Why miss out on the free media while spending millions (or more) on paid-for media placement?

It’s something I keep on asking for, but seems to be consistently waylaid by cost – the additional fees required to pay for the talent, the music, etc. to be world-wide rather than local are enough to stop this from happening on a semi-regular basis – as a result, I think that we are limited to waiting for the public to post our ads (illegally, but that doesn’t seem to be bothering many people).

Surely that’s wrong?!

I actually believe the future of “Traffic” will not be just moving tapes of our ads to the TV networks or routing print ads to the magazines…instead I think the function should evolve & change around social media.

Right now in the States at least there is a boom in “feed companies” that claim to take digital content like videos and get them on sites, get them talked about on blogs, create attention to these assets, “help to go viral”…I call it online PR but some call it social media seeding.

Most of their success still depends on simply good creative…a good video will do well without much artificial help. Making a video appropriately so is one challenge, giving it a little bit more of a push out there is another.

The reality is that we can barely get a junior account person to upload video assets to YouTube and other video sites, let alone go back and see what’s sticking, who’s talking, who’s embedding it on their site, is it getting shared, etc.

I think these companies promise a bit more, as though there is a magic box they use, I think its more mundane than that, but its the labor and effort they put into feeding, seeding, watching, measuring content online that’s useful.

I think agencies will begin to formally incorporate that function into their internal process. So in the future we’ll have a production or media or traffic sort of person that looks at whatever campaign we are building and plans out how to get it seeded into social media.