Having worked at and with several different agencies over the years, I couldn’t agree more. Today’s AOR’s continue to deliver the goods across traditional media and marketing as well as in newer channels like interactive, SEM and now social. However, to your point, I’ve talked to the heads of social media at a few of the large agencies and they have no interest in providing things like a platform and moderation/community management. They also — self admittedly — don’t traditionally keep UI designers on staff that are experts in branded community design (note: there are some that do so I’m not over generalizing on that last point).

It will be interesting to see how the evolution transpires over the next few years. One possible outcome could be the rolling up of strategic groups focused on social like Crayon and New Marketing Labs with a white label provider like Awareness or Jive into some of the larger agency conglomerates like WPP. At the end of the day though, we’ll just have to wait and see!

Best,
Aaron | @aaronstrout