That old dinosaur Phil Georgiadis was right. (But so was I)
Greg Grimmer concedes that an old debate with Phil Georgiadis may have ended in a score draw…
Readers of a certain age might have had the dubious privilege of being at the dreary Welsh hell hole that is Celtic Manor some time back in the last decade.
There Phil Georgardis, then MD now Chairman, of Walker Media and your dear correspondent traded barbed comments about the potential or otherwise of online advertising.
Phil (in a turn of fate guaranteed to now make Chris Locke laugh) had just won the Barclays account from Starcom and together with his loyal client Jim Hytner took the stage at that year’s Media 360 event to de-bunk all things digital.
He also argued that the time honoured media principles of effective levels of coverage and frequency were being neglected in favour of the new fangled ideas available in digital channels. I, being the head of the world’s best digital agency of that era, (This is an opinion piece ! Ed) obviously took a counter view with lots of evidence from the sector that is now excitingly known as “Performance Marketing”.
Now Phil was of course trying (and succeeding) in differentiating Walker Media from just about every other media agency at that time who were desperately putting digital, search or social at the “heart of the agency”. Whilst he was quietly investing heavily in the digital area he managed to ensure that Walker argued good client-friendly common sense. Don’t spend money on a new channel just because it is there and make sure you have a measurable effect on those media you do choose to use.
I returned to this debate last week in a conversation with Michael Steckler, MD of Criteo. They are running an event this week aimed at digital savvy clients that returns to the debate of Performance versus Branding in the online space.
Being survivors of dotcoms boom 1 and 2 we chuckled at the current mindset of media types who seem to be the first to recommend the cookie duration to a client but seem to be the first to complain when an ad that isn’t 100% relevant in terms of timing, targeting, or environment hits their browser screen.
A recent example of such was a very bright media agency MD who talked in eloquent terms about understanding the purchase cycle of a particular product but could or would not give the online marketing a break due to still being served display ads after purchasing the said product.
Instead of criticising the team or indeed the media , two things should be going across the cranium of any half bright media type at this point.
- Clearly the targeting (demographically, attitudinally, physiographically, regionally – if not timing) was spot on
- Display advertising is having an awareness effect not just a performance effect
Anyway back to dear old Phil and the effective frequency debate he was arguing back in 2005, where a secondary point he was keen on making at the time was that online display was overpriced. Fast forward six years and the massively increased supply of inventory and the plethora of over supply of media owners in the online sector mean yields have tumbled for all. Thus frequency is now cheaper to achieve (coverage is still an issue but let’s leave that for another day) and whilst decades of offline research has produced the general wisdom that traditional effective frequency is always “between 2 and 3” maybe – as my Jurassic coast dweller was arguing – we haven’t known the effective frequency of online display until more recently and – guess what – it might be higher for a banner than for a 60 second TV spot or a colour DPS.
Moreover, we may have got carried away with a mixture of old school wisdom and new school technology, I clearly remember being impressed by adserving technologies that enabled me to use automated frequency capping rather than having TV buyers spending hours trying to manually cap the over exposure on TV. Maybe it was this that meant we under-bought not over invested in digital back in the day. Whereas now new media owners, using a combination of targeting technologies and charging via interaction not mere exposure, are dragging clients and agencies that thought they had escaped the drudgery of banner ads behind back in to the fray.
Thus I have to end this story with the fact that of course we were both right. I was just ahead of my time in arguing for increased digital investment ahead of more prosaic less interactive channels, but Phil’s principles were indeed right and are probably now more true than ever. Avoid the stunts, the frivolous and the irrelevant. Don’t buy the birthday candles before you have even baked let alone iced the cake.