A House Divided

With their power, prestige and seat at the strategic table firmly established, media-agency executives rarely bring up the old joke they used to love to tell, where the pitch leader tells the prospective client, "We have five minutes left. Do you want to hear about media, or do you want to go to lunch?" Now, it's the creative agencies' turn to worry that they're being left out of the marketing loop. Executives at some of the largest ad agencies in the country think the concept of unbundling—the process by which media departments were siphoned away to form new buying and planning service companies—needs to be re-examined. Some have kept a few media strategists. Most have not. Some think the link between media planning and creative should not have been severed in the first place. And some shops are doing something about it. JWT, BBDO and Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, among other agencies, are taking steps to bring the strategic media planning practice, or at least part of it, back in-house —through hiring, joint venturing with media-agency sisters or creating new "liaison" positions with the creative side. The rationale for doing so is that media choice and usage has become such an important factor that message makers and media thinkers can no longer be separated. "It's is not about bringing the media back into the agency in its entirety," says JWT New York co-president Rosemarie Ryan. "It's about finding smart, creative media thinkers who understand media contact strategy and the target audience. So, it's bringing media thinking back in a different way." Until unbundling upset the hierarchy a decade ago, media planners and buyers were considered by many to be pencil-pushing geeks, obsessed with numbers and hidden away in offices as far from clients as possible. Basically, the buyers secured time for the ads that were conceived, developed and produced by "creatives"—the big-idea people who dealt with clients and, deservedly or not, got all the glory. Not anymore. Not with media-neutral being today's hot term. Not with the success of TV-eschewing campaigns like Burger King's "Subservient Chicken" and the American Express Seinfeld/Superman shorts. Not with Procter & Gamble, Unilever, Coke and others clamoring for communications channel planning and integrated communications. "If brown is the new black, media is the new creative," says New York-based search consultant Joanne Davis. Several high-profile agencies remain full-service, or nearly so, often because unbundling there would have introduced conflicts. They include Publicis Groupe' Publicis & Hal Riney and Fallon; Interpublic Group's Foote Cone & Belding and Deutsch; and Omnicom Group's GSD&M. (The latter made media-only business a core competency before unbundling.) Still, holding companies remain firmly committed to unbundling, especially in buying. And the marketplace benefits that made unbundling logical—the chance to pursue media-only accounts, establish a separate revenue base to compensate for the dismantling of commission-based fee structures, and bulk up to negotiate effectively with consolidated media sellers—still exist. The difference now is that technology has changed the game. Dramatic transformations in the way people consume media and the proliferation of media options have forced a re-thinking of the very term creative. Broadband video. Gaming. Smart cell phones. Video on demand. Wireless everything. Podcasting. And, of course, DVRs. Navigating these seas has made media "a new function," says BBDO North America CEO David Lubars. "Today, you have consumers avoiding different kinds of media, [so the challenge is] what surprising places can I put my message. That's a creative exercise," Lubars says. (Indeed, the word creative shows up more and more in media-only pitches as well, notably in Coke's $350 million consolidation in 2003, in which the client credited the winner, Publicis' MediaVest in New York, with superior "creative" thinking.) Seeing all this, shops are bringing back media planners to find better contact points for their ideas. At JWT, for example, Ryan and co-president Ty Montague are bringing in three of their own media strategists and will share at least one and possibly two more in a deal with WPP Group sibling MindShare. The three in-house planners (one has been in place since last year) will be dedicated full-time to creative teams housed at JWT in New York. The others will split their time between the two shops and serve as a communications "bridge" between them. Unbundling, Montague contends, "was the right idea for its time, and now it's time to re-examine it. Creative people need to think about the context of their ideas as well as the content. ... In the simpler world, it was in fact plausible and economically advantageous to separate [media from creative]. Now there is a new stage emerging where they need to be conjoined." Marc Goldstein, MindShare North America CEO, sees his agency's arrangement with JWT as an experiment that could lead to a permanent and expanded planner-sharing relationship, if the hires make a contribution that is worth the cost. "What we're trying to do is create a linkage that allows for the best possible thinking and communication between the agencies," says Goldstein. "We're not taking 20 media planners and putting them back into the creative agency." WPP CEO Martin Sorrell