The Agency Role in Brand Content

By Haniya Rae • May 12, 2013 •

Brands are without a doubt publishers these days. They are building command centers and churning out content they hope will find an audience.

That should be good news for agencies. Yet many brands are going directly to publishers and other content specialists to create brand content. Some question whether agencies, steeped in creating ads, are up to the task of leading their clients’ content strategies.

“In Content Era, What’s the Role of Agencies?” examined those issues. Alexander Jutkowitz, managing partner of Group SJR, contended many agencies just can’t keep up with content strategy on a daily basis. Agencies were created for one-hit advertisement campaigns, not ongoing media sites.

As you can imagine, that didn’t sit well with several agency folks. Craig Waller, president at Pace Communications, contends that “there exists a small breed of agencies that understand content and specialize in creating and managing content for brands.” Still he allows, big agencies complicate the matter by trying to “purport to be experts in field and content.”

Not so, according to Andrew Boer, the president of Movable Media: “Just as there was a media buying function in advertising, agencies will play the same role with paid content amplification, and likely do a better job as choices begin to expand beyond Outbrain and Facebook sponsored posts.”

Tom Buday, head of marketing and consumer communication at Nestle, puts forth the idea that ads are content, so the distinctions are meaningless.