When media and creativity isn’t seamless
In this guest posting, Happy Soldiers’ Sophie Price argues that media/ creative collaboration needs to start happening sooner than the meeting room door.
Leo Burnett’s recent success at Cannes for Canon is yet more proof that brilliant communication ideas are born of a seamless marriage of media and creative thinking. In fact, the bulk of the Media Lions were awarded to creative agencies this year.
Sophie Price
Outside of the media category there were loads of Lions for ideas where I’d defy you to pick whether they originated with a ‘media’ or a ‘creative’ person. And that kind of either/or thinking is the nub of the problem.
Sophie, sorry to be a little rude, this article feels like it was written 5 years ago! The game has moved on, People get that medium and message are fused.
However, Im interested to know why MEC (the media agency) didn’t claim the media lions for the EOS work. If it was true collaboration as you say it was shouldn’t the media agency have applied for and accepted the lions?
Of course the theory of media and message being fused is well understood (for well over 5 years) but media and creative agencies putting that theory into practice is all too rare. And I think that’s the point. I would be interested to know if there was any real collaboration between Leo Burnett and MEC?
This is a very real issue and constant source of frustration from a client perspective.
Nice article Sophie, thanks for sharing. Its down to the individuals within the media and creative businesses to initiate the meeting to be held early in the ideation process. The reality from a business level is that Media Agencies are hiring more creative people and Creative Agencies are hiring more media people… because everyone see’s the opportunity to develop even bigger and better ideas when the 2 thing’s are 1. Who will win the race…?
think you’ve missed the point – industry needs to walk the talk
Who is actually walking the talk and putting media strategy under the same roof as creative strategy – Happy Soldiers, BMF, Campaign Palace, Bellamy Hayden, kwp, Razor, a few others?
The problem in most big agencies – media and creative – is that many of the new generation of management don’t even understand the talk. It comes out of their mouths, sure, but they don’t really know what it means.
Sick of hearing about it. The sense of it is so utterly inarguable.
We all agree with sentiment and if effectivenes was the only focus, creative and media would always hold eachother hands and do incredible work. The reality is they’re in competition for the clients cash. With media agencies pitching hard against eachother and working for increasingly small margains attention is shifting to look at where new $$’s can come from and in many cases that means targeting a larger share of the creative budget.
Does anyone want to start that old debate again – can creatives benefit from having inhouse media teams again?
Sure a bunch of creative agencies swept the media lions however the program ignores effectiveness, a cornerstone to effective comms planning. Collaboration early is critical to achieving success on all fronts.
When I started working in advertising, media, creative and account service were under the same roof, even in some of the smaller agencies. It was normal for people from each discipline to sit down and kick ideas around before the brief was written. Once the brief came through to creative, media had often already cracked a great media idea and this was contained in the brief. Conversely, creatives sometimes had ideas that involved media not specified in the brief and would simply have a chat with them to see if it was possible and affordable. After agencies were ‘unbundled’, unfortunately, it became less convenient to collaborate. I now find it amusing to read articles that present the idea of media agencies hiring creatives and creative agencies hiring channel planners as the way of the future.
Do the channels decide the idea or should the idea decide the channels? It is the eternal question that media and creative agencies continue to fight over.
Both have the consumer at their heart, but neither appears to deliver a solution that a client seems to feel confident in.
To produce better work planners of either agency need to either colaborate more or become one and the same. Maybe a true communications planner should lead both media and creative, but then they would need to be independent of both. Unfortunately, that idea is not new, and I was at PHD in London when Naked was set up to do just that.
But’ here’s a thought, if media owners like PBL actually get their act together, they are well palced to deliver a service to our clients that seemlessly integrates both media and creative. Now that’s something to be truly worried about.
Don’t media people generally choose the media plan according to who takes them to lunch or gets them tickets for the footy?
I’ve always wondered why if media agencies are such experts then why is it nerds that seem to invent all the new and major forms of media.
Cannot agree more. Creative ideas are not always just with the creative team. It’s not about channel plannnig it’s about planning the channels, and then channels within the channels. The media proprietors have become very clever at making an idea really work hard across all sorts of communicaiton opportunities. Thankfully we come across creative teams who want to listen.
Ideas are all that matter.
An idea is an idea, whether you classify them as media or creative or whatever. The division of our ‘disciplines’ has cost our clients too much money and too much time(which also means money).
We should stop competing with each other and trying to create ‘new revenue streams’ when clients don’t have more to spend. It’s silly and shortsighted. Instead, we should be focused on quality, giving clients something they can’t get anywhere else and thinking they couldn’t have imagined doing on their own. If that means a step back to the way we used to be, then great. Our industry SHOULD consolidate. We’ve spread ourselves too thin. It’s marketing and business 101. In tough times, trim it all back to the core and begin again. Unfortunately, we don’t all work for the same company. Some won’t survive and some will come out stronger. I reckon the Leo Burnett Grand Prix shows they are one agency headed back to the future.