The days of the campaign are over

Guy Abraham, global strategic planning director, Zenith Optimedia Worldwide, believes that the discussion has gone beyond 360-degree communication. He is an advocate of moving the needle towards thinking in a 365-day fashion. Quoting stats from an Adobe study he points out that over the last two years, marketing had progressed faster than what it did over the last 50 years.

“The day of 360-degree integrated communication around an advertising idea is no longer relevant,” he says, and adds that the job of communication has now moved on towards developing an ability to identify people at different stages in the consumer journey and serve messaging and brand experience across more and more touch points.

In an interview with cat.a.lyst , he speaks about why the creative agencies are not as well-placed as media agencies when taking charge of an ever-changing mediascape.

There is a lot of talk that the campaign approach to marketing is over. What are your views?

Absolutely. Let’s get back to the history of the creative agency, the media agency and the PR agency. If you think about it, the creative agency was a full service agency and the only means of communication was advertising and a little bit of PR, promotions and stuff.

Then, the PR department left to do its own thing and the media department left to start on its own, because there were things beyond advertising that media departments were getting involved with, like advertorials, sponsorships, integration and so on.

If you talk about an integration with a show like Indian Idol , there was no campaign or traditional advertising in that execution. It was the media agencies who worked on the entire concept. The media has been delivering non-advertising brand experiences over time. And we have been engaging with digital agencies, technology experts and e-commerce departments. So we are not about cost-effective buying of TV spots or print space anymore. Over the past 20 years we have become multi-disciplinary practitioners, many departments with multiple skills. So we have moved with the customer. The creative agency is still coming out with big advertising ideas as they can do that cost-efficiently. But they are a factory for communication, while we are a curative agency that finds, negotiates and delivers traditional and non-traditional media across touch points. Our ambition is not to be guardians of the brand.

Earlier, the creative agency was the guardian of the brand. Has that responsibility been handed back to the clients?

It depends on the client. We as the media agency want to be the masters of the customer experience across the journey.

We believe that we have that kind of customer understanding across “why, where and what” to satisfy expectations at every stage of the customer journey. The media agency has been in charge of understanding customers far more than the creative agency. Over the last 10 years, which creative agencies globally have even subscribed to data sources like TGI (Target Group Index)?

But don’t most brand ideas come from the creative agency based on insights given by their customer insight teams?

They develop the advertising idea and the advertising insight is with the creative agency. But we are the ones with the customer insight, who know what the customer wants. We know what customers are doing with their mobile, we know what videos they watch on the internet and so on.

If the media agency has the real insight because they delve into customer insights every day and the creative agency has the brand insight, isn’t that a position of conflict from the brand’s point of view?

In a campaign world, a brand decided that ‘I am going to say this to the consumer’ and the agency created advertising on those lines.

What they did not realise was that in a TV ecosystem, that was the way of life. In the digital age of paid, owned and earned media, the advertising is only one part of the ecosystem.

The ambition of the media agency is to be the guardian of that entire ecosystem.

Will technology endanger the media planning business?

You need people to run that software. In a machine-based future, we will have media guys hooked on to the system and you have auctions.

You still need planners to understand what’s next because the machine cannot predict that.

You said media should make owned media work the hardest, so that it has a trickle-down effect on your paid and earned media…

The way you do that is to optimise your owned media. It’s not about money and media spends but man hours. Clients have to think not about where you spend the most money, but about where you make the most difference. That’s why you need to pay attention to owned media first.

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