we had<\/a>: \u201cP&G\u2019s Marc Pritchard calls for an end to the archaic Mad Men model\u201d.<\/p>\nBill Duggan is a highly respected commentator; and \u2018Marketing Week\u2019 (where the Pritchard headline comes from) is a fine magazine. And they\u2019re both right; and they\u2019re both wrong.<\/p>\n
The media business is increasingly about integration, which as a concept goes far beyond making sure your press and OOH messages look vaguely as if they might be related to one another.<\/p>\n
Today\u2019s integration isn\u2019t just about conventional advertising; it encompasses all forms of communication, from PR to experiential, from online influencers through to the way that customer facing staff interact with those consumers they come across.<\/p>\n
And this is where Pritchard\u2019s point resonates. His ANA address speaks of \u2018partnerships with agencies\u2019 as opposed to working through them. Advertisers use multiple specialists and it\u2019s wrong to suggest that any ad agency can either supply all those specialist services, or indeed consider the benefits they bring objectively.<\/p>\n
I speak as one who was once physically threatened by an account man in a sister creative agency for daring to suggest that maybe non-advertising solutions might serve the client better than yet another straightforward TV campaign.<\/p>\n
To a plumber, most household emergencies come down to plumbing; to an ad agency most solutions look very like an ad.<\/p>\n
A lack of understanding around what constitutes true integration is behind why so many commercial messages online are so poor. They look too like ads. They don\u2019t fit within the medium within which they\u2019re placed. They ignore context, and the end-user\u2019s needs from the medium.<\/p>\n
According to Marc Pritchard, \u2018advertisers have been steadily outsourcing work to agencies\u2019. \u00a0He wants to \u2018eliminate the siloes between creatives, clients and consumers, and strip away anything that doesn\u2019t add to creative output.\u2019<\/p>\n
Once upon a time a UK agency called Wight Collins Rutherford Scott launched with no account men, and direct contact between creatives and clients. It changed its model soon after when it realised that great account men can add a great deal to creativity.<\/p>\n
Then media agencies tried to position themselves as solution-neutral thinkers \u2013 until it was discovered that what many of them meant by solution-neutral was not quite the same as revenue-neutral.<\/p>\n
What\u2019s needed is more collaboration between specialists, leading to more integration in messaging of all shapes and sizes. And at the end of the day only the client (who, don\u2019t let\u2019s forget is hardly silo-free) can make that happen.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
To read the headlines you would think we live in a curiously binary world. Facebook\u2019s wonderful; Facebook\u2019s on its last legs. TV is dead; TV is still the most effective medium ever invented; printed media forms cannot survive; print circulations increase as readers seek the truth behind the stories.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bjanda.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1015"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bjanda.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bjanda.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bjanda.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bjanda.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1015"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.bjanda.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1015\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1018,"href":"https:\/\/www.bjanda.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1015\/revisions\/1018"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bjanda.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1015"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bjanda.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1015"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bjanda.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1015"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}