Must media agencies re-invent themselves in a world where media can be owned by everyone, asks Philip Jabbour, CEO of Starcom MediaVest Group MENA
“We used to plan campaigns that predominantly aimed to enhance awareness. We would then – through delayed tracker data –monitor uplift as consumers slowly viewed our communication, noticed it after a few exposures, and consequently found themselves inclined to look for it in-store. Hopefully they would purchase it and, ideally, become loyal to it enough to recommend it to their friends and families.
That was the process. Looking at it, and taking the time frame out of the equation, our intentions for consumer behaviour are still the same. It is just that we dipped the process into an atomic accelerator that forces us to never start from scratch again, now that communication and dialogue between brand and consumer are a continuous pendulum.
So when I hear that media agencies want to re-invent themselves because the consumer is now in control, I tend to agree with the objective but not necessarily the reasoning. Consumers always were in control. It just took us longer to read their actions and reactions. Look at the social revolutions happening all around our region. The people are not saying anything new; it is just that technology is allowing them to get at it much faster and in a more effective manner. In today’s social world, everyone is an influencer.
We live in a world where news and content are shared 140 characters at a time. This is in contrast to a world where we sometimes relied on weekly, even monthly, periodicals for updates and analysis. What that means is that any marketing or communication cycle that we studied in books across multiple chapters is being truncated to the bare minimum. This is a result of the converging trend of technology and digital developments. After all, what is the internet but a connection engine that lets us create value by eliminating the distance between here and there, this and that, later and now. This simple transaction, though, is enabling brands to radically change their behaviour, thereby creating disproportionate value and growth to both consumer and brand. And it is happening in real time.
Remember that every consumer interaction with a brand is a media opportunity. So, where once it was accepted that the role of the brand was to ‘sell’ its proposition to the ‘consumer’, it is now clear that people’s expectations have been elevated. The most effective brands are switching from a pure sales orientation to a service orientation. People are rewarding brands that are operating to this agenda, whether they are in low or high interest categories. Pampers don’t just sell diapers; they provide help to new mothers. Amazon doesn’t just sell goods; it is an advice and social network space for shoppers. Coke doesn’t purely sell physical refreshment; it provides new experiences in music and sport. These brands are creating powerful and enduring human experiences.
Given the combination of real-time communication and the power of enduring experiences, consumer journeys with brands are no longer linear, and that necessitates having an on-demand approach to much of brand communication – entailing search, social and strong behavioural targeting. This requires new infrastructure, new approaches, and new partnerships. Different agencies will go about it in a multitude of manners.
Some will focus on data mining. Despite us living in a relatively poor data-driven region, the ability to access insights is out there, and one can easily drown in a sea of data and multiple sources of information. However, the ability to consolidate data sources, interpret relevance, and analyse outcomes, will provide solid competitive advantage to advertisers and agencies that can transform such information into actionable and relevant communication solutions.
Others might focus on content management. To serve the consumer requires the ability to segment high value audiences and effectively sequence communication to them. This does not require advertisers to necessarily become a major content creator. It requires an approach to the development of key partnerships with content providers and the ability to curate and manage content. And the options go on and on.
Whatever the approach, the ability of a media agency to attract the right talent that recognises the need for a step change in how we talk and respond to consumers, will ultimately drive the most value to its client businesses. By applying this recognition to marketing communications, brand relationships with people become a more enduring affiliation: that means the consumer is no longer vulnerable to competitors every time they finish a tube of toothpaste – a transaction bond. Instead, brands deepen the relationship to create lifetime value for the customer, and eventually sell more.
The empowerment consumers have these days is nothing novel; it is just that their real-time network of influence is accelerating our ability and need to dispatch messages, and immediately listen to what the ripple effects are, in order to follow through with other salient messages.
Incidentally, in the time it took to read this, 6.7 million pieces of content were shared on Facebook and 1.3 million updates were tweeted… and possibly some of the above hypotheses became outdated (and yes, I have exceeded my 140 character limit). So we can take action and make things happen, or sit back and wonder what happened.”