Forrester: Agencies Need to Reboot

The new Forrester report profiling the current structure and status of the agency world delivers findings that perhaps many of us in the social media space have known for a long time: "agencies need to reboot."

"I can't say there's an agency now that's the agency of the future," said Peter Kim, a Forrester Research analyst and co-author of the report.

Basically, they have discovered that indeed, consumers are increasingly tuning out messaging, thus marketing will become a practice of community/conversation integration:

In Forrester's view, a simple fact is driving the need for wrenching change in how advertising agencies are structured: consumers increasingly do not trust marketing messages. Instead, they rely on advice from friends and others in their various communities to make product decisions, while using tech tools to tune out ad messages they deem irrelevant. On top of that, consumer media choice has made the notion of a "captive audience," other than during some sporting events, a thing of the past. [via]




Key findings by Forrester:

Agencies need digial integration

Shift the focus from mass to niche

Agencies must be organized around communities, not disciplines

Agencies will begin to integrate community members into their companies

Advertising agencies will "get geekier"








Read the report synopsis here via AdWeek