The chairman of the recent iMedia U.K. Agency Summit reveals his thoughts on the steps agencies will now need to make if they are to remain in touch with consumers.

Marcel Proust once remarked, 'the real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes,' and this seemed pertinent to many of the attitudes we were trying to change at the recent iMedia UK Agency Summit (which I had the pleasure of chairing).

Our keynote speaker, Hamish McRae from The Independent newspaper, outlined that we are presently witnessing the greatest shift of economic power for 150 years -- underpinned by five seismic trends. These trends were not just applicable to the importing and exporting of goods and of the movement of personnel, but about the wider awareness that all of us in the room (as marketing communicators) needed to embrace to ensure our businesses prospered in line with these new trends in economic power.

The implications Hamish outlined were applicable to all of us, and made us realise how great the challenge is that we face in the western world to maintain our current economic status quo:

• The fight for economic survival in a globalising, networked economy.
• The fight for resources and how this will affect nations and international business relationships.
• The fight for talent: how a business sources, attracts and enthuses the best young people from all over the globe to come and work for them.
• The fight for the space of mind of consumers as we enter a networked, interlinked universe that allows us to opt out of traditional advertising and media.

All very heady stuff -- especially whilst we enter an epochal transition in working out what advertising now is, what media will evolve into and how commercial communication companies are going to survive and prosper. Marshall McLuhan informs us that 'all media work us over completely and are so persuasive in their political, personal, economic, aesthetic, psychological, moral, ethical and social consequences that they leave no part of us untouched, unaffected, unaltered.' That was true in a world dominated by a few media giants that decided what we could or should know, but it's clear that Marshall McLuhan's thesis is being 'rewritten' by the revolution taking place in social media. And what about advertising? 'Nobody reads ads. People read what interests them, and sometimes it's an ad,' said Howard Gossage.

For me this was a core component of the Summit because it directly addressed to the audience the awkward questions: how does one make advertising useful? And how do we move beyond a world of interruption marketing, to a world of engagement marketing? Ultimately, in my opinion, it becomes an issue as to who can implement social marketing tools most effectively…
 
Vasco Sommer-Nunes expanded upon this theme when looking at blogs. He found that there were four key components behind the most successful and involving ones:

• Respect: The essential learning curve is to remember blogs should be respected as a personal space.
• Participation over interruption: Don't interrupt what the user is doing with an ad but rather create an environment in which the user has a natural interest in participating and then voluntarily decides to engage with.
• Content, not ads: Content is much more likely to fulfil a user's need over an ad. People love to talk about interesting things that they are party to online. Ads rarely trigger a conversation, but conversations drive markets and clients want to be talked about.
• Users are ambassadors: Word of mouth is the most influential factor in making a purchase decision and with every third online purchase being closely influenced by peer to peer communication, bloggers become a serious force to be reckoned with. Perhaps blogs are the new advertising!

So what does this mean for the agency of the future, and how will it evolve in this consumer-empowered universe? To return to the iMedia Agency Summit once more, there was a fascinating panel debate addressing this issue, and I recall Johnny Vulkan (from the New York-based agency Anomaly), discussing how they had strived to navigate away from old business models to become something that now couldn't be compared to a traditional agency. This was a world where networks existed to harness peer groups of creative and communication talent, diverse in essence and which couldn't be contained within the four walls of a 'traditional' agency.

So what's next?

I did feel that although there was general agreement among the delegates, there was also a vacuum as to what comes next as we seek new advertising models, frameworks and metrics. But it does seem clear from our discussions that we urgently need to begin implementing a new blueprint that combines different media and different talent, to help create great and inspiring communication that ultimately transform the traditional forms of media that have for so long dominated our industry.

Alan Moore is founder & CEO, SMLXL.