This to me is the great unasked question of our age. And I have a fairly good idea what the answer is. But it isn't quite what you expect.
The Cannes Direct Lions shortlist has not yet been published. But, without giving anything away, I can reveal that it contains quite a few entries in which are found lines like this....
"One million downloads"...."garnered PR coverage worth 1.5 times the initial media outlay"... "headed the country's podcast charts for five consective weeks"...."1.5m unique visitors to the site...."
What I am seeing, in short, is ideas now using digital and non-conventional media (ie media which place no strain on the media budget) to attract and maintain audiences at a mass scale.
What I don't see, incidentally, are any entries containing lines such as "in pathetic gratitude for this unexpectedly large free audience, the client gifted the agency an amount equal to the sum they would have paid for those GRPs had the audience been acquired conventionally".
And I'm not sure I'm going to see those lines any day soon.
But some extra money needs to move towards the world of content creation to fund the new role it finds itself playing: not only talking to an audience but actually creating one.
Money needs to be found from what was once "a media budget" to encourage the creation of one of the most priceless commodities any brand can own: Earned Attention.
That is Earned Attention as opposed to Bought Attention.
Because, as the cost of bought attention rises (fragmentation, blah, blah) and the cost of earned attention goes down (online, social media, virality, PR, blah) the latter will start becoming better and better value. It is already better value, in fact - except that the metrics of bought attention still prevail, and with it the ludicrous notion that a pair of bought eyeballs are just as valuable as a pair of earned eyeballs. A little like suggesting that the Band of The Coldstream Guards playing before an FA Cup Final is just as popular as U2, because they are both playing to a packed Wembley Stadium. (It's all about reach, you see.)
Now what would happen - just as an experiment - if you took the whole media budget and gave it to a creative department to spend how they wished?
Unless they were a real extremists, it's likely they would spend some of the money on media - on distributing the content they had created. Would it be 85% of the money? Probably not.
What would they do?
They would probably create a lot more content. They would spend lavishly on PR-ing the content. On seeding it. They might even slip popbitch.com £1000 to mention the Youtube URL.
Some - most - of the content they produced would bomb. But possibly not all of it. And the successes would be amazing.
My final verdict? Three times out of four they would fare worse at spending the media money than the media people. But the fourth time they would do ten times better.
You do the maths.
Or, if you have a media budget out there, it's a challenge I am quite prepared to take up.
