In the world of advertising, the wildly popular “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like” campaign that drew millions of responses and a global following of loyal Twitter fans shows the growing importance of social media as marketing tools of the future, according to Jason Bagley, a keynote speaker at Thursday’s Bend WebCAM 2010 conference.

With the growth of social networking sites in addition to the advertising outlets of television, radio and newspapers, Bagley said there’s no future for traditional advertising agencies that aren’t willing and able to create and manage messages for the digital world as well as the traditional media outlets.

He also envisions digital-only agencies waning in the future, as the major brands like Old Spice will need full-service agencies to manage all aspects of their marketing.

“With all the different media outlets and channels, integrated branding and consistent brand voice has never been more important than it is right now,” said Bagley, a creator of the “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like” campaign at Wieden+Kennedy advertising agency of Portland.

“We write all the copy” for print, television, radio, in-store, Twitter and Facebook, Bagley said. “There is nothing we don’t do in terms of branding for Old Spice.

“There is going to be a need for big agencies that can figure out digital and interactive,” Bagley said. “There is a future for agencies that can evolve and be effective in all forms of media.”

During his presentation, the audience roared with laughter at clips of various versions of “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like” clips. One included the commentator talking about the potential for an Old Spice commercial in which President Barack Obama should be seen wearing only a towel, like the man in the Old Spice commercials.

Another crowd favorite was the Old Spice commercial designed specifically to stimulate social media responses to the question, roughly translated as “Do you want a man who can bake a cake in the kitchen he built by hand and then show you the best night of your life?”

When the first YouTube commercial in the series drew millions of responses, Bagley said, the idea was born to do the social media response video.

And yes, Bagley said, the Old Spice actor in the commercials actually ran a skill saw through a kitchen cabinet and jumped into a hot tub and onto a motorcycle in making the commercial.

Bagley also showed a series of clips of previous Old Spice campaigns that he thought were based on good ideas but didn’t gain the same kind of fan response on Twitter and other social media sites.

A tweet containing what Bagley thought was a good idea about Fresh Scent Old Spice was depicted in a hairy armpit, with the words fresh, fresher, freshest and freshishnish.

Bagley said he coined the word freshishnish while brainstorming under a 20-minute deadline to come up with copy to go with the armpit fresh scent art.

“I said fresh for the first one, fresher for the second one, freshest for the third one, and panicked when I realized I didn’t have anywhere to go for the fourth one, and just blurted out ‘freshishnish,’ and my partner said, ‘That’s it,’ ” Bagley said.

“Our Twitter following exploded,” Bagley said. “We now have one of the most loyal Twitter accounts anywhere.”

The lesson from that, he said, was how important it is to monitor and respond to social media chatter.

His point in describing all of those creative episodes — and in talking about the campaigns that were successful and those that weren’t — was to encourage the audience to continue to come up with crazy ideas, because you never know which ones are going to be a home run.

The conference continues today with a hot-seat panel discussion and question-and-answer period on how to make websites more functional and creative from 9 a.m. to 11 a.m., educational presentations on search engine optimization (SEO) and competitive Web publishing, managing your reputation via search engines, designing websites for wonder, going global using search and social media, website usability, the lonely life of the long-distance brander and the closing keynote on the history of SEO.