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Where do you see yourself and your agency by 2016? For those who don’t buck their ideas up, “driving a taxi” and “nowhere” respectively is the conclusion of the recently published IPA/Future Foundation report ‘The Future of Advertising and Agencies: a 10-year perspective.’
This recently published tome looks at how the brand and media environment might evolve, and how ‘the Agency’ might look in 2016.
It concludes that brands will merge into an increasingly fragmented media content from search right through to gaming, and that marketers’ focus will shift to gathering data about consumers and then interacting with them on a permission basis.
At the same time traditional advertising will mutate into editorial and consumer space and the 30-second TV ad will become anachronistic.
So are the days numbered for traditional advertising agencies? Media Land is certainly changing fast, but then it always has. Remember the explosion in desktop publishing in the early 80s? Reports of agencies dying then were much exaggerated then, let alone the terminal throes of established magazines.
Agencies are notoriously durable and are almost by default early adaptors by definition, as arguably they are closest to emerging trends when compared to almost any other service industry.
And what is clear to any early adapting agency is the fundamental shift in influencing and buying power in favour of the consumer. If the Internet and all its associated culture is the biggest shake-up since the industrial revolution, then disintermediation, or the bypassing of the middleman to reach goods and services, has been the inevitable result.
But with the evolution of search engine marketing as a mainstream discipline, forward thinking advertising and PR agencies are seeing opportunities in a) consolidating and developing existing client and business arrangements b) developing new revenue streams and c) the increasing use of search engine marketing as intelligence that has implications in every aspect of their clients (and their own) sales and marketing activity. In short, there are a myriad of crossovers between traditional agency activity and search engine marketing.
For instance, organic, or natural search, ideally compliments mainstream PR-whether that is B2B or consumer driven. Agencies are already experiencing massive shifts in budgets being re-allocated online as clients see the web as an increasingly powerful resource used by their target audience. But in the same way that PR seeds the press with releases and themes, clients will want visibility in those all important natural search engine listings. This is, after all, the equivalent of editorial to contrast PPC advertising, but without the ensuing online advertising inflation that is so prevalent today.
Consistency of message is vital in any overall campaign. Visibility in the search engine listings is an effective way of underpinning advertising and pr activity elsewhere. It isn’t necessarily that search engine marketing will replace advertising, PR or direct mail or that matter, it is more that the disciplines are becoming that much further intertwined.
After all, an in-store sale may be the result of online research leading to a visit to a website. Conversely, a newspaper article or ad may have sparked sufficient interest to visit a company’s website and from there, a sale or at the very least a new business enquiry.
Finally, organic search gives any campaign the ultimate potential and lucrative results – of the so called ‘long tail of search’. Audiences may have very specific requirements that are typed into Google, or instance a certain colour or technical specification which may indicate they are some way along the buying process. Alternatively, search engine marketing means that a site can be optimised to attract visits and enquiries from all associated terms around a campaign message, be that a strapline or a phrase used in marketing that product or service offline or even the name of the actor playing the part in a TV commercial. Imagine the literally hundreds of potential sales channels search engine marketing can add to an advertising or PR campaign.
And in the same way that editorial is perceived to have more authority and ‘stickiness’ than advertising, a recent survey found that 40% of people reviewing organic listings perceived those on the first page of Google, MSN and Yahoo! to be experts in their particular field.
The benefits to utilising search engine marketing do not end with search engine visibility however. It is by no means unusual to record a Return on Investment of anything between 300-400% over a campaign duration.
So how best can any agency, not just advertising and pr, integrate search into their campaign planning? Collaboration, or a strategic partnership, would seem to be a logical and commercially effective solution, with low risk / high returns achievable or both sides, as well as the potential of a happy client with a significantly boosted bottom line.
However, effective search engine marketing is time-consuming and relentless in its demand for constant maintenance. And given the explosion in website activity and the subsequent elevation of search engine marketing from a peripheral, specialist IT based discipline into the core marketing resource it is seen as now, it is increasingly competitive.
The key to making the collaboration or partnership work is the people and processes involved. An agency needs 100% confidence in a strategic partner before letting them anywhere near established clients or a pitching situation.
The debate about the future of branding and the media environment will rumble on, but one thing is for sure: the relationship between agency/client/consumer is shifting rapidly with the consumer increasingly in the driving seat. Collaboration with a proven search engine marketing supplier will give a whole new depth and perspective to any campaign both in terms of income and sales leads, right through to data intelligence that has implications throughout all company sales and marketing activity, such as which enquiry terms are being used to find a particular product or service? What are its most popular generic terms? Are they abbreviated?
These, and many more areas of marketing activity enjoy a whole new perspective with the benefit of search engine marketing.
No matter what changes pan out in the media environment, the need to ‘add value’ will always be the mantra of any agency looking to retain and build client relationships and Search is an invaluable tool in achieving this.
Any agency looking to the future and wishing to consolidate and develop client relationships and significant new income streams would be well advised to start researching the market for a reliable partner in search engine marketing.
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