The Hindu Business Line : Making advertising accountable

It isn’t as if the whole world is interested in where advertising is headed. Like the way they watch a commercial or casually flip past a page which contains the combined labour of fifty people, advertising is largely ignored. Unless, of course, you make an ad with animals or show lots of skin in which case, you get a lot more attention than you want.

Ten years ago, talk of clients cutting into 15 per cent commissions would have been fodder for conversation. Now the question is no longer, “Do they?” but “How much?”. Clients today have cut into all the avenues of revenue. They’ve hacked at commissions, snatched away print jobs, questioned TV commercial estimates and ruthlessly cut down exhibition estimates by an arbitrary margin. It has now become more like bargaining in Palika Bazaar. The average client would bluntly cut down the quoted price by 50 per cent. Most agencies caved in, making clients believe they had been creamed for years! Eventually, in a matter of a few years, advertising went from being the poster boy of the economy to its abandoned child.

Advertising agencies have only themselves to blame. They have never been accountable and never had to meet quarterly projections. When market share went up, the agency took credit and the blame was automatically placed on many other factors such as product quality not being good enough, patchy distribution or even the wrong strategy when the markets were otherwise.

The old thinking about agencies being only one part of the marketing mix provided enough cover for escape routes. The net result — agencies were marginalised, pushed to the periphery like a host of vendors who compete on price and clients got to pick the ones they wanted by chance.

If that seems a harsh depiction, consider this. When have agencies charged clients for a pitch? When have agencies offered to solve a problem not connected to communication and got considered seriously? When have agencies really understood the business their clients are in? Which leads to the all important question: Are agencies really in a position to add value?

Let’s face it. The old model is broken. Revenue from media commissions has worked for over one hundred years but it looks as if the expiry date is fast approaching.

Fragmentation of media, the mainstream movement of the Internet and the mobile revolution are redrawing the contours of communication and agencies will have to understand and align themselves for a role within the emerging space. Otherwise, they will go the way blocks and mats disappeared when photo typesetting and digital delivery were adopted by newspapers and magazines. So, what will the agency of the future look like?

The first step is accountability. Clients want results and agencies will have to figure out a way to deliver them. It’s not the bell but the cash register which has to ring when a customer walks into a shop. It will not be enough to merely create an impressive brand image.

The informed customer is going to play a huge role in changing advertising. Sensitised by so many years of exposure, they pick false notes as easily as false teeth. They will rely, not on advertising alone but on a battery of friends and impartial reviews on the Internet to arrive at a buying decision.

Advertising will have to get more truthful and far savvier if it has to sustain the interest of a generation brought up on a feast of plenty. The same customer who zaps an ad with the remote control mails another ad to a whole mailing list when it catches his fancy. One can’t buy the kind of exposure that the Honda ‘Cog’ commercial got or the attention that Sony got with its introduction of the Bravia LCD monitors.

The best advertising will get picked up and distributed by people purely because it is interesting, innovative and surprising - by mail and by word of mouth. The medium will no longer be just TV and the newspaper. It will acquire a life of its own. Think of the consumers as participants and not passive viewers.

This is the single biggest challenge advertising will have to address. Consumers no longer want to sit on the sidelines and consume. They want to be part of establishing the identity and contribute. The brands which understand this will benefit the most.

Many agencies have not established an online presence because they believe Internet advertising is still in its infancy. While that may be true, this could also mean that they may arrive on the scene after the party is over. Every medium has risen to its zenith because of its power to attract and retain audiences. The Internet has the additional power of being able to address a mass of niches, not just the masses.

So, is the future in user-generated advertising as much as there is user-generated content like blogs? If one sees the ads generated for Firefox, it would be tempting to believe so, but how many brands can truly get people to spend time and money without return or reward?

We have this prediction to make about the future. All image and soft-sell advertising will stay on press and TV, where the need is to spread awareness across a large mass of people. However, all response-led advertising will be driven by the Internet and mobile simply because these media offer a fabulous opportunity to micro-target and deliver advertising, to a precisely defined audience and track results. In addition, it will help develop a feedback mechanism that helps to improve offline targeting as well.

We also believe that agencies will have to share in the risks of the business like their clients do. They will need to evolve pay-for-performance models, which we already offer, to prove that they mean what they say and performance measured in terms of actual sales, not just intentions. It’s going to be a rough, hard ride.

It is also the opportunity of a lifetime for agencies to take a hard look at their work and redefine it. And the opportunity to prove they can live up to the hype they are entrusted with creating.

(The writer is Co-founder and Creative Head, Brand Portrait.)