MEDIA IS NOT BROKEN

A recent survey by UK-based media consultancy ID Comms, reported by Campaign^[1], shows that advertisers (clients) are failing to meet expectations (of clients and their agencies) in four key areas:

setting clear KPIs for media;
having a point of view on ROI for media;
having a well-established media community internally;
having media decisions led by marketing rather than procurement.

In the same survey, (marketing) agencies were seen as failing to meet expectations of their clients in more key areas, including:

providing wholly neutral and objective planning services;
providing insight-driven strategic planning;
having a culture of innovation;
providing thought leadership in media;
identifying relevant data-fuelled insight;
integrating owned, earned and paid media (scoring the lowest at 2.4 on a 5-point scale).

Senior people from both clients and agencies were interviewed, and interestingly, both saw themselves as only marginally better than the other side of the table did.

Wow. So now that media includes digital and social, clients don’t know what they are doing and their (traditional) marketing agencies can’t help them. In come the consultancies, as reported in the last few blogs here, with a clear data-driven digital focus, based on their core business competency.

The Caveat

As discussed way back here, always look who is behind the research. ID Comms is in the business of filling the void indicated by their own survey. Also, the respondents are all from the Big/Global Brand and Big/Global Network Agency worlds, so the results may not be directly transferable to the rest of the universe—and there is one.

The Takeaway

I think this research is a least directionally correct, simply because it explains so much that’s going on right now. Despite this title of Campaign’s report, the media is not broken. It’s the clients and agencies that are currently broken. The good news is that it’s totally within their respective control to heal themselves.