The social media landscape
A recent article on brand republic told of how Michael Birch, the multi-millionaire founder of Bebo, has injected a significant sum in social media agency start-up Punktilio. The investment was intended to enable Punktilio to compete with larger agencies that are moving into the social media space. At this point I believed Punktilo must be very much in its early stages of development with a client base of mainly regional organizations. This size of social media agency would justify a need for investment. Further reading however revealed that their client list includes Phones 4 U, Arsenal FC and Simon Cowell’s SyCo Music label! With such large clients, many would believe the agency is able to pitch to almost any client already, given that social media is to all intents and purposes free and reliant only on creativity coupled with time.
The fact that the social media industry is heading the way of all other marketing specialism’s before it is worrying. In advertising a small number of top firms have a stranglehold on the best accounts. Agencies such as DDB and JWT do produce great work but to think the ability to produce great adverts is encased within their swanky offices is wrong. I have seen inside the inner sanctum of many of these agencies thanks to graduate schemes but quickly became disillusioned by the mechanics of large agencies: I felt under stretched and yet overworked.
This was the beauty of the social media industry for me- the ability of a one man band agency with bucket loads of creativity to handle the accounts of some of the most successful companies. Now market forces are impacting heavily and the traditional agencies are branching out. Tribal DDB launched a separate division purely for social media. The accounts housed elsewhere in the agency will now surely utilize them to handle social media campaigns.
So where does Juice Digital, where I am currently placed with Manchester Masters, fall in all of this. Well, medium sized would probably be a fair reflection but with the ability to become much larger if market forces do not become too great a barrier. The creativity is here, as are all of the technical elements. What we need though is for Marketing Directors at Nike, Manchester United etc. to realize that their social media account should not go to the largest agency or the one with the shiniest client list but rather to the team that can demonstrate real innovation. Let’s hope the social media industry can, for a few more years at least, become the market where the small agency gets to teach the traditional powerhouses a lesson every now and again.
Tom McKenna
