A new role for media generalists will emerge
Opinion: Strategy Leaders
Media agencies should become more like management consultants , focussing on the ‘why’ rather than the ‘how’.
In The Media Leader last week, the media sage Brian Jacobs was quoted witnessing “agency people presenting from a script using words and phrases they don’t actually understand, or quoting from studies with which they’re not familiar” in pitches.
Media agencies pitch within pretty rigid tramlines, orchestrated by consultants. Briefs are usually inflexible and process driven, success and remuneration are often linked to specific performance guarantees by channel, filling in dreaded cost matrices.
The presentation is often a precursor to getting to the nuts and bolts about cost guarantees and payment terms, but the agency has to tick all the boxes, clients want to see the team in action and not surprisingly people presenting are often stressed and out of their comfort zones.
Jacobs has also written an excellent blog highlighting the inadequacies and unrealistic expectations of many media pitches. The artificial environment of pitches often fails to show an agency at their best and clients increasingly looking for technical expertise will find a 90-minute beauty parade a suboptimal way of finding it.
I’ve recently met a number of management consultants, they go through similar processes to win projects, but they tend to focus on their capabilities and expertise, rather than trying to jump through hoops delivering an oven ready solution.
Professional qualifications won’t improve what we do
Jacobs’ solution is a minimum kitemark qualification for anyone who wants to be a media practitioner. “[F]inancial advisors have to take regular exams to update and keep their qualifications. Why aren’t agency media people responsible for investing large sums of money subject to the same scrutiny?”
People in media agencies are really smart, have a huge appetite for knowledge and work incredibly hard. Also, most agencies spend a fortune on training. A generalist media qualification would be irrelevant in an increasingly specialist world.
Management consultants are responsible for advising multinational companies and governments on future strategy and delivery. They are not required to take regular ‘kitemark’ industry exams, but train to become specialists.
Many consultants start with an MBA then usually develop a specific sectoral expertise, so they understand core commercial principles and then some. This is a far better model for the emerging media agency world, complexity requires expertise.
Media training is better than ever
There isn’t a lack of training in media, there are masses of brilliant opportunities; from broad modules like the IPA’s CPD advanced certificate in Communications Planning to channel specific training, like Thinkbox’s TV Masters.
All are in high demand, 40,000 people have an IPA qualification. People are better trained and have better technical skills than ever.
Being a generalist was actively encouraged when I started in media. There was a hotly contested inter-agency panel game called ‘Media Mind’ where contestants had to know everything, including the telephone numbers of major media owners. Those were the days!
It was an era when targeting was pretty simple, posh people watched News at Ten, the rest watched Corrie. I read the same paper as my dad and instinctively knew how to reach most audiences.
This was a world of few choices and mass media consumption. If you launched a campaign over a weekend on the telly and in newspapers most people would have seen it by Monday.
Planning was not really much more than costing out options — we were called gorillas with calculators.
It’s a different world now, audiences and media choices are completely diverse and don’t overlap, my children and I consume completely different media, we instinctively don’t understand each other’s choices.
People live in bubbles of confirmation bias and are fragmented into multiple sub-sects of different consumption. Mass reach is virtually impossible because of the diversity of interest.
We are entering a post-reach era
The problem is we still use the same old tools (TGI) and yardsticks (reach and frequency) to try and attempt to deliver objectives that are probably unachievable in a modern world (mass brand fame a la Byron Sharp).
We describe audiences using the same old broad social demographic audience descriptors that were invented in the 1950s, these definitions are nearly 75-years-old and should be consigned to history, but briefs still target ABC1 adults.
There is now a genuine likelihood that the incorrect investment strategy will completely miss the intended target audience. Many of the old tools and practises may prove inadequate for decision-making in a world where most light viewers watch almost no live TV.
There is more fragmentation coming down the track, in the USA about a third of all AV budgets are spent on Connected TV, it will happen here.
Also, AI will change the opportunity for personalisation of advertising driven by first party data.
Who will advise clients on where to invest?
In a fragmented world, clients will need clear, quantitatively based advice on where to invest, how much and what result to expect?
Advising clients on how to navigate a world with multiple channels and audiences will require a new approach.
The IAB suggest “advertisers should resist having an either/or mindset when it comes to CTV and live broadcast.” We will need new multi-media tools and approaches to be able to deliver this.
Delivering Audience Intelligence
This is where a management consultancy style approach could be appropriate, combining audience intelligence with multiple media channel data to define business outcomes will be a very complex process, requiring multiple data sources and will develop with AI.
We should be able to model how to reach specific audiences and predict how they will respond across a plethora of emerging channels.
ITV Adlabs’ Geo-X is an early example of how inflight test and learn will evolve, I suspect many media owners will replicate this type of approach.
Moving upstream in a multichannel world
Advising on investment levels to deliver a specific result, optimised across multiple channels will emerge as an area of expertise, backed by serious data science.
This is what Audience Intelligence really is, understanding the value of consumers, their multichannel media consumption and modelling likely return on investment. This will be a specific cross-media discipline.
This could help redefine the role of media agencies as business partners. There is a danger of media agencies being relegated to delivery partners, experts in the ‘how’ not the ‘why.’
It’s a lower value role and can be easily substituted. An emerging role of business advisors akin to management consultants, using data to define outcomes is a very interesting prospect that could reinvigorate what we do.
Charlie Makin started BLM and Pintarget, he is exploring a startup around audience intelligence.