I hadn’t thought so much about resale, but as a guy who still has a second generation iPod in service, my perspective’s a little skewed.

Chances are pretty good I’ll have the thing later today.

You’re right, three sports is a lot to follow and there isn’t much room to add in another one.

saludos
Gabriel de Buenos Aires

You’re right pointing out Ad agencies should be careful to assign their creatives to execute social media ‘campaigns’. Although indeed in some cases this is exactly what they should do.

However I’m not sure I can agree with your overall conclusion stating that Ad agencies should not ‘do’ social media campaigning. In contrary I would say Ad agencies should demand to be involved with any social media project their client is involved with or plans to. Again you’re absolutely right arguing that this would be an expensive mistake for any agency when this comes down to creatives spending valuable time monitoring streams or comment panels.

But doesn’t this merely say that Ad agencies currently are not well enough organized to execute such tasks? Or that they have to better define their role and benefits for social media campaigning to their clients? After all social media touches every aspect of a brand and is capable to reach much deeper into their customers’ environment and their own organization than any traditional campaign or media ever could achieve. Isn’t this the prime ‘working area’ of an Ad agency?

So, the question at hand imo is not if an Ad agency should engage in social media campaigning — they definitely should – but how they should organize themselves without bleeding their creative assets. And with organizing I don’t mean building huge departments with (junior) people executing SM campaigns. That reminds me too much of the early nineties where Ad agencies built huge DTP studio departments that turned out to be very expensive forcing agency management to make the studio billable draining creative flexibility.

I think Ad agencies should redefine their role from scratch, their responsibilities and relation with their clients even up to the level of what it is they do best. When social media becomes business as usual, and it will soon imo, I think we’ll find creativity to become more strategic as will an agency’s role. No longer will it be sufficient to write great copy or script an excellent commercial. Great creative concepts will be useless without a properly defined context strategy.

The concept will become an integrated part of the context if you like. And if you’re not capable as an Ad agency to lay out and execute a contextual strategy you’ll have a much bigger problem at hand than discussing whether you should or should not assign your creatives to social media execution duties.

In short you’re right arguing an agency should not engage with social media execution only when such agency has not yet re-invented itself. But than the agency will face a much much bigger problem. The kind of ‘will we survive’-problem. However when they did, or are doing so they should embrace social media indefinite and position themselves as true brand masters. A position any Ad-agency should have taken long ago btw.

Kind regards
Bartel Scheers
Amsterdam, The Netherlands