by: Karl Long
If Time magazine’s proclamation of “person of the year” being plain old you wasn’t enough, then Ad Week’s ad “Agency of the Year” being The Consumer should hammer home the point. The point being that the internet (and most significantly in 2006, youtube) enables massive distribution potential to anyone with an internet connection.
Think about it in the context of HL Menkins classic quote:
Overall it’s a pretty interesting article that is levelheaded and a couple of the points that they make are right on.
1. Consumers have always been in control, and consumer generated content is just amplifying that
2. Agencies really are losing control
3. Inexpensive Rapid Prototyping comes to the Ad industry
As I had written previously in the 3 rules for managing viral marketing I noted that the cost of creating viral ads was so low that experimentation and rapid prototyping had to be part of the development process, and to be a total dick and quote myself:
There is a follow up post called How and Why We Picked the Consumer as Agency of the Year which is worth a look.
One thing that agencies need to take on board from this is that it is still really all about authenticity, this is in fact something I have seen written about a lot in “2007 predictions”. Like David at the Brand Experience Lab
As for moving forward I wouldn’t be surprised to see a lot more news about the effects of social-media and consumer generated content on the political process, David Dalka just recently wrote about this in “How to Forge a New American Mandate Via Social Media Political Revolution”.
Original Post: http://blog.experiencecurve.com/archives/ad-agency-of-the-year-its-you-again