In Fawlty Towers Basil Fawlty famously told his wife Sybil “Stating The Bleeding Obvious” would be her specialist subject on Mastermind and this sprang to mind when I read ft.com recently published an article entitled "Social networks threaten advertising growth" following the The Institute of Practitioners in Advertising, “Social Media Futures” report warning that advertising agencies face growth of just 1.2 per cent a year by 2016 if the industry fails to tackle the changes to the media created by sites such as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter.

Much of this is not new news...certainly amongst people who work in the industry who can see the increasing divide between agencies who do and don't understand and embrace the new media landscape.

What was interesting was that Moray MacLennan, IPA president and chief executive of M&C Saatchi Worldwide cites in the report that “The current downturn will accelerate these trends in agencies as everyone is looking to innovate and stand out from the crowd” - showing that one of Peter Kim's predictions of 2009 (as per the Gravitythinking blogspot entry on 23rd December 2008 is already coming true !

Of course the bigger point is that all agencies that claim to provide marketing services to Clients should be considering social media as a matter of course and not just as a media, as this report suggests, but rather as a method of communicating with their target audience and that can only be done effectively by (paraphrasing Kevin Roberts in Lovemarks ) - telling a great story - and in turn contradicting him - that does not always have to be via a "Great 30 second commercial"

We look forward to the months ahead !