity of the events as well.

This concept — known as “ambush marketing” — involves running similarly themed campaigns around the time of the event without actually mentioning the event itself. A famous example of this was American Express’ campaign around the Barcelona Olympics, “You don’t need a visa to go to Barcelona” (Visa was the Olympic sponsor). Aware of this practice, sponsoring brands usually think ahead of how to counteract them on site or on TV. Enter the web… As Nike and Pepsi have recently demonstrated, the open distribution and virality of the web create a whole new path for ambush marketing. In the “Write the Future” campaign, Nike produced a video starring their top-tier talent. They then used the web as an initial distribution ground. Two weeks and 15 million-plus views later, Nike has created a brand association with soccer, and likely the World Cup itself. Adidas also produced a very compelling video using talent as well — only it debuted a bit later and was far less seen or distributed. While Adidas may have a significant TV or local presence planned over the next two weeks, it got hijacked online.

So what can a brand do to protect itself, or alternately, what can you do to best position yourself to steal someone else’s thunder?

Start early! While you might not be able to own the conversation, you can at least start it. Plan far in advance — it is better to be a bit early to the party than to miss it completely. Starting the conversation immediately allows you to insert yourself into it.

Spend early! Don’t just plan your viral campaign to start early — adjust some of the spending cycle as well. Social media, rapid news cycles and thousands of bloggers are all affecting marketing plans in ways no one would have predicted 10 years ago. With these new tools, people have more outlets to talk about big events way in advance and websites actually have incentives to do so to increase search and other referral traffic. As a result, there is no shortage of relevant content to associate with from a very early stage, and users are in the right mindset well in advance of where they were years ago. As a frame of reference, type World Cup 2010 into Google — you get 196,000,000 results. Think about that –- there are close to 200,000,000 million pages that have already been indexed about the topic and the event hasn’t even started yet. Be clear While Keith Richman assume that event sponsors have many restrictions on how they can market their association, it is increasingly clear that subtlety does not work online.

As creative as the Adidas video is, it does not directly refer to their sponsorship. Wow factor The videos produced by Nike and Pepsi both have what Keith Richman call “the wow factor.” You watch the video and want to share it as a result of the story and creativity. Adidas and Coke also produced high quality content that was interesting and compelling –- but needed more “wow” to succeed online.

Target an audience! Targeting a specific audience may seem like impractical advice when talking about events like the Super Bowl or Olympics, which are inherently broad and have mass appeal. In reality though, you need a core group of evangelists to help spread the word for you, or you will never reach the broad audiences. Reach out to these evangelists early, let them know what is coming and get them excited.

In today’s world, the web and social media are rewriting the rules of marketing. This presents both new opportunities and challenges for brands, but in any event, is a factor that must be considered when hundreds of millions of dollars in sponsorships are on the line.

Keith Richman, Digital Next, AdAge.com

With Completion Expected by October, Deal Involves A lot of Moving Parts and an Aggressive Timetable

by Michael Learmonth (for the New York AdAge)

Call it a hand-holding tour. Yahoo and Microsoft executives and a small army of consultants will be making the rounds to agencies and marketers this summer to tell them what they need to know about the integration of the two search engines to create a stronger competitor to Google.

Meanwhile, the planning phase is over and both sides have embarked on the complex task of connecting Yahoo’s search front end to Bing’s search technology. The entire process is scheduled to be complete in October, but much has to happen between now and then. There are a lot of moving parts, and historically, these things don’t go smoothly. So what should you watch for in the Yahoo-Bing integration?

The fourth-quarter timing
The timeline doesn’t give marketers much leeway to test the system before the holiday season. “Launching in Q4 seems to offer marketers a lot of risk for very little reward,” said Bryan Wiener, CEO of digital agency 360i. Yahoo execs say if it appears they can’t reach desired quality levels, the deadline will be pushed until 2011. “Our priority is to transition with quality — quality judged by achieving business results for advertisers and publishers,” said Mark Morrissey, Yahoo senior VP and head of the search alliance.

Marketers’ learning curve
Theoretically, search advertisers know how Yahoo ads perform and how Bing ads perform. But how will they perform together? And will marketers take the plunge before the holiday season or move spending to Google? “We don’t know exactly, but we’re anticipating that it will be a blended average, so bids will adjust to appropriate levels,” said Kevin Lee, CEO of search-marketing firm DidIt.

Can Microsoft execute?
Every Yahoo-Microsoft advertiser will need an AdCenter account to use the combined system, but AdCenter isn’t ready for the volume. Key to meeting the deadline will be whether Microsoft can deliver two new releases of platform, the second built to handle the additional volume. “Largely, it is about Microsoft hitting delivery dates that will dictate the schedule,” Mr. Morrissey said.

Yahoo and Microsoft’s working relationship
Microsoft isn’t the easiest company to partner with, but there’s a sense that this can’t be allowed to fail, and so far, so good. It doesn’t hurt that the head of Microsoft advertising, Qi Liu, once ran Yahoo search, and several other Microsoft execs also worked on Yahoo’s Panama platform. It also doesn’t hurt that about 400 Yahoo search employees are migrating to Redmond. Meanwhile, former Microsoft search advertisers have to meet their new sales reps from Yahoo.

Will it matter?
Fundamentally, advertisers go where the queries are, and so far Bing’s gains appear to be coming directly from Yahoo, which won’t help in the competition with Google. “It’s like pulling change out of your right pocket and putting it into your left,” Mr. Weiner said. If the search transition was finished today, combined query share would be 29.5% in the U.S. What will it be when October rolls around?

Cause-conscious demographic likes campaigns tied to social movements!

With estimated spending by 14- to 34-year-old consumers of $1.2 trillion at stake, per market researcher Mintel International, it’s not surprising that a conference last week in California focusing on new ways of communicating with that population segment drew some of the nation’s top marketers, including Coca-Cola, Hewlett-Packard, General Electric and Activision Blizzard.

But a survey of the 35 CEOs and senior marketers attending the PTTOW conference did reveal some surprising results.

One key finding: today’s youth are extremely “cause” conscious. Nearly two-thirds of the respondents said that it’s important to tie marketing campaigns aimed at them to social movements, such as the environment or education or other cause-related initiatives that could affect social change. (Watch video highlights from the conference.)

The survey also revealed the extent to which social media has become integral to marketing efforts in just a few short years — each respondent said his firm is now using social media in some form to connect with consumers. Almost half reported that they believed online and social media will be the “most impactful media in connecting with Generation Y over the next two years.” Another 34 percent said mobile would be the most impactful.

Location-based social media functionality will grow dramatically in the near term, per the survey. Nearly two-thirds said it would become a “key element” in social media over the next year.