What’s more important – media or creative?

The debate of supremacy between the medium and the message is as old as the industry itself. It certainly seems to have been going on forever. 'Campaign' magazine recently ran a feature on 'Is creativity more important than media?' saying this debate had been 'reignited' by Martin Sorrell.

I’ve always thought this debate was spurious & unhelpful at best, and dangerously divisive & distracting at worst. It is a bit like asking, 'what’s the most important bit of your car – the wheels or the engine?' They both do different jobs for starters and are infinitely better together than they ever could be apart.

Now, I’m probably a bit biased in my view because we’ve made sure at mcgarrybowen that the last four pitches we’ve done have been integrated with our partners in the Dentsu Aegis Network. We’ve pitched media/creative together, indivisible, and we’ve unsurprisingly won all four. I just can’t see how you can have one without the other – idea/execution, content/context. The AAR has reported a 16% rise in ‘integrated’ pitches in 2014.

But I have an even greater concern. I think that whilst the media and creative industries busy themselves with engaging in this (largely irrelevant) debate the real battle might be happening elsewhere. I think the answer to the question – 'what’s more important creative or media?' – could very soon be neither.

This is because I’ve noticed something really interesting happening recently at the centre of the creative industries in the UK that might make the whole question irrelevant.

One of the most senior figures in UK media (Steve Hatch at MEC) and the previous President of the IPA (Nicola Mendelsohn at Karmarama) both quit recently to take on a fascinating new challenge at the same company. The name of that company? Facebook. David Wilding was poached as Head of Planning from PHD this summer to do the same role at….Twitter.

Two of the brightest young creative talents at W+K when I was there left to join one of the most creatively interesting and progressive creative companies in the country. It’s name? Google. Iain Tait and Stu Smith have also both recently had stints at Google Labs in the US after leaving high profile agency strategy roles (although to be fair both are now back agency-side).

YouTube is now one of the most powerful media brands in the UK, and certainly amongst the most ubiquitous content creators and disseminators. And the best piece of creative advertising in the last three years didn’t come from one of the traditional big agencies like AMV or A&E – it was 'Meet the Superhumans' from that talented bunch of in-house creatives at Channel 4.

Do you notice something here? Whilst the media and creative agencies engage in the largely pointless debate as to which is the most important they seem to have failed to notice that the most accurate answer might actually be the media OWNERS.

Media owners have the budgets. They can now, clearly, attract the talent. And they can cut out a whole range of expensive and time-consuming bureaucracy by going direct to the client. Why would you, as a client, spend time engaging with a media agency and creative agency to identify targeting strategy and creative content when you could just go direct to the source? It’s worth thinking about. If they’ve got the insights, they’ve got the resource, they’ve got the talent and they’ve got the access – what do they need us for?

It’s often said that we always fighting the current war with the weapons of last – and that’s what this debate feels like to me. The debate seems to have moved on.

Does tomorrow belong to the media owner? Now that’s a debate worth having.

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