Dream on. Full-service as it was is not coming back

You don’t hear media people or clients saying they want to see a return to the agency model of yesteryear – but it’s back up for discussion nonetheless, writes Dominic Mills.

There’s always a cyclical pattern to the way adland thinks and obsesses, and right now it’s focused (again…) on the return of full-service agencies.

This is the same as, oh, 2007, 2010 and as recently as last year.

Then we saw VCCP buy AdConnection to fold into its fledgling VCCP Media arm and IPG creative shop MullenLowe set up a media unit, Mediahub, while Havas Media Group wants to bring all 17 of its agency brands together under one roof by the end of the year.

And, after hibernating for all of 12 months, it’s back again. At Mediatel’s Planning conference earlier this month, a number of participants touched on the subject.

Since then, following news of the Saatchi/Blue 449 win of Asda, the commentariat (that includes me, I suppose) have been out in force. You can read stuff here.

But here’s the thing: you never really hear media people say they want to go back to full service. It’s almost always the creative agencies that wax nostalgic and yearn for full service. The media people nod politely, but you know what they’re thinking: “over my dead body, mate”.

And here’s the other thing: when did you last hear a client say they wanted to go back to full service? Because, if they really did, they could make it happen.

It’s not complicated to work out why clients prefer the status quo: it’s easier for them to manage, there’s no diffusion of responsibility, no ability to blame the creative agency for any screw-ups (or vice versa).

Andrew Stephens of Goodstuff, commenting last week on the Asda/Saatchi/Blue 449 arrangement, puts it cogently: “Being independent of a central creative contract means the media agency simply has to work harder to ensure the work is always the best it can be. There are no hiding places or protecting each other behind closed doors. Our name is on it, which means the media product has to stand on its own two legs.”

Or you can put it this way: clients want one throat to choke for media, and one for creative.

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There’s another reason too, which is rooted in history. When full service really was full service, the media departments (as they then were) were usually regarded by the rest of the agency as something on the bottom of their shoes – to be wiped off on the floor or ignored.

They were kept in the basement, and rarely allowed out.

So why, when they now can determine their own paths and priorities, would they want to go back to that?

They don’t and, as the floor plates of adland have shifted, the media agencies now find themselves holding more power (and money) than their creative peers – which is exactly why the latter, who have been pushed down the table, flutter their eyelashes at their media peers.

At the same time, as media has become more diverse, so media agencies have developed a dizzying array of specialisms – search, mobile, social, analytics and so on – making them much more complex. They have a hard enough time integrating their own specialisms, let alone working more closely with creative agencies.

That is not to say the two sides don’t need to get closer together. As one senior media man put it to me last week (and I paraphrase): “The creatives are making ads and designing formats, but they’ve no idea where they’re going to go, or what the context is. And we’re booking slots with no idea what’s going to go in them. So where does accountability lie?”

But how might modern full service look? The Asda initiative is one possibility, and has the advantage that both Saatchis and Blue 449 will start from the same place at the same time with a blank page.

Most client appointments of agencies are made out of sync – Tesco’s appointment, first, of BBH, and then about 12 months later, Mediacom, is a case in point. This makes it infinitely harder to get them to work closer together.

We know Saatchis and Blue 449 will co-locate a dedicated team working exclusively on Asda, which is fine up to a point. But the specialist talent will not work exclusively for Asda, because the economics of specialism (and maybe not the culture either) simply don’t allow for it.

However, as I understand it, one of the benefits of the arrangement is that some of the barriers will be broken down, and each side will have fewer vested interests to defend. We shall see how it works out.

The other way we might inch back to full service is, so to speak, via the back door: media agencies developing more creative services.

We have seen this already with media agencies developing content arms (although contracting out most of the creative stuff), but the latest development looks even more interesting.

Earlier this month, MEC announced the launch of Wavemaker (actually more like the formalisation of what they were already doing), which claims to bring together content creation, distribution, evaluation and data/insights into one dedicated unit, and a global one at that.

This looks to me like a move towards a modern-day, media-centric version of full service, albeit disguised by the all-purpose cloak of ‘content’.

MEC may wish to pretend otherwise, but I’m meeting them this week, so if I’ve got it wrong no doubt they will slap my wrists.

Cuckoo: it’s Cannes time already

As the first cuckoo is supposed denote the arrival of spring, so ‘Cannes one-upmanship’ heralds summer.

I’ve been enjoying Mediatel’s ‘Overheard at AdWeek‘.

My contribution: two middle-aged blokes hugging each other, and one – in a bid to upstage his ‘friend’ – says: “Will you be in Cannes? You must come to our party.”

It made me want to throw up. FFS, it’s only April, and you’re not allowed to ‘Cannes’ anybody till late May.