Last week, Peter Kim of Forrester produced a report into the future of marketing and advertising. Its summary is a stark “change or die” warning to what internet and social media are doing to the industry:

Today’s agencies fail to help marketers engage with consumers, who, as a result, are becoming less brand-loyal and more trusting of each other. To turn the tide, marketers will move to the Connected Agency — one that shifts: from making messages to nurturing consumer connections; from delivering push to creating pull interactions; and from orchestrating campaigns to facilitating conversations. Over the next five years, traditional agencies will make this shift; they will start by connecting with consumer communities and will eventually become an integral part of them.

Over at Technobabble 2.0, Jonny sums up some of the best blog reaction to the report, as well as some of his own observations. I particularly liked this one, as it’s spot-on - more and more of our work is working more integrated manner with other agencies, crossing over and sharing ideas and personnel:

I believe that within a few years there will be less distinction between digital, advertising and pr agencies - we will in turn become influencer agencies that span multiple media.

On the dissenting side, Mark Earls dislikes the concept of communities that Kim puts out:

But a big fat “NO” to the idea that there are “fixed communities”: this reeks all too much of the network theory that geekworld likes; human social connections are much more interesting than that model - derived from the tech world - suggest.

However, I don’t think anyone’s claiming there are such things as “fixed” communities - we all occupy multiple communities and adopt multiple identities. We may be an expert or influencer in one community but a total newbie in another. Trying to conceptualise these is difficult in terms of classic network theory, in terms of mere transportation of information and ideas and treating people as mere transceivers, can only provide an incomplete picture; some of the more funky postmodern stuff like actor-network theory could well come in. The idea of network and actors being interchangeable, of transformations of messages and what ANT calls “struggle”, add an extra dimension and take into account the fact that being members of a network involves development and taking time. Whether you’re a brand or an individual, it is not just a case of plonking yourself in, sending a few messages and saying you’ve “created a conversation”, but hard work that may mean transforming yourself as well as others.

What do we need to do to get networks and brands working together, is summed up nicely with what Paul Isakson has to say here:

Instead of looking at what brands can tell people, we instead need to be looking at what brands can do for people. How are people really using the products or services of your client? What are they actually saying about them? (No, not what they say in focus groups. What they really say about them.) What do they wish they could do better? What could brands do to make peoples’ lives better/easier/happier/etc.?

We’ve been looking a lot at this lately, building up some insight research methodologies and a corpus of tools we can use to look at brand perceptions, and how better to relate to customers - how to turn a brand that talks at consumers into one that talks with them. It’s fun but hard work - despite the wealth of information out there, distilling it into useful, actionable insight isn’t easy, and in fact it’s one area where old-school disciplines can help new media and digital mature as a discipline.