Monday tapas: C5 row is a knife in the back for planning
This week Dominic Mills chews his way through a menu of advertising news, from Omnicom’s £30m Channel 5 exit, to marketing’s apparent identity crisis.
Welcome to the ‘tapas’ column: less of a rant than last week, more of a selection of small morsels for readers to sample and explore further if they wish.
First up is a reaction to Omnicom’s unilateral decision to take its ball away from Channel 5 and give it to ITV instead, and why it undermines everything media agencies say about the importance of media planning.
The background to Opera’s decision is here, and the usual pithy comment from the estimable Brian Jacobs here.
I’m sure the 1.2 million or so regular watchers of Big Brother will neither notice, nor give a stuff, that as of last week the ad breaks in one of their favourite programmes look very different. Gone are the likes of McDonald’s, Irn-Bru and Sony Music.
But what about the clients? Their marketing departments will notice. The big cheeses at Omnicom, however, will be fervently hoping they are, at best, disinterested. I suspect it ain’t that simple.
Other affected advertisers include Walkers, Warner Bros, Renault, Coty UK and Co-op, all chasing the hard-to-reach 16-34s that Big Brother delivers well.
Now here’s the funny thing. Opera spent more of these clients’ money with Big Brother in 2013 than any other single programme.
So, if Opera saw fit to shovel so much of their money into BB last year, how does it explain the decision to spend nothing this year?
I imagine the two most obvious/honest – take your pick – explanations to the client will go down as well as a cup of cold sick: one, ‘er, we were big-time wrong last year, it’s not the right environment for you’; or two, ‘listen mate, we really messed up our share deal with ITV and, frankly, it’s more important to us to meet that than it is to keep you happy’.
I have no doubt that the likes of Zenith, MediaCom and Carat are, as I write, all over these clients. For their part, they will be wondering what is going on; why they are the ones to suffer, and how it will affect their businesses. They will be vulnerable to the seductive cooing of Opera’s rivals.
Meanwhile, if I ran either PHD or OMD, I would be mightily cheesed off. Here are two agencies that stress the importance of strategy and clever thinking – i.e. planning. And these are their clients they will have to defend this decision to, not Opera’s.
Yet, in effect, Opera is saying that planning counts for nothing. I used to have considerable sympathy for agencies when they complained they couldn’t charge for planning. I don’t anymore.
Marketing’s identity crisis
Next on the tapas menu is a selection of news items which suggest marketing, as represented by the client-side discipline, is going through a bit of identity crisis.
Let’s start with Procter & Gamble, the Harvard (to Unilever’s Yale) of 20th century marketing, which last week declared that ‘marketing’ is out, and ‘brand management’ is in. In one sense, given that P&G invented the concept of brand and category management many years ago, this is a back-to-the-future move.
Just two days earlier we had Marks & Spencer putting even more emphasis on marketing in order, as boss Marc Bolland puts it (somewhat tautologically), to help the organisation move with “pace, simplicity and speed”.
This is some turnaround for an organisation which really didn’t bother with marketing until 20 years ago; indeed, it was so culturally opposed to it that former chairman Sir Rick Greenbury personally told me off when Campaign reported that it was about to appoint its first-ever ad agency. You would have thought he would have more important things to do.
And to wrap up a confusing week for marketers, on the same day as M&S, we had EE’s outgoing head of digital saying he doesn’t believe in chief digital officers.
So what’s going on? The answer, I think, is to borrow from writer William Goldman’s maxim about Hollywood, is that no-one knows anything anymore.
This is not a criticism. Life for marketers is so complicated today, and changing so fast – and perhaps so different across sectors – that it is inevitable they have to feel their way towards the right structures and roles.
Last month, for example, I was chatting to one agency chief about which clients really ‘got’ marketing today. Retailers and service companies, they said.
“And which ones don’t?”, I asked. Packaged goods, was the answer.
One explanation, they suggested, was that because retailers and service companies (banks, insurers, airlines) are directly exposed to the consumer, they have been quicker to grasp the importance of being agile and responsive, particularly in areas such as social media.
Packaged goods companies, by contrast, are one stage removed from consumers – usually by retailers – and have been slower to adapt. Their brand-led heritage and structures – when products are the same, everything rests on the ‘brand’ – mean decisions can only be taken after every impact on the brand is considered. This makes them slow and unresponsive, often not helped by ossified and hierarchical structures. Diageo, my informant noted, was particularly bad.
No wonder then that the likes of P&G are struggling to work it all out. It’s tough. Few, however, will feel confident enough to dispense with a chief digital officer, as EE’s Dominic Collins, heading off to Legal and General, thinks they should.
We will, I’m sure, see many more such examples of organisational convulsion as clients search for the right road forward. Most, though, will be about giving marketing a bigger role as top-line growth and faster responsiveness become, in parallel, more important.
Teasing the sainted Mary Meeker
Finally, here’s the amuse-bouche of the tapas menu.
What a relief to see someone teasing Mary Meeker about her obsessional wish to see ‘time spent’ with media linked to ‘money spent’.
There are times when those of us who think she is away with the fairies on this one (though not on other stuff), feel like a lone voice in the wilderness.
Here’s a great blog from Dave Morgan, pointing out that, if ‘time spent’ was the only criterion – as opposed to stuff like impact, context and so on – then advertisers should stick a large part of their budgets on crockery and eating implements. Read some of the comments too, especially the one about sleep.
Why? Because Americans spend as much time eating and drinking as they do on their mobiles. Imagine how much time the fat ones spend.
Bonkers? Of course, but then so is the Meeker construct.
To get all the latest MediaTel Newsline updates follow us on Twitter.