Has any agency really solved the multi-disciplinary thing yet? On both the demand and supply side of the marketing process, we still stumble over the idea that we might be living under a different paradigm. Much of what I’ve seen about cross-disciplinary thinking is actually effort to keep the problem alive, rather than to solve it once and for all. We aren’t always working with today’s realities about media consumption and consumer choice environments, but on yesterday’s paradigm - to reach as many consumers as possible with a single message.
I’m fascinated by the resurgence of interest in ‘emotional’ decision-making. TV is making a play for comeback through the work of Thinkbox, though its efforts to help educate the latest generation of media people into the art of emotion are falling on deaf ears in the DM agency world. The latter ask the (fair) question of “how come they get £3m to spend on a brand campaign with ‘no roi’ yet I have to justify my 200K mailing effort with actual sales?” TV enthusiasts say “without any emotional content presented as frequently as possible to everybody, the brand won’t be famous enough to remember. ROI is about the long term, not just the short term.” Ironically, both have a point. Clients ultimately need to decide where to put the money. But agenda free advice is a rare thing.
Digital media doesn’t respect the old model. Nor does it appreciate the effort of the old paradigm to keep it boxed up as ‘just a direct response channel’. It’s rather more complicated than that. I believe it's as powerful to create emotional experiences that reach right into the hearts and minds of consumers about matters that are important to them on the website as it is in the TV ad. We know it's harder when the exposures aren’t measured in the same way.
Cumulative effect is one way to look at things, and to some extent, the media metrics systems being developed now are beginning to get that. Pretty much every ‘creative’ agency structure, though, still seeks to identify the single effect that each agency is responsible for, and can claim credit for in a credentials later. I’m not sure this is good enough in the new paradigm, where media planning is increasingly about keeping a brand ‘in the air’ not ‘on the air’.
Ah, Alastair. We obviously all feel a bit hard done by and misunderstood at times. Your DM media planners might feel aggrieved that their investment is expected to generate measurable results, but TV planners feel that the positive effect TV - and other brand media - have on the performance of response channels is shockingly undervalued.
The burden of proof is on us in TV and we take enormous trouble to produce impartial evidence that pound for pound TV pays back more than any other medium. Even for short-term response, DRTV is as cheap as search or online, but you do have to go to the trouble (and expense) of proper econometric analysis.
The phrase 'accountability' makes me very suspicious; I suspect that what DM and online agencies often mean is 'countability'. And surely effective media investment is what we should be recommending not just the media that are easy to count.
However Thinkbox goes out of its way to endorse integrated multi-media planning. Our joint study with the IAB demonstrated that the combination of TV and online is greater than the sum of the parts, for both response and brand-building. We'd be happy to come and share it if you haven't seen it yet.
I also wrote a whole page in Campaign about the joy of TV plus DM. Only last week at our Televisionaries event did we show the results of D2D's analysis of Brand Index data and media spend people where DM or online were working positively in alliance with TV in markets such as mobile networks and airlines.
Yes, Thinkbox is not exactly 'agenda-free', but at least everyone knows where we're coming from. However there is a wealth of impartial data available from the IPA and others that advertisers can trust and TV comes out very well pound for pound. But not on its own. You won't find us being anything other than positive about the TV plus concept. Are the deaf ears our fault or the DM industry's?
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Alastair - nice stream of consciousness but does your train of thought have a guards van?
Tess - "pound for pound TV pays back more than any other medium." I would suggest that all depends on what you mean and how you quantify "pays back" - but top marks for a confident and well delivered bit of meeja blarney. I mean, you need to count he people you reach right? Or is it reach the people who count....
Thanks for your comments. Tess, just to clarify, I don't feel hard done by at all. I think clients are because there isn't a common currency. I'm with you on the need to be multidisciplinary, but sense frustration in the organisational design of the agencies that asks everyone to measure their bit in isolation. There must be a better way. Incidentally, one of my favourite quotes of all time (from Tim Brighouse) is "children don't grow taller by being measured" which was in response to the government of the day's obsession with SATs in schools and the (oft manipulative) statistical analysis flowing from that which determined the fate of school financial incentives. If we apply this analogy to our world, we run the risk of focusing only on what we measure, not the collective outputs or big picture for the brand. You may also be familiar with Macnamara's fallacy, which creates a risk of ignoring, with suicidal effect, information that doesn't have statistics associated with it.
Alastair Duncan
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