‘It is the media agencies’ fault’

Greg Grimmer: Media planners perpetually destroy potentially great media companies through their myopic ways. Or is it more complicated than that?

This month’s excursions in the Grimmer media world have included chairing a panel at an industry event curiously entitled ‘Music 4.5’. Here, I was surrounded by entrepreneurial tech start-ups, expensive lawyers and even more expensively dressed venture capitalists.

Surveying the delegate list I realised I was the only agency person in the room. Now sometimes that can be a very good thing, today was not one of those days. I made this observation to the floor and asked them to be gentle with me. This was, of course, ceremoniously ignored as speaker after speaker and question after question from the floor was based around the premise of ‘why are media planners so stupid not to see the value of our new sparkly digital venture?’

Everyone was convinced that the ad funded model was going to be successful for digital publishing/audio content, if only those pesky media planners would see the value of their offering and stop spending money on that damned television thingamajig.

Now of course this is not a new phenomenon. You don’t have to be a media sales person to think that advertising agencies – and media planners in particular – are biased in their judgment. Clients, journalists, auditors, consultants and Uncle Tom Cobley have all over the years suspected that wrong media decisions are being made due to a combination of our commissions, bribes (either real or in the form of lunches or jollies), laziness (I’ll just bung out last year’s plan) or just plain stupidity.

Now I have worked in agencies, both big and small, and worked within agency deal scenarios as well as line by line arrangements. I can honestly say I can count with just one finger how many times I have heard a senior agency manager try and wrongly ‘influence’ media spend. This was a clumsy effort by a finance director who made the observation in a board meeting that our poster spend was quite low and posters were, in fact, financially ‘efficient’ media. He was ceremoniously told to stick to finance, not media planning.

Now this isn’t to say that ‘special’ relationships don’t exist between buyers and sellers. This has always existed and it tends to be the seller not the planner that unfairly benefits versus their competition. An editor once said to me, when I accused her journal of favouritism towards another agency: “Never criticise your competitors for doing their job better than you are doing yours.” A lesson I learnt long ago – and one that unsuccessful tech start-ups and sales directors alike should be encouraged to remember.

The much decried agency trading desks now minimise the effect of good human interaction. They are accused by those excluded from them as being set up purely for the benefit of agency profitability, not for the good of clients’ media plans.

The most tired sales pitch I still hear and one I heard last week was: “We (as a media) get X% of consumers time but only a tenth of X% of the ad revenue.”

Ignoring the fact that research used in this quasi-equation normally has more flaws in it than Davis Love’s decision making process for his captain’s picks* for the US Ryder Cup team. This observation goes back to the fact that someone is doing their job better than you.

But back to media planners – I used to say give me 18 months with a bright graduate and I would be able to turn them into a capable (or indeed talented) planner. However, this is not the case nowadays because of the amount of specialist craft skills that planners haven’t learnt to execute, for example PPC, SEO, branded content and so on. Some of the best media planners used to come from the TV buying department, with the early days of the Internet producing talented planners that were using the web as a hobby as well as a work tool. Now the route from specialist to generalist is a harder road to travel.

However, this should make planners more open to new ideas from external sources – and indeed this is my experience. They may get it wrong but these days who knows what the ‘right’ media plan looks like? With data overload, too many choices and never enough money, life as a planner can seldom have been harder.

For me, the best planners always went through a stage in their career of ‘going native’ with their clients, when it became difficult to tell whom they really worked for as they cared so much about the clients’ business success. I like this trait but as a manager I always tried to keep them focused on the advantages of working in an agency framework while looking for the next new untried solution.

So, if you are reading this as a disgruntled entrepreneurial tech start-up failing to hit your ad-funded revenue target, or indeed a kvetching sales person unable to convince your intended target with your pitch, think about the following…the planner in front of you may be incredibly adroit at their job and indeed will have done lots of soul searching before committing to an excel spread sheet. They are being paid to make an objective decision for their client and not for the benefit of your business plan or bonus cheque.

*Steve Stricker and Jim Furyk