Is Social Media Too Boring For The Ad Industry?

While reading one of favourite blogs, Todd at PR Squared mentioned some common topics that come up, when discussing social media with ad execs:


"Advertising Exec: “Thanks for coming by.  We know you guys ‘get’ Social Media.  We get it, too; we love it in fact — but …”
PR Guy: “But it all starts to fall apart once you get past the campaign level?”
Advertising Exec: “Yea, yea, well, kind of… Don’t get me wrong, we can develop some community-appropriate and rockstar-level creative that helps start the conversations, even get a ton of fans or followers or whatever, but …”
PR Guy: “But then you have to feed that beast, right?  You feel this voracious need to fill up the channel with new and excellent content, which is an expensive burden, both financially and creatively.”
Advertising Exec: “Yes, and then …”
PR Guy: “And then you also need to monitor these conversations and engage at a peer level in real-time, and also guide the client in how to react quickly, appropriately, and candidly themselves.”
Advertising Exec: “Yes!! And that’s not what we do.”
PR Guy: “Yep, I get it.  You guys craft brilliant campaigns but the ‘relationships’ part feels low-level, mundane, hard-to-do, and fraught with risk as you engage with every Tom, Dick & Wierdo online.”
Advertising Exec: “See?  I knew you ‘got it.’”

Todd, I agree with you 100 percent. Coming from the ad world myself, I see where things sort of fall apart when ad execs try to develop s.m. campaigns. Most ad agencies feel building social media campaigns, is all about creating groups, fanpages and running ads on Facebook. Advertising is all about selling things, so the fact that they have to take a new approach with s.m. (i.e. relationship building, community management etc.) it be comes this tedious task no one wants to commit to. I think they're trying to over complicate things. Most can not even being to understand how simple s.m. really is.