Media reps jive with advertising agencies

Winds of change have been relentlessly sweeping across the landscape of the advertising industry, creating new equations and rewriting the rules of the game. Nowhere has it made a greater impact than on the advertising agency business which presents a totally different picture today from that four decades ago. As a consequence, media representatives have also shown greater resilience than the proverbial chameleon in changing their colours to suit the dynamic environment.

Those were the days when flip charts and the OHP (overhead projector) provided the sophisticated sales force with tools of persuasive communication. Soon enough, they were overtaken by the carousel Kodak Projector which occasionally rebelled and left the presenter in total disarray, as he struggled to replace the slides that had disappeared down under! The advent of Excel electronic spread-sheets and Power Point added a new dimension to the sales kit. Today, the media rep walks into an agency armed with a pen drive and a laptop and allows the OHP to take over in one of the many conference rooms that are provided for the media fraternity to prevent them from entering the working area where new campaigns are churned out in strict confidence.

Apart from the changes brought about on the selling front, how have the purveyors of space been coping with the advertising agencies that have been evolving at a smart clip over the decades?

Those were the days

In years gone by, almost lost in the mists of memory, the agency heads and top honchos in Creative worked in tandem and monopolised the contact with clients. It was gin and tonic at lunch at one of the premium clubs, followed by protracted discussions in the afternoon. Sundowners or cocktails/dinner invariably followed on the weekends.

Ranking next in the hierarchy, the group heads, account executives and account planners serviced the clients, taking over the line of action after the basics had been outlined by their bosses in conjunction with the senior officials at the clients' end.

It was only after the framework was completed and the budget frozen, that the media planner/controller came into the picture. Even at that juncture, the account executive and one or two senior executives at the clients' end had the final say on media selection. (Today, the client's representative often fights shy of interfering with media selection on the ground that the agency is fully accountable when the post-campaign analysis is taken up for discussion in the presence of the CEO.)

It was, therefore, logical for senior marketing professionals in the media to work out their respective moves and, accordingly, cultivate the agency heads while establishing a close rapport with the account servicing officials. And finally, the exercise had to be rounded off by calling on the media planning/ buying/ scheduling fraternity, who invariably hailed from Tamil Nadu or Kerala, apparently because of their inherent expertise at crunching numbers!

Then came the new era when the difficult times spelt the death-knell of gin-and-tonic lunches, lazy afternoons, cocktails by the poolside and binges on Friday evenings. The Olympia in Kolkata and the Ritz in Mumbai, the regular watering-holes of the advertising fraternity, began to notice a drop in the ringing of the cash registers!

In the meanwhile, to add to the media representatives' challenges in this newly evolving environment, the concept of the media independent began to take concrete shape. While the Ivy League agencies such as JWT and O&M (WPP Group), Lintas, Ulka and R. K. Swamy retained their identity, the media outfits spawned by them, such as Mindshare (with a mindboggling number of splinter units such as Maxus, Motivator, Fulcrum), LMG, Interface, Lodestar and Media Direction, began to overtake their original creators in terms of business, revenue and increasing interface with clients.

The scene today

How does the media representative operate today in the midst of this new labyrinth of advertising agencies, creative hotshops, digital media outfits, independent research units and, of course, independent media agencies? Quick on the uptake, the purveyors of media find it fruitful to network more with the media planning/buying fraternity.

Heads of advertising agencies, account executives (who service the clients in association with their media planning executives) and creative heads are not being contacted with as much frequency by the current generation of media representatives, who are already hard-pressed to keep track of where the action is and where the concerned individual is, given the high rate of attrition in the industry.

Creative duties and media often emanate from two different sources and, occasionally, media plans are worked out in Europe, Singapore, Japan or Dubai and implemented through their corresponding outfits in India! (Most of the leading multinational agencies in the world have a presence in India today.)

While the agency business itself is getting to be more and more complicated with the big four or five international conglomerates acquiring or forfeiting global business that cause seismic changes way below in the local scenario, the media representatives are left in limbo till the alignments become clearly defined and they can tweak their approach accordingly.

The advent of digital media and digital specialist outfits has again drawn fresh battlelines for the pitch of this rapidly growing business. Agencies are vying with each other to offer a bundling of solutions while clients are keen that specialists work out their own strategies.

In this churn, the media representatives who have, only of late, settled down to marketing their online editions in addition to the regular arms of the media, have to quickly re-learn the art of marketing the multifaceted options available on digital media, social networking sites and search engines. To add to the party and provide additional scope for advertising, enter the new breed of iPads, tablets and smart phones!

Grooving into the digital era, newspapers are quickly getting on to the mobile platform for the consumption of their content by mobile users, having planned their moves well in advance to change the format to suit the small screen of the mobile instrument. “Apps” is the new jargon doing the rounds. Nimble-footed representatives are marketing space and time through the acquisition of new skill-sets and a paradigm shift in their way of functioning and customising presentations.

The advertising agency of today is a cauldron of energy and bubbling ideas. The media representatives are constantly updating themselves to keep pace with the dynamic agencies lest they be left by the wayside. Just as they offer a bouquet of business solutions ranging from print advertising to electronic media, event marketing, brand activation and brand loyalty programmes, the agencies are gradually trying to get back to the old ways of combining servicing and creative under one roof, with a whole lot of specialist options to retain the clients in their fold! After all, it takes two to tango!

(The writer is a consultant (advertising) to The Hindu group. E-mail: vkalidas@gmail.com )

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