The first part of this post is a blog-post by a close friend of mine who was intrigued by a media owner friend who seemed confident that their in-house creative services department would help them bag big business and subsequently could turn into a viable revenue stream. Famous last words? Read on and please do comment.
Your new creative agency - the media owner
I was having lunch the other day with a media owner. He was asking me for some people he could hire for starting an in-house creative department. A few things emerged from that conversation:
1. Clients just don’t seem to have the budgets to pay for new creatives or a medium specific execution (say a print ad that needs to be reworked for OOH). They are the ones asking if the media owner could do the production too.
2. A lot of his clients are new to advertising, and to the medium. He’s growing the long-tail.
3. He wants to move beyond media budgets i.e. Increase wallet share from the client (media+creative).
4. Consolidate the media budget & throw in the creative execution for free - particularly for large MNC clients who don’t have in-market specific creatives.
5. Media agencies are increasingly coming to him with content/integration/production ideas as part of the media buy.
5. The media owner has most of the production talent in-house, though they are mostly involved in putting out his product into the market.
6. Other media owners already have established in-house creative teams/agencies. So this model clearly works.
When I asked him about the consumer strategy, brand-fit, execution details etc - he was fairly confident that it could be worked out. He wasn’t really seeing spectacular commercials coming out into the market anyway.
My recommendation to him was to just have a roster of freelance creative talent whom his company can tap upon, depending on the projects. Saves the media owner from the hassles of managing a department & the associated costs. I did refer him to a friend of mine, a suit, working in a creative agency, for being the go-to person he could hire on a full-time basis to do project management.
And I left the lunch thinking that we media agencies haven’t quite leveraged the media owners fully enough yet.
PS: There’s no such thing as a creative agency & non-creative agency.
My two bits...
I believe you had the misfortune of sharing a meal with an extremely myopic media owner who rather than concentrating his/her resources on doing what this person's employer does best - regaling the customer; seems to want to adopt all the inefficiencies of a system that's struggling to bear its own weight under the guise of expanding their business.
The very reason our industry is unwell is that it has itself blindly chosen to believe what it does best - amplify a point of differentiation for a brand or create one when none-exists; rather than look to see what and how we could mechanize/streamline operations that do not need 'talent' anymore. It is these inefficiencies that have us pinned to the wall, inefficiencies that clients have indirectly demanded of us and we have willingly obliged for a few dollars more. Now these very clients (or their superiors) need some (and for some that amount is significant) of that money back, not because they 'need it' but because it could be put to better use elsewhere. That, however, is a debate we could have on your previous post on 'free services', a debate we can well address in part here.
What we have effectively done is fail to see the crest of that virtual wave of growth and lose ourselves in the belief that every service we provide is essentially labour intense – where intensity was either measured in junior bodies or an equivalent senior body. You know that as well as I do, we all have managed offices. That merely shifted the inefficiency, from many to a few. Take the erstwhile full-service agency. If it had not added inefficiencies in bulking up its “creative thought factory” and ignored efficiencies that the relatively “mechanized” delivery system for creative elements – media had to offer, we would never have had a ‘media agency’. Clients pushed back on inefficiencies and the powers that be hived off the part they thought would help win them the war. Then it all went astray. The creative agency neither rid itself of labour intensive inefficiencies nor rid itself of its addiction for easy money and the media agency went the same route as the creative agency of yore – merrily adding the same inefficiencies to its lean operations without addressing the growing and unnecessary call for more and better differentiation of services. Advertisers are equally to blame. The market, you will agree, if full of one too many undifferentiated products. Products that have manufactured differentiation from dental-health-aided-nirvana to interview-winning-fairness-creams. Don’t take my word for it, just ask the likes of WalMart et al. The fact remains that there are massive induced and inbred inefficiencies in the system that need to be addressed before we find more inefficient solutions looking for a fresh problem. It is not to our credit that we’re “starved of talent good enough to make a difference” but it is a shame that despite a growing, educated workforce, talent seems to want to avoid an industry that makes it exert more animal effort to do better what he/she is already doing rather than change the tool-kit itself.
So what services would we see going “mechanical”? That debate I’ll reserve for a few days more. However I will leave readers with some keywords. Buying, auction, early-bird, knowledge (not information), placement, google (or search engine), automation, planning, monitoring, staffing, cross industry savings.
Coming back to the media owner, what sense would it make for them to add a labour intensive, thankless process to their operations to help make up for a forward-team’s inefficiencies? How long is it before the same demands are made of the media owner by the advertiser as those they make of their creative agency? It is their programming and customer marketing teams that are their forward teams. If these forward-teams can’t regale the customer (and attract eyeballs) anymore they’d better start looking for someone who can!
In-house creative departments are best reserved for advertisers on the margins, advertisers who either know that their product/service isn’t differentiated enough to warrant “forced creative solutions” or seem only to want to pinch an extra penny today only to throw it away tomorrow.
So yes, your media owner friend doesn’t know that his/her ship’s sinking, and if it isn’t this hole will surely sink it.
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