4A's Media Conference: Most 'Thought-Provoking'

Creative & MediaThe conference kicked off with the four creative agency panelists providing their take on the rapidly changing communications mix. Crispin Porter + Bogusky ecd Alex Bogusky, VCU Adcenter managing director and professor Rick Boyko, Bartle Bogle Hegarty chairman and global chief marketing officer Cindy Gallop and Leo Burnett vice chairman and ecd Jonathan Hoffman all preached the gospel of media agnosticism. "If we are not open and flowing with where the interesting stuff is happening," Hoffman said, "we are really doomed. Right now the money is with the least interesting vehicles [e.g., TV], but that's going to turn over with a slam and we're all going to get crushed underneath it.""We've been pretty clear that we don't just want to do TV," said Bogusky, citing the well-received Subservient Chicken online campaign his agency created for Burger King. "You don't think about media when creating an idea. Sometimes you have to invent the media." Bogusky drew appreciative laughs when he addressed media's still-lingering resentment over its backseat role in the years before unbundling, in a plea for peace. "Creatives must have been very bad to media people. It was not me! To my defense, we need each other. I want to be friends," he said.Collaboration is the key, concluded Boyko. The term "creative," sometimes bestowed on only one part of the business, may cause some of the friction between the two sides. "We're called creative, but we're not all creative," he said. "We're content people trying to be creative." And conversely, there are plenty of "creative" people on the media agency side of the business, he added.ConvergenceComcast CEO Brian Roberts made what he described as his "make-good" appearance at the conference last week—after having bailed last year on the exact day he was scheduled to make the keynote address, in order to manage the company's attempt to buy Disney (which subsequently failed).Roberts declared that the much ballyhooed convergence of the personal computer with television has finally been achieved. He also acknowledged the growing number of choices that advertisers now have when placing their dollars. "Convergence is here," he said. "Our view is, if you invest, innovate and differentiate, you're going to be successful. For your industry, I think convergence means that you will also get more value for your money than ever before."Roberts told the audience that his company has spent billions of dollars to serve the changing viewing patterns of consumers as well as advertisers who need to adapt to those new patterns with different ways of marketing to consumers. He said that some predict digital video recorders will be in 50 percent of the U.S. household base in five years. On the video-on-demand front, Roberts said, Comcast estimates the viewers within the company's 22 million subscriber universe will access 1 billion on-demand "views" by the end of the year. One problem, of course, is how to measure all that viewing in ways that make sense to advertisers. To that end, Roberts announced a new agreement between Comcast and Rentrak, a Portland, Ore.-based data management company, whereby Rentrak will monitor video-on-demand usage over Comcast's subscriber universe and issue monthly reports that track four metrics. Though seen as a good start, it will not tell advertisers who's watching which programs, like Nielsen's current ability to break out data for normal TV viewing. But that could come in time—the company has begun early talks with Nielsen about providing such measurements, said Warren Schlichting, vp of new business strategy at Comcast.ROIUltimately, advertisers want to know how much product is sold as a result of their advertising expenditures. "Marketers want to see a return, and we need more effective measurement" to show what the return is, said Fran Kennish, senior partner and strategic planning at Mediaedge:cia.Jon Mandel, chairman of MediaCom U.S., said not all the fault lies with Nielsen Media Research. "It's a societal problem," he said. "We all don't have the time to be measured."Still, the lack of good data is frustrating, and the reason for it is that the media sales side pays for most of it, said Mandel. He attributed Nielsen's recent decision to delay measurements of the DVR audience until next year to pressure from the broadcast networks. "They don't want us to know what is really happening," he said. According to Barbara Zack, chief strategic officer at research company IAG, the only way advertisers and agencies are going to counter the leverage that the networks have with Nielsen is to start paying significantly more for research. "Advertisers want increasing amounts of research to analyze an increasingly complex world," explained Zack. "But the cost of all the research and data is going to escalate, and somehow the advertisers are going to have to step up and support and fund research. … They say they need better analysis and complain about it, but they don't want to pay for it."

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4A's Media Conference: Most 'Thought-Provoking'

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