Media agencies have become commoditised shades of vanilla
If media agencies don't change their way of thinking, fast, they could all be surplus to requirements in as little as five years, writes Martyn Thomas.
Advertising is a fabulous industry, often derided and misunderstood by those not involved, but certainly preferable to getting a proper job.
Within the advertising industry are those of us in media, a part of the industry that needs a good hard look at itself. There is a line of thought that says if we just keep doing what we currently do, we’ll all be surplus to requirements in five years.
Marketers have worked out/are working out that media agencies are their commoditised bitches and treat them accordingly. As independent media agencies become increasingly absorbed by the major holding groups, this leaves marketers the choice between five networks and – as someone put it – 17 shades of vanilla.
The big five networks are akin to massive container ships lined up in the Suez Canal: slow to move and difficult to change direction with a vested interest in delivering their cargoes of airtime and precious programmatic inventory.
We must go beyond mere channel planning and generate ideas that connect people and brands. In doing so we bring creative thinking to centre stage – that is, strategic creative communications thinking coupled with the actual creative manifestation. A “flow” if you will, rather than a multi-agency linear process.
In this connected era, brands have lost control of the carefully stage-managed unveiling of their story and consumers have realised that advertising has been taking their time and money (usually both) for years. The opportunity now is to go beyond preying on their time and to give, not take.
The challenge is to identify those communication activities that create enough value for the consumer to inspire the behaviours we seek.
This could include the likes of good old-fashioned advertising, creating social currency, providing utility, offering opportunities to rally around a cause or to connect with people that matter.
A recent UK Media2020:Refresh research study surveyed over 250 senior marketers responsible for over £5 billion in advertising investment. It kicked up a handful of interesting findings from a client’s perspective as brands restructure too.
Technology and data are changing the media ecosystem as brands reorganise to become more data-driven and customer-centric. Agility and flexibility are the words du jour in the strive for contextual creative delivery which flies in the face of the slower, more linear, multiple agency partnership option.
Recently, you may have noticed that Procter & Gamble’s chief brand officer Marc Pritchard has announced shaking up the agency model and putting the focus back on creativity.
Coupled with this we have the issues of programmatic transparency, brand safety and effective measurement.
Transparency is regarded as fixable. Brand safety, regarded as more systemic, is the biggest cause for client insomnia and in the face of a fragmented and siloed measurement industry we can expect brand-specific media KPIs will become the barometers of accountability rather than industry benchmarks.
The magnetism of digital is waning as similar levels of spend are now allocated between brand-building in traditional media and conversion-driving digital media. The honeymoon between brands and the large technology platforms is over.
Clients have learnt that audiences are easy to find, but attention is not. Programmatic may be very efficient for targeting purposes, but targeting alone is only one-half of the equation and is no guarantee of marketing effectiveness. In a quest for more creative focus, Pritchard goes on to say: “We relinquished too much control. We were dazzled by the shiny objects and big data overwhelmed us. We ceded a lot of power to algorithms. Now we’re saying no.”
These drivers of change should be a cause for concern not only for media agencies, but also what I’ll call traditional creative agencies.
Alternatively, as someone who ran an independent media agency for 18 years and has recently been absorbed by another independent, the nimble fragrance of opportunity is in the air.
It’s been a few years since Naked came to these shores, but what they did well was to raise the profile of media thinking beyond channel planning and kilos of target audience rating points. They also brought creative and media agencies together and raised the profile of creative media thinking with the CMO and CEOs.
We’re all aiming for the same place from different starting points and it seems clear that the opportunity is to remove the ‘complexity’ of agencies to provide the necessary disciplines sitting as equal partners in a much more fluid structure.
We are now in the business of providing a customer experience. The quicker our industry orientates itself around that central theme, the quicker we’re going to mirror the type of value that our clients so desperately need, as they themselves transform.
Martyn Thomas, curiosity and innovation at Hatched Media.
“We must go beyond mere channel planning and generate ideas that connect people and brands”
This is echoed in a different Mumbrella article every few months and a very cliched statement. The industry simply doesn’t care.
User ID not verified.
I was getting nice and hyped with the first few paragraphs and then it descended into a classic mumbrella piece. I (personally) would have been more interested in the pay off of trying to tackle the 14 shades of vanilla vs taking a brand/client problem lens. The focus we always seem to take with pieces like this is that of a homogeneous group vs taking a more aggressive approach and delineating ways that agencies can go to market. I’m not saying to go full Ritson or Galloway but if all the agencies spend their effort trying to fix the same “problems” they just all become 14 shades of strawberry.
User ID not verified.
Agree – and Im pretty sure what he is describing is a creative agency – where all the vocal disgruntled media folk wished they worked
User ID not verified.
Good Sir/Madam, please feel free to provide an alternative structuring of my sentence. One that avoids any form of cliché. You may find this quite hard, but worth a shot. Also, you are correct that it is a point that keeps being raised in articles in Mumbrella, but wouldn’t this suggest that the industry perhaps does, indeed, care?
User ID not verified.
1. Those at the top – there are leaders running media agencies who may be good at squeezing clients for more money and building diversified services clients don’t really need. These people can’t recognise good media planning / strategy. This has a knock on effect of hiring strategists who aren’t effective at influencing the work.
2. Clients and those at the top again – A lot of media ‘wins’ are won on cheaper media or reduced fees rather than media thinking which could be potentially transformative for a brand.
3. Strategy / planning – Massive underinvestment in media strategy – big 200 people + agencies with only 2-3 senior strategists who only really show up in pitches. Either overly complex planning processes that no one uses or ones so simplified they churn out the same answers.
4. Distractions – doing the conference circuit with presentations about AI, VR and Blockchain isn’t selling the power of decent media planning to new clients and using up valuable resource.
5. Media Vendors – media agencies reliant on the best responses to inform channel mix and selection when this should be driven by the planners and strategists before it reaches brief stage
6. Kickbacks – yes, they’re still happening. Agenciy leaders can deny that they’re getting them as they set up separate companies to accept them. It’s just a slight of hand.
7. Training – there is hardly any. There may be some ‘Talks’ from the odd expert on nutrition and yoga but industry standard training isn’t cohesive or comprehensive enough.
8. Creative agencies – In the absence of decent media thinking creative agencies are creating their own and investing in talent that can do it for them. Also noted, media agencies attempting to to start making ads not because the creative agencies can’t but because the media agency is trying to create extra revenue.
9. Automation – The reluctance to approach automation (TV buying anyone?) means there is less investment in time and budget in solid media planning.
10. Dishonesty – good ideas born at other types of agencies are benig claimed as the media agency’s own. This sets a bad example for new people to the industry.
11. Those at the top again – Leaders with low EQ are being rewarded first and fastest. This is creating toxic working environments despite the free yoga sessions for all.
User ID not verified.
Please leave the industry if you hate it so much. No one likes a killjoy
Practical solutions please, not a pile of steaming poo
User ID not verified.
You have to point out the issues before you can change it. Why do I feel people are skirting around these?
I loved(d) the industry. But to use your turn of phrase It’s just a a ‘pile of steaming poo’ now
User ID not verified.
still waiting for practical solutions.
anyone can point out problems.
much harder to fix things.
User ID not verified.
And yet people don’t seem to be pointing out most of the ones I listed above. Hence my need and desire to spell them out . All of those problems have the solution implied in each statement I could spell them out but I’m sure you’re wise enough to realise how to approach them all
User ID not verified.
You can’t go wrong by studying marketing, and as more and more businesses come to rely upon the power of the Internet, there is clearly a great future in understanding the technology behind marketing.
User ID not verified.