As media goes full service, media agencies find themselves in the driving seat, says Suhail Kambriss, COO of Zenithmedia MENA
“Media, in some form or another, has been around for a very long time. Americans like to claim the first newspaper ad was published in the Boston News-Letter back in 1704. The Brits argue they were there first, with commercials appearing in their weekly newspapers back in the 1600s. But if we’re turning this into a competition, we Arabs can point to commercial and political messages found on the walls of ancient Arabia. And while we’re at it, I’m pretty sure the Egyptians were the first to use papyrus to make posters too.
But it’s fair to say the advertising and media industry evolved to the stage where it began walking on two legs, with the introduction of the world’s first advertising agency, JWT, in 1867. You’ll notice my deliberate positioning of ‘media’ behind ‘advertising’ in that sentence – because that was how full-service agencies worked. Creative led and media followed. There is a lot to be said for having media and creative working closely together, but in the full-service agencies I grew up in – over a century after James Walter Thompson had pioneered the way – the media department was still a forgotten corner of the agency. We were perceived as number-crunchers who lived for our five minutes of fame, at the end of presentations and new business pitches, when we were allowed to share our crunched-numbers with PowerPoint-fatigued clients, who tried, valiantly, to disguise their yawns.
Media reached the tool-wielding phase of evolution in the 1980s, with the advent of media independents. Media departments split from creative-dominated full-service agencies, and we found ourselves with actual budgets – budgets for new, innovative media research tools; budgets for cutting-edge weapons to fight the ad avoiders; and budgets for those long lunches we’d always envied the creatives.
Jokes aside, the split required a huge shift in focus. We had to convince ourselves, as well as our critics, that we were more than just experts in buying time on TV, or space in newspapers. We were planners, we were brand strategists, and we were guides who could lead our clients through an increasingly complicated media landscape. Nevertheless, until a decade ago, our task usually revolved around guiding our client’s marketing dollars towards a standard set of carefully planned options – print, radio and television.
But things started to change within our media environment, and agencies and brands that failed to adapt, quickly became extinct. First came MTV. The music television channel had an instant, and obvious, impact on advertisers, with MTV’s frenetic, attention-deficient-disorder videos changing the visual nature of commercials forever. However, these music videos also ushered in an innovative media idea that consumers might actually be persuaded to tune in for the advertising message. So, along with cable and satellite came speciality channels, like the Home Shopping Network, entirely devoted to advertising. Content-creation slowly started to enter the media agency’s domain.
The natural selection began in earnest with the advent of the internet. I still remember 1993 as the year the World Wide Web became a reality, with millions of global users coming online. As the internet exploded, so too did consumer-generated and consumer-distributed content. TV became just one of many screens people were watching. The line between message and medium became blurred.
The agencies that thrived and survived were those that adapted quickly and were able to offer solutions across all media, from traditional campaigns, through branded digital content to experiential marketing. At the same time, we still had to prove we were delivering a high return on investment. The key is finding a way to measure campaign effectiveness – live – in an environment where the standard parameters of ‘reach’ and ‘frequency’ are increasingly replaced by ‘bounce rates’, ‘buzz’ and ‘retweets.’
Today’s world is all about sensing and responding in real-time, and reacting with content and messaging whenever and wherever consumers want it. The advantage for media companies, particularly those that embraced digital and social media early, is that we are more accustomed to the speed of change. Ad agencies are used to writing scripts, then passing them on to directors and production companies and waiting for results. In contrast, media agencies are all-too-used to demands for rapid content-creation and quick turnaround.
In many ways, media has gone full circle. In fact, it has gone full-service. But this time we are in the driving seat. We have evolved from number-crunching nerds to fast-moving communication experts. Darwin would be proud.”