Alain Thys and Stefan Kolle of Futurelab have published a thought provoking report on the advertising industry:

There is a growing disconnect between what advertising agencies offer, and what their clients are looking for

Although the report is focused on above the line and media agencies, rather than a specialist conversation agency such as ourselves, there’s more than the slide I’ve pulled out above to suggest that the approach we’re taking is what clients both want and need. Judge for yourself:

If that piqued your interest, you should also check out The Connected Agency report from Forrester:

marketers will move to the Connected Agency – one that shifts: from making messages to nurturing consumer connections; from delivering push to creating pull interactions; and from orchestrating campaigns to facilitating conversations.

We’ve been working with Ford for the past few months now on the This is Now campaign to launch the Fiesta across Europe and we’ve recently started working on the campaign for the launch of their new Ford KA.

The campaign’s called “Find It” and it’s all about encouraging people to look beyond the obvious, to find and explore hidden discoveries. As part of the campaign, they created this video about the street art scene in Shoreditch:

We thought that a perfect way to get people both looking beyond the obvious and talking about the camapign, would be to take some bloggers on a street art tour of Shoreditch.

So that’s what we did on Saturday. We took along about 20 people, bloggers and their friends, to discover the best graffiti classics from the likes of Banksy, Eine, Obey, Invader, D*Face as well as work from street artists like Jim Cereal, L.E.T., Mike Marcus, TEK13, Sam3, Patr2ism and David Gouby. Here’s a little video of the day:

Also see write-ups from Michael, Lolly, Chris, Mehrdad, Gerel, Cédric and Martin or photos from Lolly, Mehrdad, Chris, Cédric, Violette and Robin.

Thanks again to all the bloggers who took part in this event: Cédric, Chris, Fubiz, Martin, Gerel, Lolly, Mario, Mehrdad, Chris and Vandalog. And a special thank you to Michael ‘RJ’ Rushmore from Vandalog for sharing with us his knowledge of street art and to Cédric for sharing his knowledge about Space Invaders with us.

And if you’re wondering what those 3D KAs are that appear in the video, head over to gofindit.net and download the app yourself.

Last Wednesday in Stockholm I spoke at the third Disruptive Media conference.

My talk is a (hopefully) reasonably glued-together set of my own thoughts about the challenges faced by people in large organisations who feel they should be doing good stuff on the web. In fact, a lot of what I talk about – the need to ‘empower’ individuals to ‘communicate’, the need to rethink approaches to customer interaction and, above all, the need to put customer happiness (rather than maintenance of organisational status quo) first – can be applied to all aspects of outward-facing organisational behaviour. And, come to think of it, internal behaviour too – just replace ‘customer’ with ‘employee’. In the words of Budd, ‘how do we stop doing dumb things to customers and people’?

While I share Jan Chipchase’s views on conference videos, in the spirit of openness I’ve embedded the recording of my talk below.

For some more audience context, it’s worth taking a look at the Jaiku backchannel, which ran throughout the event — it’s mostly in Swedish, but with a bit of help from Google it should be mostly intelligible to non-speakers.

I also spoke on a panel to conclude the day alongside Brit Stakson of JMW, Anna Eriksson of Keybroker and Paul Walker of Cohne & Wolfe, discussing the future of media at large.

All in all a fantastic day – so thanks to Annika for the kind invitation to speak, and to the other presenters and attendees for their questions, feedback and ideas.

Shane Richmond, The Telegraph’s Communities Editor, asked me to guest post on his blog while he’s away on holiday, on the theme of a “social media to do list for 2009″. I thought I’d take a shot at compiling a list of five social media New Year’s resolutions that apply to all businesses, large and small. Go and have a read, and let me know what you think.

We’ve been pretty busy at We Are Social this week (as we are normally!) – yesterday, Robin announced the launch of our English website and here I am today to tell you all about the French version.

When it comes to Social Media, France is such an important market that it made sense to have a website and blog to engage with French brands and online influencers alike. The French market is actually pretty specific when it comes to Social Media on the basis that blogs are predominant within the social media landscape (France is ranked first in the world when it comes to the number of blogs per internet user). Social networking and micro blogging however are not yet as big as in the UK, but they’re growing rapidly – for example take a look at Facebook stats: in December 08, there are circa 6 million of French people on Facebook versus 2.5 million back in July 08.

And luckily we now have quite a few of those French social networking people in the team to be able to carry out campaigns in France: meet Violette, Camille, François and myself as the French “Chef d’Orchestre”.

By the way, I’ll be in Paris next week at LeWeb’08 so if you’re around and want to catch up, let me know!

When we set up We Are Social back in June, Nathan and I were convinced we had to practise what we preach with our own use of social media. We think we’ve been pretty successful so far: although for a while our website was just a single page, we linked to our Facebook, LinkedIn, FriendFeed, Twitter and Skype accounts. We’ve recruited people to the team via both Twitter and LinkedIn, and developed new business opportunities from bloggers who’ve been on the receiving end of our outreach.

Today, we’ve added another piece of the puzzle, with the addition of the We Are Social blog. You can also see an aggregation of all our Twitter conversations in the right hand column (if you’re reading this via an email or RSS subscription, click through to see it). For those of you that haven’t visited for a while, we now have pages talking about who we are (still with those links to our social media profiles), what we do, why we do it, our ethics and our clients.

It may take us a while to find our collective voice, but expect us to be keeping you up to date with what we’ve been up to, the latest relevant industry news and trends as well as little bit of that We Are Social je ne sais quoi.

We’re keen to make sure this blog is an ongoing conversation, so we’re looking forward to your comments (either as text or video) on this, or any of our other posts.

Anyway, enjoy the ride, we certainly are.

As reported by today’s Guardian, amidst the grim news from Group M that the UK’s total advertising spend is set to fall by nearly 6% in 2009, there are some figures that stand out.

Digital spending is likely to grow by 4% and public relations by 2%. Not massive growth, but a lot better than the 9% decrease predicted for traditional media spending.

This is some consolation for those of us that believe that social media is causing a fundamental change in the way that companies communicate with their customers and prospects, as it seems that the people who hold the budgets think the same, and despite the economic climate are juggling their budgets to reflect it.