‘The media agency is only just beginning to get its seat on the table’
Ideate around the knowledge that a media agency has instead of reserving them for channel allocation, Cortizo-Burgess tells Devina Joshi
In today’s fragmented media agency business, with new verticals and functions mushrooming every day, do you believe the time for collaboration is finally here? Will things go back to the old structure, with all verticals under the same roof? No, I don’t think there is an old structure to go back to because customers have become even more interesting now. If we try and practice media and advertising the way that we were trained, that will be a huge sign that we are falling out of sync with the way people lead their lives. All of those disciplines, whether they physically come under one company, there is a responsibility that we have towards our clients to ensure that those disciplines merge somewhere along the way as we create a strategy, idea and execution.
I don’t think pushing it all together under one agency is necessarily the only way of doing it. But yes, there is a point of convergence where all our different fractions and silos need to be connected to create a unified plan. But then how do you tackle the challenges of working with multiple agencies for the same client? The abilities to embrace complexities and to connect different dots become a must. Bring together those different points of view outside of all the political dynamics that exist… because a lot of times, those agencies will not be from the same holding company. And even if they are, it doesn’t necessarily mean an exclamation of “Hey, we’re family!”
At MEC, often we have been asked to be the glue or the connector in such cases. If you look at the craft of account planning, it has always been about bringing together different points of view — from the brand, the culture and the consumer — which your agency can springboard from. Clients relish it when someone takes the responsibility of connecting and synthesising energies from various agencies. There are times when I have had to collaborate with a competing media agency — and that is when I really have to do justice to the client and the brand. The media agency business has evolved from buying and planning to communications planning. Are the lines blurring slightly, with the creative agency structure falling in step on similar lines? There’s still not enough of that ‘blur’; there should be. A lot of lip service is paid for that collaboration, but the reality is, the shift isn’t happening fast enough where media can be brought more forward into the start of the creative/ process. A lot of times advertising agencies think media agencies are purely about execution, which is an easy trap to fall into, as the two sit separately.
The media agency is only just beginning to get its seat on the table, which is such a shame, because if you had applied all of that discipline and talent within media at the very beginning, then your understanding of the audience, the opportunity you face would be way clearer. Then you can ideate around that knowledge versus just using or reserving media as a place of channel allocation.
When I joined MEC (two and a half years back), that was part of my mandate. I see myself as helping our industry move from the last 10 minutes of a creative presentation to the first critical minutes of problem solving. But there are clients like GE and Tiffany who demand such integration/collaboration. For years marketers have tried to decode a consumer’s purchase decision journey. Could you please share insights from MEC’s reports on the various stages in this journey and at which point should a marketer aim for maximum impact? What the MEC study decodes is that a consumer is active in the decision-making process, regardless of whether or not she buys a product or engages with a brand. A lot of us are trained to think within the Allison-Fisher funnel or the purchase decision funnel. But what that study tells you is that outside of that triangle, the consumer is open to bias about your product or brand. Then why leave all of your information or engagement for that person just within the funnel? There’s a lot of opportunity to create a more engaging environment for customers even outside of the funnel — what MEC calls the ‘passive’ stage. A lot of people think ‘passive’ is not important when in reality it is because that is where you start making your impression about a brand. So does a client need to invest in a brand versus a product? The reality is, it is both. In your experience, what do clients rely on more — owned, earned or paid media? At the moment, I have clients who are really interested in switching that practice of starting with paid, to starting with owned assets. Even if it is not at the execution stage right no, it’s easy to have that conversation when your budgets get slashed. But even with budgets intact, I think it is interesting as practitioners of communications for us to say, what if we behave that we have to start with owned assets first? There are a ton of assets that clients already have to generate goodwill and to communicate a brand’s point of view. I think it’s just responsible to start there versus automatically defaulting to television. Starting with owned media, first create ideas that are more interesting and dynamic.
On the other hand, clients find the ‘earned’ part risky to deal with, as it is not 100 per cent in their control. The managing of earned media is different from solely devising and controlling the consumer experience. It is more challenging and rewarding, even if you just orient your thinking in this way — owned, earned and then paid. How is the emerging markets landscape more challenging — and consequently, more advantageous — for MEC as opposed to operating in a developed world? I probably have a rose-tinted view of developing markets because to me, ‘developing’ means that things aren’t set in a particular way just yet and that’s exciting. Paid media isn’t an actual default in developing markets so what happens is, you are more open to exploring owned assets/channels first. That’s frugality at play... Yes, definitely. That should be like a spotlight for us... what from emerging markets can be applied in already established markets. That’s the question.