emphasizes that the holding company is not turning back the clock on unbundling. "Anything we're doing is jointly between creative and media agencies—e.g., JWT planners are being jointly hired or placed by media agencies in creative agencies, while remaining on the media-agency payroll," he says. "Clients are looking for more integration. ... We're trying to avoid duplication." Omnicom's Goodby, which has a handful of media planners, is looking to double that number to close to a dozen and team them with account/strategic planners already in-house, says co-chairman Jeff Goodby. The purpose of teaming media and account planners is to link the "how to say it and to whom at the same time," Goodby says. The old model of passing the creative off to media once it's complete is no longer feasible, he says. "Media needs to be close to the creative development, and it needs to happen in the early stages." Others have created "liaisons" to bridge the physical gap between their creative departments and their media-agency partners. Havas' Euro RSCG in New York has had one for two years—executive creative director of media Richard Notarianni. He not only has input into the creative process but ensures that media planning is fully incorporated from the beginning. He is in constant contact with the media agencies that Euro works with on its creative accounts. "From the creative perspective, the first job of media people is to tell creative people why they can't do things," Notarianni says. "My job is to tell them how they can do it." "To have a strategic media person physically located with creatives helps ensure that the media strategy and creative strategy are linked," says Mike Naughton, vp of media at Euro client Charles Schwab. "When separated, it can default to the client to ensure that integration. [Euro's solution] takes the burden off the client to make that happen." Naughton would like to see even more change, noting that adding liaisons or media strategy staff to creative shops "doesn't solve executional integration. That's not a strategic media person's role—creation agencies need to revisit the role of account executives, because that was the account side's old role: that all disciplines were integrated from strategic start to executional finish." They may not tell self-deprecating jokes anymore, but media-agency planners and buyers might be less than enthusiastic about a return to "bundled" environments. In March, at the Association of American Advertising Agencies media conference, a panel of creatives felt enough lingering resentment from the audience of mostly media-agency executives that Alex Bogusky, ecd of Crispin Porter + Bogusky, felt compelled to say, "Creatives must have been very bad to media people." He added, "We need each other." Media-agency leaders do not dispute the need for a better union—to a point. Irwin Gotlieb, CEO of GroupM, the WPP entity that oversees the holding company's media-agency brands, points out that the planners at JWT, besides keeping their media-agency business cards, "are career pathed, trained and resourced by the media agencies." "I'm not dismissing greater connectivity, but there have to be other ways than hiring each other's disciplines," adds Jack Klues, CEO of Publicis' Starcom MediaVest Group. Also, says Klues, for creative shops to suggest they are reclaiming a function they had before unbundling is "a little insulting." Building new processes for media planning in the digital era? "I think the media agencies had something to do with that," he says. Executives at two of Goodby's Omnicom sisters, BBDO and DDB, see no need to bring planners back in-house. DDB worldwide CEO Ken Kaess says that "putting [media] at the front of the strategic chain is something that can be addressed without re-creating media planning groups. You work with your existing media agency more up front. The other way is to evolve the role of account planning." BBDO New York CEO John Osborn agrees. "I have no interest in replicating what OMD and PHD do really well." Instead, when Lubars arrived from Fallon last September, one of his first moves was to create task forces at BBDO and its media siblings comprised of account planners and media strategists, who meet on a moment's notice to discuss the integration needs of any major client. In January, the shop created a new post, director of creative media, and added the job to CMO Richard Kronengold's existing duties. The function, mostly designed to facilitate the development of new media ideas, Lubars says, is also designed as a liaison between the agency and media shops. Whether media planning continues to migrate back to creative shops or the link is strengthened some other way, the trend is likely to continue for the most potent of reasons: It's endemic to the integration demands of the clients, although the geography doesn't matter to them. "The separation sometimes is huge, and it does affect the success of the client," says Peter Weedfald, svp of consumer-electronics sales and marketing and North American corporate marketing for Samsung Electronics in Ridgefield Park, N.J. But he adds, "It doesn't matter if a planner is in Building A or not. What matters is that there's complete harmony between creative, account and media."

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A House Divided

Steve Mcclellan

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