In a tough climate it's easy to talk about changing an industry but then doing nothing. But at the recent Agency Summit, many agency heads decided to do something a bit radical to make change actually happen.

I attended the iMedia U.K. Agency Summit in Brighton last month, where many of the discussions centred on new technologies and ways to facilitate marketing to consumers. Key areas of focus were mobile (as always), social media and ad exchanges.

Although we all talked through many of the positive and negative aspects of these growing channels, a large percentage of the attending agencies were asking for input on how to structure them better. For example, what are the rules for engagement? How much do you charge to manage an ad exchange campaign or for social media services?

Many of the agencies were looking for guidelines as to what's acceptable within these realms, and it transpired that in the place of nothing, each agency was creating its own marketplace. This means charging completely different amounts in a variety of ways, often on an ad hoc basis.

The IAB released a set of social media standards recently, focusing on social media ad metrics and social advertising best practices, in an attempt to tackle this problem. But according to the agencies and publishers who attended the summit, these haven't been readily adopted. The guidelines seem to be a good set of metrics to start from, but in order for something to be rolled out across the board, we first need to define what each agency is actually doing across these new channels. This includes identifying what activities they are being asked to undertake and how they are fulfilling these demands.

A group of agency heads and those working within the space decided to start thinking about forming standards, terms and conditions, in order to create a defined marketplace for social media, and so created 'The Brighton Group'.

The objective of the group, which was facilitated by Peter Kwong, senior planner at Publicis Modem, is to get the people that have the ability to make a change in the same room to talk about what can be achieved. One of the key goals is to factor in how publishers can get involved in the process, and from this early stage, it would make sense that they are encouraged to form the same sort of group.

Historically, groups like this have failed to make a marked difference, whichever industry they fall under. However, one positive example is the Aspen Group. In 2001, this collective was created to look specifically at terms and conditions (T and C) relating to online media campaigns. Each agency had its own agenda and many questions were put forward about how to define CPM and CPC. Despite this, the IAB drafted the Aspen Group T&C document in 2002, which has now been rolled out and is accepted as an industry-wide standard. Proof that despite initial hurdles, a group of people really can make a difference.

The secret to making a group with a goal so huge really work is to use an open source model. Here, agencies and the like contribute in the understanding that eventually their involvement will become beneficial to all those involved in or working with social media. Imagine a world where clients, agencies and publishers all knew what the price should be to a run a social media campaign, or what the average cost per referral is so that success can truly be benchmarked. Possible? We'll see…

Chris Nuener is SVP Agency Solutions at Acceleration.