By Charles Lee Mathews. Creative and media agencies are disconnected, and everyone is locked out of the commercial data they need to do better work. For real improvement, brands need to share commercial insights with their marketing partners.
Why do creative and media still sit separately? It’s a question that has many experts in the industry scratching their heads. As Kagiso Musi, group MD of Meta Media, put it in last week’s newsletter: “It’s bizarre.” More than that, however, it’s an obstacle to commercial success. “Whether you sit on the creative or the media side, the work that we should be doing is building a bridge to commerce,” says Musi. “Without creative products, media will not exist. And without media, where would the creative go? What’s most important is understanding what our customers want. What they want is commercial results.”
Musi notes the industry needs media and creatives to work together in their clients’ best interests. “To fix the problems in the industry we need a more holistic perspective,” she says. The solution, she believes, demands that creative agencies become commerce agencies. “We’ve got to marry creative and commerce for marketing to work more effectively. To do this, creative and media need to work more closely together than ever before.”
- #Interview: Kagiso Musi on building creative commerce agencies (Nov 2024)
- Net results: when media and creative align (July 2024)
For Charlie Stewart, CEO of Rogerwilco the traditional approach to branding and budget allocation is flawed. “Historically, there’s been an 80-20 split with 20% going into production, which is the big idea and the execution of it. Eighty percent would then go into the amplification of it. There’s an inherent weakness that doesn’t encourage relatable, authentic creativity. It just encourages people to follow a recipe,” he says.
Brand relevance is critical
“The role of creativity is to cause behavioural shifts. But people still are stuck in this world where the vast bulk of a budget needs to go into amplification. I would caution against that and say brands need to make sure that the message resonates before they even start thinking about where they’re going to place the message,” he says.
Neil Pursey, CEO and co-founder of Measurebyte says that the current business model sees brands perpetually brief agencies to do top-of-funnel marketing which is all about awareness. This has locked agencies out of the commercial data that brands hold on to.
When agencies get paid based on a percentage, the motivation isn’t there to improve performance, Pursey says. “They can see all the problems and want to change things, but the business model doesn’t allow for this.”
Industry value chain fragmented
“This creates silos, which are a persistent problem in the industry,” Pursey adds. “Advertising agencies want to build better brand campaigns and be able to report on how they improve brand salience, but they’re not empowered to do this because of how procurement is structured in the industry,” he says.
After working across disciplines in the marketing sector, Pursey — like Musi — has a deep perspective on adland’s broken business model. He helped set up Draftline, Ab-InBev’s data-led creative agency. “Draftline is a rare [business] in that not many companies can build a full 30-person data team with [over] 70 creatives who work on some 30 brands.”.
The solution, Pursey says, is to invest in trusted third parties that hold important insights. “If all the data is centralised and an agency can look at the bigger picture, they are more well-equipped and better off, and can make better decisions for the brand. This enables better outputs and performance marketing,” says Pursey, who started Measurebyte with Jay Thomson, formerly of Liquorice, to solve this problem for businesses that can’t bring everything in-house like AB-InBev.
Adland’s big misalignment
Scott Reinders, partner, digital media at Connect, part of the Up&Up Group (formerly M&C Saatchi SA Group) agrees there is a disconnect between agencies and clients when it comes to sharing key insights. The other big disconnect, he says, is between how performance media is run and measured.
“Often agencies focus too much on promotional or performance activities instead of legitimate brand-building activities. But this doesn’t just rest with agencies. Often agencies would like to be able to provide the data and insights, but are on the outside looking in,” he explains. This happens because clients keep bottom-of-funnel insights like customer behaviour data, conversion metrics, and lead qualification data to themselves. Reinders says clients rarely share these insights and data with their agencies.
Better data insights needed
“If advertising and media agencies had access to certain data points held by clients we could provide a much more holistic approach to any campaign, whether this is a performance campaign, a promotion or a brand-building effort,” Reinders says. Most agency work focuses on top-funnel activities — social media, content creation and brand awareness. But Reinders points out a key problem: “As soon as consumers hit that convert stage, there is often a data lockout and agencies don’t see the conversion insights.”
He says linking insights from a data analysis perspective is crucial to improving marketing performance. “Trusted partnerships must be established between brands, advertising agencies and media agencies. It could be that as agencies we’re not pushing hard enough to build the relationship and just doing whatever our clients ask.”
Amanda Louw Bester, founder at Pragmattica Digital Consulting, says the industry faces a dilemma that starts with intention. “Over the years, I’ve worked in an agency with brands as the client, and I’ve worked in a media company as a supplier where ad agencies are your clients. I’ve also worked with tech companies that are intermediaries, bridging the gap between the two by being enablers.”
To sell is human
“The challenge is that the solutions agencies offer are too often driven by a sales requirement and the services they already provide. The intention doesn’t necessarily come from the brand’s own objective or from their business objective, or how a marketing agency or service provider can help achieve that objective,” Bester says.
“Agencies mostly focus on the strategy in their realm of expertise or area of specialisation and this is where the misalignment comes in,” she says, adding that in a declining industry and eroded economy, turning away business or aspects of business is very counterintuitive to employees and agency owners who need to make a sale.
Charles Lee Mathews is a contributing writer to MarkLives MEDIA and MarkLives.com, as well as co-founder of The Writers, a writing consultancy.
