Opinion

When media and creativity isn’t seamless

In this guest posting, Happy Soldiers’ Sophie Price argues that media/ creative collaboration needs to start happening sooner than the meeting room door.

Leo Burnett’s recent success at Cannes for Canon is yet more proof that brilliant communication ideas are born of a seamless marriage of media and creative thinking. In fact, the bulk of the Media Lions were awarded to creative agencies this year.  

sophie price happy soldiers mumbrella

Sophie Price

Outside of the media category there were loads of Lions for ideas where I’d defy you to pick whether they originated with a ‘media’ or a ‘creative’ person. And that kind of either/or thinking is the nub of the problem.

What started as a trickle of sparkling ideas is fast turning into a steady flow and should become a torrent. Rightly so, for the sake of our clients’ and our industry.

So why on earth isn’t this seamless union seen in all creative agencies? It beggars belief that creative agencies still present ideas where the media/creative collaboration obviously began just outside the meeting room door. Do they really believe today’s clients won’t twig?

It seems old habits die hard in our industry – ironic as our very charter is fresh thinking. Truth is so many creative agencies are paralyzed by process, revenue structures and politics. And the very subject still kindles a contentious, often political debate with clients and partner agencies alike. This defies simple common sense.

We’re seeing such rapid changes in communication channels and in the ways consumers consume communication – so many new opportunities emerging seemingly all at once. It’s crazy not to have someone with channel expertise as part of the creative mix to help inspire with media understanding.

It doesn’t replace the media agency – this is not media planning in disguise. It’s simply about having people in the team that don’t need to apologise for understanding and liking channels – people who can make the most of their smarts to help create more inspired, more considered, more responsible and convincing ideas.

Reality is, despite endless Agency ‘processes to creativity’, ideas are born from healthy chaos. They aren’t passed down a line for the next person or next agency to add their bit on the end. They don’t wait for a media meeting to happen. The opportunity to make a difference is fleeting. You’re either there – and a part of it – or you’re the purveyor of bolt-ons and compromises. Ideas demand channel input, there and then. Beginning with the real business problem; helping spot the real opportunity, sparking new ideas or in making good ideas great. Having channel input, smarts and inspiration in-house at the time of birth is the key to imaginative, inspiring, unexpected ideas – the kind that turn us on.

The barriers to adoption are mainly in the mind. They’re about a willingness to be inclusive versus a stubborn structural separation (reminiscent of old-fashioned trade-unions). Which is probably why the campaigns we most envy emanate from a mindset that is nimble, modern and curious (big and small agencies, networked and independent, alike).

Call them what you will – channel planners if you must – we just call them planners (who happen to understand and quite like channel). But whatever you call them, have them. More of them. Embrace them and enable them. And media thinking will move from last speaker in the presentation to full participant in ideation.

And our industry will produce more of the stunning ideas we all envy as a matter of course – not just once in a while.

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