Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted

Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; but at least it creates the right impression.

 

I was in meeting recently discussing the launch of a new product with a client. We were talking about the creative work and discussing the laydown that had been proposed by the media agency. The primary media channel in the proposal offered good ‘value’, but didn’t really seem to fit the (premium) brand or task in hand. After about 15 minutes of discussion, the junior client said in a non-judgemental way, “The thing is, our media agency aren’t brand guardians, their job is to just hit the media numbers.”

 

It was a very perceptive assessment and it kind of stopped the discussion dead. But I left the meeting thinking “When did that happen?” I know media agencies are under intense pressure to justify media planning and make a decent margin, but I was shocked to think that they were absolved of any responsibility for brand custodianship or accountability for business results. 

This isn’t a dig at media agencies because I think it’s actually symptomatic a wider malaise in the whole client/agency dynamic. There was a time when all (good) agencies were genuine partners in building the brand, but we have sleep walked to a place where agencies are compartmentalised by discipline and told to just do ‘their’ bit and execute as efficiently as possible, rather than act as fellow brand custodians. 

However this kind of ‘big picture’ brand stewardship is needed more than ever because I believe Clients and Agencies have been complicit in making marketing campaigns less focused and less impactful than they were a decade ago. The certainties of media (limited number of channels with predictable audience delivery) have given way to the fuzziness of media (unlimited number of channels, many with unpredictable or even fraudulent audience delivery.) This has eroded the discipline of focussed campaign thinking and effectiveness, and leads to a lot of time and money being wasted doing/making too much, with too little impact.

 

Clients are keen to have modern, multi-media campaigns to show that they are progressive and in touch with changing media consumption habits, and agencies are only too keen to oblige. However because production budgets and agency fees have been reduced the production quality, and therefore impact, of the individual assets is often compromised. Meanwhile media agency margins have been squeezed driving greater reliance on media buying to make money and the quality of media planning has suffered.

 

The net result of all of this is more noise for consumers and less impact for brands, and marketing becoming bogged down in impressions, hits etc rather than genuine business impact.

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