I’m honored to be a guest on Mitch Joel‘s famed podcast, Six Pixels of Separation, to discuss my latest post that’s caught the Industry’s attention how Social Media Agencies are Turning to Ads. Mitch invited me on the podcast to discuss this further.
One of the assertions I make is the term “Social Media Agency of Record” (aka SMaoR) will eventually go by the wayside, as those pure play agencies are starting to move into advertising (starting with social ads), digital, interactive, and more. My take? We’ll just have a broader focus as social becomes nicely integrated with other digital efforts.
Listen in to the podcast below using the embed, or watch on Mitch’s website.
I’d love to hear from you in the comments, should the term Social media agency of Record dissolve? Or will this remain as a dedicated type of pure play firm?
I don’t know if the term SMAOR will be long lived or short lived, but I can tell you that social and digital are not the same, serve dramatically different business outcomes, and will continue to be separate but strong compliments to each other.
Digital has long been the realm of performance marketers. Brands buyers have largely been left out of digital – as evidenced by their continued large spend in traditional media (digital spend is $ 60B annually and traditional brand spend is 10x that at $ 600B annually).
Social will end up being the preferred environment for brand engagement at scale, while digital as you see it today will continue to be the realm of the performance marketer. These two types of business outcomes – brand building ( brand mindshare, brand love, brand advocacy, brand awareness) vs. performance require different skills and a different approach to different types of clients. Large CPG brands will never be big digital spenders but may spend massively for brand engagement at scale in social.
This is an exciting time without a doubt, but early in the evolution of authentic brand engagement at scale in social.