There’s more to media planning and buying than scale

Opinion

Size isn’t the only opportunity. Building good relationships with media owners means jointly understanding what success looks like and ensures client, agency and media owner can unlock mutual growth.

Conventional wisdom has always been that collective buying power and control of volume makes for success. Understandably, then, the looming Omnicom and Interpublic merger is the biggest story of the year so far. All well and good, but what happens if size doesn’t always matter?

In an industry increasingly defined by data, AI and rapid technological evolution, this warrants further consideration. After all, clients have never enjoyed more access to new sophisticated solutions, each with its own ability to drive attention and allow for customer-centric engagement.

As such, opportunities are aplenty to cut through against competitors’ bigger budgets.

So, in my view, while price ultimately will play an important part, pressure will mount on disruptive creative thinking and access to those new solutions to carve out opportunities — especially for the majority of clients that don’t have the budgets to splurge hundreds of millions each year on media and advertising.

Nurturing and developing deeper relationships between media owner partners and agencies has never been more important in this context.

Collaboration as catalyst for growth

Agencies need to create space for us to come together with media owners to foster brilliant creative media solutions for clients’ commercial needs. This can only be achieved when media owners have access to the right teams across the agency, be that client, strategy, activation or leadership.

Creating a better understanding between clients, media owners and ourselves is something we’ve been working on for some time via our Havas Unlocked events series. We’re determined to remove the “baton pass” transactional culture we’re used to seeing to establish more meaningful time together.

Because time spent better understanding client objectives and what campaign success really looks like garners a better response first time around. In doing so, idea generation is protected and the bar can be raised around creativity.

And this is why creating space for these conversations is crucial. Especially for longstanding client relationships where the pressure to innovate and find new opportunities is critical.

Havas Unlocked was initially designed as an annual event, but it’s been so valuable to all involved that we now hold it twice a year, allowing for more frequent and deeper engagement to ensure we’re all singing from the same hymn sheet.

Being a true partner works both ways

With more channels and platforms available than ever before, media owners need to enhance the experiences they can offer to advertisers and upskill how these opportunities are packaged, with a focus on creativity and innovation.

And showing thoughtful consideration for the client challenge and offering bespoke solutions ensure media owners remain a true partner to advertisers — a necessary component in a brand’s success story.

It’s also important that media owners understand the agency ethos and what makes them tick. Agencies spend time defining their vision, their relationships with clients and what makes them different; media owners need to respond to that and show up accordingly.

Success begins with a strong brief

One area I am sure we can all agree on is the importance of a good brief.

Challenging agencies to provide better briefs and more clarity on what the client actually wants is key — and by that I don’t mean asking for lots of irrelevant background information. Rather, we must ensure the problem is clearly defined, so that the solution is simple and can be directly linked to driving commercial results.

Demonstrating that you have a complete joint understanding of what success looks like will not only boost the credibility of a campaign and channel, but will also increase visibility of the partnership. This will build trust and inspire both teams to collaborate in the future, helping to reimagine and strengthen the relationship so that the agency and media owner can grow smarter together.

The ultimate acknowledgement of a strong agency-media owner relationship is entering an award together — proving to others that together your work is necessary, inspirational and effective.

We’ve experienced this with Domino’s, our long-standing client for over 26 years. We consistently try to push boundaries together to bring fresh thinking and new ideas to life, with multiple media firsts and award wins — testament to the growth that true collaboration unlocks.

And what this shows is that, increasingly more than spending power, a convergence between client, agency and media owner helps unlock mutual growth and is ultimately where the magic truly happens.

Abi Ward is deputy managing director at Havas Media UK