‘It drives me insane’: Telstra CMO lashes industry for separation of media and creative
The head of marketing for Telstra has said “it drives me insane” when asked about the separation of creative and media agencies.
In recent years the debate has been whether agencies should re-merge the creative and media functions which separated during the ’90s and the emergence of more specialist agencies, with several marketers slimming down their rosters to cope with the workload.
“I think it’s a great tragedy,” Joe Pollard told the RethinkTV conference in Sydney. “I grew up in a world where, early in my career, I spent as much time with the creative teams and the production teams as I did with the media owners planning and buying media.
“Now I’m back in client side it’s something I reinforce. We don’t look at creative without media and if I could have my way we’d have one group of people.
“We bring everyone together and it is one team. I would prefer fewer people 100% on the business all in the room together. And we encourage them to work outside, and if there’s fighting for who owns the client relationship – and all that bullshit that I know goes on – it’s not accepted because we’re all about having great people get in a room and solve our problems.
“I think the structure of the agency model currently, you have to force it as a client because it’s impossible to do it if you’re sitting on the agency side. And the added thing from TV perspective is you have to demand the media owner is part of those conversations. We have the best success when the media owner is involved.”
“It’s a long-winded way of saying it drives me insane,” she added.
Youi CMO Hugo Schreuder said the company had not used either creative or media agencies and preferred to do those functions with in-house teams for the last seven years.
He explained: “Our model really works well. We have unbelievable relationships with all the media, and it’s a wonderful privilege to sit with all the media, explain the challenges and come up with the solutions.”
there are pros and cons of having everything under one roof vs separate agencies
neither is best in all circumstances for all clients
horse for courses as they say..
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Gosh Joe. It’s sort of a big decision as to which outside sources you use to get your work done. The full-service agencies are still out there but it seems not big enough for your account. Whereas, using one agency for media and another for creative work means dealing with two uncoordinated entities and spending a lot more time getting things straight between them. My personal belief: Do the thinking in house with advice from the creative source. Once the creative strategy is determined see what media availabilities are there by briefing the media buyers and get the best deals possible. Then whoosh it back to creative for production of the materials you need. It’s all so basic and old-fashioned, but if that doesn’t work you can always book an appointment with Harold Mitchell who’ll be glad to share his thoughts with you. But Joe, on the client side, and I spent quite a few years there. you have to be the pivot point, the boss, the centre of the action. Too many Telstra campaigns seem to have their origins in different parts of the organisation and often don’t relate to each other even if they could.
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Surely, she’s in a position to change that?!
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That’ll be OMG launching a Telstra centric full-service agency model within 6 months then…
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My thoughts too. A number of clients around the world have done this and agencies have set up separate agencies to handle big clients.
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Agree Joe – time for the tail (media) to wag the fat dog (creative).
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But strategists and designers aren’t going to be booking media anyway. What does it matter if the different teams sit in the same office or not? As long as there is a good working relationship between the media agency and creative agency staff then I can’t see it being any different than one company with different teams handling both.
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It’s like buying a hi-fi made up of carefully-matched separates versus an all-in-one system. The all-in-one will be easier to buy, but the separates will sound much better.
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