Nick Barron is CEO of MediaCom MENA
“It’s been a while since I threw some numbers into this column, so it’s time to remedy that. Did you know that 53 per cent of people recommend products and brands in their personal tweets, but brands that have Twitter accounts fail to respond to over 50 per cent of the tweets they receive? And 72 hours of content is uploaded to YouTube every minute, but 50 per cent of branded content gets less than 1,000 views – most of which I suspect is provided by the agency and client marketing team.
So how is such a dynamic and resourceful industry such as ours getting it so badly wrong? I’m sure there can be many explanations but my personal suggestions would be twofold. Firstly, for the past few years it seems the only focus of companies has been to save money and economise rather than use communication programmes to build brand value and create profit through growth. I’m sure that the saving generated through better systems and processes has added to short term shareholder value, but I doubt much of it has been re-invested in the brands themselves.
Second is the separation of the communication business into individual skill centres. On the face of it there should be a positive momentum for digital utilisation, with a huge number of independent specialists having been launched and most of the creative and media big players having specialist divisions.
Sadly the evidence doesn’t stack up. Now that consumers have absolute choice and control, marketing needs to invest in more complex channels to deliver its messages, which by default will cost more in infrastructure and have a longer payback. Agencies for their part need to start looking at the bigger picture and get back to working with, not for, their clients and each other.”