Future 100: Industry needs more collaboration and trust
The Future 100 Club: Empowering Voices
The industry remains poor at true collaboration, partly because advertisers are not pushing hard enough, according to Future 100 members.
Speaking at a recent roundtable event, Charlene Williams, senior project manager at Word on the Curb, admitted: “As an industry, we’re all really bad gatekeepers.”
Francesca Coia, digital planning account director at Republic of Media, stressed: “Clients have to push for [collaboration].”
“Time is such a challenge,” according to Sophie Gale-Evans, client business director at Digital Cinema Media. With clients sometimes demanding “10 scenarios laid out”, she conceded: “Planning by iteration like that takes time. You can argue time is better spent earlier in the process.”
Lee Mabey, managing partner, Red Star, at Dentsu X, agreed. Citing an experience when a client pushed back on multiple ideas in a meeting, he explained: “They want to see one response – they don’t want to see six or seven responses.”
While all agreed that collaboration at the start of a process is key, it is difficult to achieve.
“If you’re collaborating and you don’t know how to focus on your own lane, that makes it difficult,” said Evelyn Oluwole, senior sales director at WeTransfer. “Often there’s overlapping, there’s duplication in efforts — that causes so much confusion and everything just falls apart.”
Hannah Dempsey, vice-president, marketing, at Jellyfish, encouraged brands to work on this with their agencies. She noted: “It’s about relationship-building — getting to know the agencies, building the rapport with them.”
Supporting media owners
Another key area to boost collaboration, according to the group, was to involve media owners more.
Highlighting how discussions around collaboration are often about just agency and advertiser, Mabey said: “The media owner is the under-utilised part of the process. Get them into the conversation.”
This was certainly the consensus among those in the room who worked at media owners. As Oluwole declared: “Sometimes it feels like a battle between media owner and agency.”
Kate Tovey, director of customer engagement at JCDecaux UK, pointed out: “The role of what is being asked of a media owner has changed. Sometimes we can be used in quite an implementational way and that doesn’t scratch the surface of how we can add value.”
Part of that is to do with the sheer amount of new tools and products that each media owner offers and that agencies and brands are expected to be aware of.
Lee Isaacs, senior media manager, southern and northern Europe, at Just Eat Takeaway.com, acknowledged: “For people who aren’t in the know, it feels like a lot of money, a lot of work. We rely on agencies to help us.”
One key way to improve this process is the sharing of best practices and use cases so that agencies are kept abreast of new developments, the group agreed. Moreover, for an industry that can be highly complex and is keen on acronyms, everything needs to be made simple. As Mabey said, “Everything is easier if it’s in layman’s terms.”
Creative and media together
A lack of collaboration is also cited as the main reason why media and creative don’t seem to be working closely enough.
For Emily Roberts, head of digital at Responsible Marketing Advisory, she has seen first hand more brands asking for a more joined-up approach. “It doesn’t happen much now,” she said. Tovey agreed: “It feels like it’s not as joined up as it could be.”
The room was in agreement that the two should be together more, with Williams pointing out: “Media is still only seen as a distribution tool.”
Gale-Evans added: “You see the best work when it’s integral to the wider plan.”
However, Isaacs countered: “It depends on the appetite of the business and how much time you have. It’s quicker to do a basic campaign. Is your CEO/CMO going to care about how creative your campaign is or do they just want to see the numbers?”
But as Oluwole emphasised: “If the ad is bland, no-one is going to look at it.”
More trust needed
Elsewhere, trust is a key topic that comes up time and again in this industry, but often relating to consumer trust in brands. The Future 100 cohort, though, highlighted the importance of trust between brands and agencies.
Without trust, it’s hard to get good work out of an agency, the group agreed. “The amount of times I’ve seen a great piece of work and the marketer goes: ‘I don’t like it…’” said Mabey, alluding to how personal preferences can often get in the way of feedback to briefs.
A recent IPA and World Federation of Advertisers study found that 89% of agencies and 84% of marketers believe personal opinion plays a big part in decision-making when it comes to creative development.
The research also found a long and complex approval process was another contributing factor — something that was echoed by Mabey, who suggested “sometimes there’s so many levels of approval” that it’s easy to miss out on a good idea.
“You have to trust the agency that they’re doing the right thing,” he stressed.
Indeed, there’s such a focus on “proving” returns via measurement, the group suggested.
“There’s a default to measure what’s easy to do so,” Gale-Evans noted.
What about consumers?
Another priority that is not discussed enough among industry leaders, according to the F100 members, is the end customer.
“We all are the end user,” Coia said. “Sometimes we sell things we wouldn’t pay attention to!”
“Have a good understanding of what the consumer wants and expects — optimise that,” Gale-Evans urged.
Mabey added: “If the customer looks at it and goes ‘that’s shit’, what’s the point?”
Much of this comes down to reluctance in a volatile economic environment. Tovey admitted: “There’s a lot of scariness around risk-taking.”
As Roberts pointed out: “Of all the budgets a CFO can cut, marketing is the easiest to cut. If a media owner/agency comes up with a big collaboration piece, and it doesn’t deliver, they will cut it.”
Isaacs suggested: “Make sure everyone understands that’s where the brilliant work happens.”
In a rallying call for more collaboration, Oluwole concluded: “We owe it to the next generation to do it right.”
The discussion was the first in a series of roundtables featuring members of The Media Leader’s Future 100 Club. Key topics in these talks will culminate in the Future 100 Club: Empowering Voices event taking place on 26 June.