Ellie Johnson's take on the MIXX: Small is the new big

It is 2007, the Internet as a consumer medium is a dozen years old and has reared four generations in this short time: the early adopters, Gen X, Gen Y and now the Millennials. In the last decade or more, the Internet has led the life of an immortal youth – big on dreams and short on rationale - catapulted from their big man on campus status into the real world – the world that said, Oh yeah? Prove it. After the gold rush and the bubble of youth burst - reality set in with demands from the establishment for business models, standards and measurability. The brands and companies that wanted to find success online looked to the portals for the model to match. The model was get big, partner, offer it all to everyone.

Similarly, interactive agencies wishing to get their hands on the gold rush budgets, sprang up like the new brands online did - either as start up experiments by exiles from the traditional agencies or as the online wings of those traditional agencies. They too, wanted to get big, bill big revenue, create big brands including their own, create big minds – figure heads in the industry.At the Mixx 2.7 conference, it was fun to see a number of familiar big heads from the web’s adolescence were on today’s stage, directing panels and presenting today’s big advertising ideas.

This year, small is the new big idea. AOL is less an avenue to the web and more a content play now via sites like TMZ and with their branded API’s for Facebook and other social networks. The change is coming so quickly, even MySpace, the social networking phenom that launched just a few years ago and now rivals Yahoo! on a monthly basis for greatest number of unique visitors, finds that even their formidable size is a deterrent for marketers who fear the message gets lost among their masses. The masses are what we were once all after! Today however, the mother ships and the revered interactive agencies, who have survived the digital age thus far, are practicing fragmentation, creating verticals even as they consolidate and partner. The bigs are forced to keep up with the transparent, nimble, specialized smalls. It’s all about the niche, the vertical, the individual.

Seth Godin, who was interviewed by Charlie Rose at the event, said social media is the assembly line of interactive’s industrial age and marketers, brands and corporations alike are feeling online shift and charge in a whole new direction. He challenged marketers to develop the remarkable and predicted that big companies like MSFT cannot come up with anything remarkable or worth talking about. (Side note: MSFT sponsored the event. Awkward!) Mr. Godin gave us our assignment: marketers must navigate the masses and find the individual, deliver a message that the individual wants to interact with, share, snag and use to define them selves. The consumer wants a relevant message, that doesn’t trap them in a branded experience or simply monolog to them but rather, opens a conversation with them.

This is scary stuff for a lot of consumer brands and their fears resounded in the halls with talk of, “We’re lost. We’re not in control any longer – the consumer is.” A lot of consumer brands will find that social media will not make sense. Can anyone really be friends with a box of Kleenex brand tissues? Probably not, but the Let It Out campaign from Kleenex shows that the CPG brand understands that it’s not about their tissue – it’s about their consumer and how their consumer relates to their brand and it’s working for them. The campaign exploits the emotional and pushes the rational, the practical use of Kleenex tissues. Smart.

Media Two is smart. And our small agency is well-positioned to act as the map for our clients and for consumer brands that make sense for today’s uncharted new media opportunities. Our concepts for social, digital environments that expound upon the valuable knowledge we’ve extracted from the exchanges that our client’s are having with their consumers today, are exactly what this shift in the industry will be propelled by. Our agency lives by the idea that online is the first critical touch point between the brand and the consumer and that online campaigns should drive the entire cross-platform campaign. Not the other way around. And we have the data to back up this approach. We’re a small, nimble agency with the ability to foster the critical dialog that brands are looking spark with their target audience. And our creativity is tapped to create the platforms that will enable the conversation and track the return on investment. I left Mixx 2.7 feeling completely in control in the face of these exciting new challenges and thrilled that we have generated the body of work we have to pull from and the creativity and resources – and clients – that will enable us to take the challenge and do something remarkable.