Andrew Shebbeare is a partner at Essence, an agency recently honoured at the E-consultancy awards. Given his extensive experience working in the marketing and the digital media space, managing an internal online agency at Loyd's TSB and as Head of Aquisitions at Create, we thought we'd take the chance to ask him a few questions about the digital year ahead and Essence's work in Social Media.

Could you tell us a bit about how you got into working with digital?

My partners and I started Essence because we wanted to bring the same kind of rigour to the agency space that we had insisted on in-house – proper ROI measurement, end-to-end tracking and value based marketing.

If you take a look back at 2008, what were the significant trends/changes that have happened in the digital media space?

Publisher consolidation - it started in 2007 but by the middle of this year our list of suppliers had shrunk from the hundreds to a handful. Not just in media, but also in service providers. 2008 was also the year that social networks started to really figure out site monetisation, and that big brands started to get their heads around Social Media.

What are the digital trends you believe we should keep an eye on in 2009?

I think we might well see the online display market shrink for the first time, and slower growth in online media overall. I suspect that we would even see negative growth overall, if budget conscious offline advertisers weren't moving their money to more accountable online channels. At the same time I think we'll see a lot of continued innovation from the big names (especially YouTube and Facebook) in terms of advertising products. This in turn means that the gap between cheap and cheerful media and premium, targeted inventory will keep on widening.

Essence was recently highly commended by the E-consultancy awards for innovation in Social Media, could you tell us about your work on GiveTakeDonate?

GiveTakeDonate was born from Cancer Research UK's innovation team. This is a new business unit, tasked with finding innovative ways of raising money in the fight against Cancer. They approached us with two ideas, and ended up selecting Essence to build both (the other wasn't ready in time for the E-consultancy awards, but you can check out MyProjects at myprojects.cancerresearchuk.org).

How did you drive uptake of the platform by contributors?

The site is currently in beta and only users living in a relatively small catchment area can signup. In those areas there has already been radio and in-store promotion, and some Online Marketing. I think one of the key drivers of take-up will be white-labelling of the platform - large groups and corporates can have their own, self contained instance of the system, and Cancer Research have had lots of interest already.

What was the most interesting skill someone donated?

We've had lots of business related skills offered, but my favourite by far is the hula-hoop lessons, available from someone with 4 years of relevant experience, no less!

How are you measuring its success?

We're watching the number of users, the number of offers and exchanges - but ultimately success will be judged by the amount raised in donations, in relation to the cost of developing the platform.

Have you learned any big lessons about online fundraising?

I've been surprised at how few charities do this well. Giving online is too often impersonal, often doesn't feel terribly secure, and it is hard to know where your money goes. I hope that GiveTakeDonate and MyProjects go some way towards fixing this.

How do you respond to clients that are sceptical about Social Media?

I think it's important to show the worst as well as the best of Social Media. By showing how not to do it as well as showing some of the stellar examples of brand marketing that money just can't buy, we avoid adding to the graveyard of virals, profiles and apps without users. This helps clients understand what makes the difference between a waste of money and the best possible investment a brand can make.

Apple or Mac, Facebook or MySpace, and do you think Google is evil?

Now you're just trying to cause trouble! Google are our biggest client; they're lovely ;-)