In an effort to position itself as a tech savvy one, ad agency Fallon has launched an all-in-one social media tool called Skimmer. Running on Adobe AIR, this free desktop tool aggregates streams from various social media sites into a desktop widget. So your activity on Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Blogger and YouTube can all sit in one place instead of you flitting from one to the other. Cool. On the Mac platform, there is Eventbox, which has the same objective bringing together Facebook, Twitter, RSS feeds and Reddit.
Rob Buchner, chief marketing officer of Fallon says, “there’s a tremendous amount of pressure on the industry, and [pressure] we put on ourselves, to demonstrate to clients we understand social media and life-streaming technologies and can advise them on how they can live in this world. There are a lot of PowerPoint presentations. We felt it was better to lead by example. We’re in this experimental phase as an industry. We wanted to have a stake in it.” As an application, it’s interface is clean and very much an Adobe AIR look (similar to Adobe Media Player), if you know what I mean. Unlike stuff like Friendfeed on the net, you can upload photos and videos with this desktop tool.
Recently, BBH launched Zag, a brand invention agency. With increasing competition from specialist agencies and consultants, it’s good to see traditional agencies attempting to prove their mettle. I was very happy to see Fallon do this since it’s been one of the agencies I looked up to when I was growing up in advertising. Every major award show book used to have a huge compilation of Fallon McElligot entries on the index page. Here’s to more such.
