Further efforts from media owners to work collaboratively with one another may create more problems than it solves, PHD Media’s chief strategy officer has said this week.
Earlier this month, the UK’s three largest commercial broadcasters – ITV, Channel 4 and Sky – said they are shifting their focus towards reaching clients directly, and have been in talks with clients about the possibility of pitching for briefs together. Meanwhile, efforts have been made in the publishing world to consolidate digital ad sales.
However, asked on an Advertising Week Europe panel whether media owners should do more to work together in order to solve advertiser needs, PHD’s Mike Florence said: “no – based on what we’ve done before. It’s very clear the profit centres are in different places and [we see the media owners] squabbling over the budget.”
The companies end up fighting over money rather than working together, Florence said, adding that within this current model, there cannot be “true collaboration” between media owners or an “honest” relationship with clients.
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“So that model doesn’t work because it causes headaches,” he said, though he agreed that an alternative model, such as uniting the media owners under a single P&L, could have potential.
However, Florence added that with smaller clients, a partnership between relevant media owners to drive something bigger and deliver scale to rival the duopoly could still be effective.
Meanwhile, Claire Hilton, managing director, global brand and insight at Barclays, tentatively said it was an “interesting” idea to be able to deal with a “club” of media owners that can help address a brief, rather than a multitude of individuals. “As a client, I would definitely like to hear more about that.”
However, she expressed concern that working directly with media owners would lack the same impartiality and “broad landscape perspective” that media agencies can offer, and also doubted the ability of a brand to maintain strong direct relationships with multiple players.
“In my media strategy and planning, the real value that I get from my media agency is knowing that they know us incredibly well,” she said.
“There are very few briefs that I can think of where we end up going with just one media [channel]… If there are instances in which we only need to care about one platform or channel then fine, it makes more sense to go direct, but that’s not typically the norm.”
