KEEPING THE MIND PROFITABLE

What must never be amiss in using strategic design according to Nasreddine is profitability. This certainly reverberates with the business of media planning as another existential pillar of the marketing and communications industry. Standing besides the advertising agencies, specialized entities in advertising conglomerates that have often been referred to in industry lingo as media buying units (MBUs) are focused on designing and negotiating the avenues that will deliver return on investments (ROI) for the marketing dollars of their advertising clients.

From his perspective, as expert on media planning and buying, “design is creativity for us. We always focus on creativity in media buying – how can we be creative in our media approaches?” says Wissam Najjar, managing director for the Levant region at OMD, a worldwide media planning company and unit of Omnicom Group, a New York-based global marketing communications powerhouse.

“We know that the future is content so we focus a lot around content. For us creativity is about being creative through content, and for us being creative means that it has to make business sense to the client,” Najjar elaborates.

Explaining that things like getting gleaming awards for a campaign’s design will “not do anything for the client who wants volumes, to achieve targets, defend market share or gain it,” Najjar says the media planners speak a language with the client that is based on the fact “that he wants exposure and at the end of the day wants business and it all has to relate to ROI.”

This means that in his experience creativity and design aren’t quite everything for a media planner, because some creative ideas emerge as too complicated for deploying them in sales and the creative angle alone does not have “the scientific approach that we do,” Najjar says. “Our role is to sit together and craft a strategy which is doing well creatively and also as a business strategy.”

“Our design part comes in where we do something creative within the media itself. We think about how we can approach any media with a non-traditional manner,” he continues and references approaches such as the growing practice where adverts mimic the style of content providers such as news media publishers.

These so-called native adverts seamlessly blend into the platform formats of digital environments and provide advertisers with increased rates of engagement by media users, although Najjar notes that “some people feel frustrated [by native advertising] because they believe that they are being cheated.” But the cardinal question for media planners cannot be the displeasure of some, it appears, or a debate over the need for an impenetrable wall between marketing and content.

Where just a few years ago advertising groups in the Middle East were lamenting how the region was still lagging in its embrace of online advertising, the new ubiquity of tools such as native advertising testify to the fact that the digitization of communications is perhaps slower here but no less of a challenge to advertising and media stakeholders to develop sustainable standards of governance, and at the same time achieve the economic aims that will allow both marketing communications and content publishers to grow.

For a media planner, this means being clear about priority one, Najjar says: “Our biggest topic is how to engage the customer, so anything we come up with has to be engaging.”

And of course the need to survive is right at the center of all changes in the communications sector, including the role and importance of design. With the advertising industry’s own exposure and adherence to the laws of evolution, design has always been present but in recent years it has risen higher and been given what Areej Mahmoud perceives as “its right place, the place where it should be.”

AN EVOLUTION IN INTELLIGENT DESIGN

“Design is for sure taking a more serious place in advertising and has been doing that for a few years,” says Mahmoud, who is head of creative at Leo Burnett Beirut, an international agency that is part of France-based advertising conglomerate Publicis.

He links the greater role of design to the industry’s departure from what he calls “the tyranny of the media,” the era when advertising industry minds were focused on which medium a message was to be placed in. “For a very long time the advertising industry was hijacked by media, where the thinking process of anyone in advertising was, ‘what are we putting on television, what are we putting on radio, what in the magazine, what’s outdoors?’”, he says.

The old approach according to him would seek to find a common ground between disjointed information strands on consumer, product, brand message and sales purposes associated with an advertising campaign and implement this in media according to placement priorities. For Mahmoud, this traditional way of thinking in advertising was overly formulaic. “I don’t think of design as a practice, because I am a designer. For me, thinking as a designer is looking at a problem and all its angles,” he sums up his definition of design and enthuses, “Since today we are free from the tyranny of media companies, you go back to solving a problem as a human being, not as a marketer, planner or salesman.”

As an example for how design thinking at an agency can solve problems when it is not bound to media, he cites approaches like that of New York-based agency R/GA whose Hammerhead navigation solution for bikers earned top awards at the 2015 Cannes Lions.

Approaches proving the validity of the design method in solving business problems are accumulating all over the advertising industry and it’s not only global agencies with pedigree that can deliver them. When Beirut-based agency