Last night I attended the kick-off of the third season of Conversations About The Future Of Advertising. Edward Boches (@edwardboches), Chief Creative Officer/Chief Social Media Officer, MULLEN (Boston) spoke about his personal evolution as an agency leader in the face of historic change.

Edward believes everything has changed, but the real change is the individual’s new power, influence, participation and control: both as a consumer and individual.

I’ve been talking to Edward for about a year now over Twitter, so I felt like we already knew each other. I worked at Mullen in the past, so we had that connection but we both also are avid cyclists which brings an even stronger bond. Unfortunately I didn’t get to work with him when I was at Mullen.

Here are some key points from the presentation as well as my thoughts.

Regarding Facebook:
• We are interested in a brand’s Facebook feed, but we won’t visit their fan page on a regular basis. We will read their feeds, so make sure you have content that is interesting and engaging
• Why take out a Facebook ad if your target is mostly iphone users. This is a great point. Just because your audience is on Facebook it doesn’t mean that they are viewing Facebook in their browsers. I read all of my Facebook feeds through TweetDeck, I will never see your Facebook ad you are trying to serve me.

Content:
• Social media must 1st start with a content strategy. If you have no content to engage your audience, your social media outreach will fail.
• There’s a mindset in PR that’s more adaptable to the concept of conversation strategy. Mullen has decided to put the bulk of it’s social media outreach within the public relation’s team. PR has a history of great writing and communication, so it is a great fit. I believe PR, Social Media, Search should all be integrated.
• The agency of the future: be fearless, experiment, and create content that your audience cares about
• The mp3 is good enough. Why do you need a million dollar TV commercial?

Community:
• There’s no such thing as perfect, only perfects. The old marketing where you had the data that said Males 40-44 have this behavior, and hang out here is over. There is no perfect ad buy anymore. You have to create community and content where your audience is
• Crowdsourcing will grow in popularity whether we like it or not.
• Curator/choreographer will emerge as the new important role
• Targeting + creative + conversation strategy will be the new formula
• “We used to watch. Now we create.” ~ “Community is the new source of content.”
• Turn analog events into digital. A great example of this is Mullen’s Brand Bowl 2010
• Crowd source a blog. Check out The Next Generation
• Inspire consumers to create stories with you
• Attention is the new scarcity. Inspire and start building relationships with your audience
• Community is our new source of content
• We want to do business with a person
• If you are not talking to consumers as participants and still as audience members, you are doomed

Key points to ponder
• The new creative brief. Build a client site that pull in Twitter, RSS feeds, videos etc. “see” your audience. Check out Magnify
• The future marketer has to be a choreographer and a curator
• ad agencies are betting on: platform, talk value, community, crowdsourcing … Not on consumer as an audience
• Whoever hires the best digital talent will win. Creativity will matter more than ever since you can’t buy attention

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 9th, 2010 at 11:24 am and is filed under Risdall Integration Group. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.