The Media Practitioner Fights Back

Having taken something of a hammering yesterday from client, research company and media consultant, the more traditional media practitioner fought back a little today at the Nice MRG conference – but with the accepted caveat that the researcher’s role must change to encompass communication in its broadest sense.

Charlie Makin, managing partner at BLM, believed that the next few years would see the demise of the traditional media strategy as defined by medium – in favour of an overall media mix. He stated that we are currently “using more media, and in different ways”. Andy Tilley, managing partner at Unity – who clearly practices this already for some of his clients – felt that research must add other elements to the existing mix in order to address “communication”, but he accepted that the communication mix was very difficult to measure.

Makin felt the media planner had real opportunity to be the agency representative who sits at the side of the client and advises (back to James Walker’s assertions of yesterday, but this time with a re-definition of the existing role, not a wholesale re-branding (see Newsline)). “Creativity will not be led by advertising agencies in the coming years, but by media”, he suggested.

Fiona MacDonald (New PHD) pointed to examples of marketing during the World Cup when this was already the case for her clients: “We feel we are closer to the consumer than the advertising agency”, but she warned of the conflict with creatives and account handlers, who saw this initially as stepping on their toes. Makin’s vision would, she felt, lead to the traditional agency changing (maybe only when they see this creative media influence eroding accepted agency revenues).

The bottom line was a potential damp squib in all this communication planning vision. How can you get the financial director at the client company to accept communication as an investment not a cost? Makin felt this could only be done by turning this around so that it was seen as a long term capital investment, not a one-off item that could be struck off the P&L account at any time.