Advertising and Marketing in the Digital Age

Twitter background designed by Affinity Express for a client

Interactive services is such a dynamic, interesting space. I recently interviewed Marisol Oberzauchner, director of interactive services at Affinity Express, to pick her brains about what she thinks of the space and what Affinity Express is doing in it. Here you go. 

KG: You help lead interactive services for Affinity Express. This is a dynamic category and it seems to change almost daily. How do you stay current with the latest trends?

MO: Our clients are looking for informed guidance. In my role, I have to continually stay abreast of what is happening in the industry, so I connect to social media portals that cover these topics, track new technologies through communities on LinkedIn and access creative groups. Outside of work, I read technology books, computer magazines and daily digests. At times, I attend demonstrations of new products. The information is available; you just have to stay current and make it a daily priority. 

Of course I follow the leaders in the space but also keep an eye out for the smaller firms who are trying to depart from the norm and solve problems in new ways. Breakthroughs seem to come frequently from these smaller guys and then the Apples and Googles buy them out. YouTube is a great example. I also found the acquisition of Radian6 by Salesforce.com interesting. A bigger recent event was of course Microsoft’s acquisition of Skype.

Agencies, Call in the Surgeon

Agencies have completely lost their way. I don’t think time needs to be spent debating that point. What I haven’t seen yet is a cohesive plan to restore the true agency business model.

Let’s take a look at history. Ad agencies were started by newspaper executives, who realized that by “priming the pump” and delivering better ad creative, publishers would ultimately sell more ad inventory.

At their peak, agencies were hired for their ability to create big ideas—business-building ideas. I’m not saying you don’t need execution, process, traffic, operations and the rest. But I am saying I’ve never met a client who wants to give an agency a substantial account because of any of these things.

Agencies win on million dollar ideas (I do realize there are specialized agencies that focus on SEO, SEM, etc., but I’m talking about the truly big agencies here). You can’t pitch a Fortune 50 account and say “I have great process, I compensate my people correctly, my production is pristine” and so on. You have to go to them and say “I won client XYZ and they were floundering. With our help, they advanced from #6 in the category to #2, and are seriously competing to be #1” (or something similar). Everything else you might say is a rabbit hole. You can spend all the time you want in it, but you won’t significantly advance your business.

How do you get to this point?