Thursday, January 16, 2014

Let's stop thinking about media and focus on the bigger picture

I've been doing some thinking. I have drafts of posts in the queue on themes about how agencies and clients need to restructure their processes, value of creatives with a copy background in the digital world, generalist vs. specialists, and other big thinking ideas. Things I am still playing with in my head in terms of telling the story.




But, the other day I tweeted:


And, when we get down to it, this is the best simplification of it all (that's not to say you won't see those other posts in the future).

What I mean by it is that right now both agencies and clients are still stuck thinking about media. I can't tell you how many projects I've had where the media comes before the idea. The funny thing is, that's not how I was trained. And yet, for a good part of my career, it's always been about the allocation of where they media spend is going to be. Granted, the fact that agencies made their money based on a percentage of the media buy, I understand why. But that doesn't make it right or the most effective thing to be doing for your communications.

Even more so than before, it's imperative to look at the bigger picture first and answer strategic questions that set up a network of ways to communicate an idea and tell a story. That larger picture has to include all aspects of the business, especially the ones that can have an affect on any and every customer touch point, and most critically, the product or offering. As William Bernbach was quoted as saying in a 1965 interview with the Wall Street Journal, “Great advertising can make a bad product fail faster; it gets more people to know it’s bad."

Agencies can't fix something that is broken from inside. They can help guide brands, but brands have to be willing to listen and change. And, once that aspect is in progress, then we can focus on the story and big idea. And, if it's big enough, it will work across any media channel you can throw at it.

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