As brands struggle to leverage user-generated content, this iMedia contributor says they should be looking to their agencies.

I think it was Advertising.com' Scott Ferber who did his best Friedrich Nietzsche impression a few years back and declared that "agencies are dead." I don't mean to tease Scott, who may have taken the millions of dollars that he and his brother John made from the sale of their company to AOL and grown a beard to rival Zarathustra by now for all I know. But, while agencies have assuredly changed in recent years and seen their billings rise, fall, and rise again, what has changed the most for them on a corporate basis has been how they actually make their money.

As most of you reading this have known for years, the days of the standard agency markup are long gone. Our industry may have been the first to change things. But today, all kinds of new media segmentation has made thoughts of "divergence," which was a cool buzzword last year, seem almost quaint. With MySpace leading the way in user-generated content (UGC) -- with as much as four percent of all web page views now, depending on whose figures you believe -- it's clear that marketers need to learn how to leverage UCG toward their branding objectives. But how?

As my friend Jim Meskauskas wrote in this space last January, "Marketers, though interested in consumer-generated content like blogs or boards where customers can post their comments, are still not willing to relinquish the control they think they have over their brand in the open marketplace of ideas. Although marketers want to engage their audiences in the 21st century, they fear engaging those audiences in a 21st century manner… Marketers and the media they employ need to get just as involved in the conversation of this marketplace as the audiences are."

I appreciate that Jimmy coyly references that marketers only think they have control over their brands in the marketplace. Anyone reading this may think that he was just being his usual subversive self and implying that the marketplace truly decides, no matter what the brand marketers assert.

But, I see this issue of control in a different way, while agreeing with Jim that marketers don't have as much control as they may think. For my money, the real gatekeepers for brands today, more than ever, are agencies.

Of course, as we've already established, agencies are changing. How has the rise of UGC accelerated this change?

"UGC will make marketers re-negotiate their brands' relationships with consumers. That doesn't mean walking away from agencies or branding. It means really listening to and providing venues to hear what consumers say and working with that," says Kathy Sharpe, CEO of Sharpe Partners. Sharpe Partners is among the vanguard of agencies thriving in this age of extreme divergence and UGC. "It's forcing agencies to make good on what they always promised-- understanding the consumer and using that understanding to sell product."

Just as good media relations require practitioners to know and treat reporters at least as well if not better than clients, the best agencies today are the ones that embrace this new role. Instead of the notion that agency professionals should be task masters who understand strategy in silos, today's successful agency professionals must have a far broader understanding of not just the zeitgeist of a given milieu, but also the sociology behind it. Only those agencies with this kind of nimble and flexible talent will gather the large branding accounts that are migrating away from television.

In other words, we all know that UGC is growing tremendously in breadth and influence. That's not news. What's news is that the lens through which brands reach their audiences is -- increasingly -- an agency lens.

"Agencies as television spot factories are dead, agencies as partners for building consumer relationships with brands are alive and well and doing it on the web, iPods, in blogs and even in stores," says Sharpe.

In 2001, when the White House chose an agency professional, Charlotte Beers, to be its top public diplomat, many in the intelligentsia scoffed. But, the increasing complexities of our world require anyone communicating with divergent and sometimes hard-to-reach audiences to know best how to reach those audiences. When it comes to communicating brands across the many growing media venues available, especially UGC, marketers should think of that long-ago appointment as a metaphor pointing toward things to come. 

The take-away for brand marketers is this: Make sure that the agency -- or agencies -- you choose to work with not only knows some of the answers you seek, but also knows many more of the questions than you would have ever thought of yourself. 

Mark Naples is managing partner at WIT Strategy. Read full bio.