Adland_ Searching for the Meaning of Life on a Branded Planet - James P. Othmer [106]
Back then, media got no respect.
After all, the choices were limited (TV, out of home, radio), and it didn’t seem as if it took a genius to target a TV spot to a demographically appropriate program, with a measurable audience. As Bill Bruce, the co–creative chairman of BBDO, told me, “Until recently, we were using a model and measurements that had been around since the days of Milton Berle.” But of course all that has changed, and continues to change.
Today an argument could be made that there is no more important aspect of the advertising process than media strategy. Today, any creative person worth her salt is keenly aware of the myriad possibilities of the new media landscape, and the most successful agency media people proactively share with the creative folks fresh, brand-relevant ideas and insights about the very same, ever-changing landscape. Today, it’s more likely that a creative person helped put together the media presentation than it is that she will get up and leave it.
At the advertising festival in Cannes, I ran into Mark D’Arcy and John Partilla of Time Warner’s Global Media Group at a midnight lawn party at Le Grand Hotel. Former agency veterans and for a short while colleagues of mine, D’Arcy (chief creative officer) and Partilla (president) clearly think that media is, if not the future of advertising, at the very least where the money is.
To my understanding, Time Warner was simply a media conglomerate, the owner of a large and ubiquitous “family of brands,” including Time Inc. (Sports Illustrated, People, Entertainment Weekly, and more than a hundred others), AOL, TBS, HBO, and Warner Bros. To me, it was simply a repository of well-known content providers where agencies placed ads. Through the sheer economy of numbers, advertisers could realize savings by purchasing media bundles. I asked D’Arcy what the hell a creative guy was doing in a corporate media empire. And even if media was where the money is, wasn’t it, you know, boring?
D’Arcy said if he had to pick a moment, the genesis of the idea for their group came several years earlier when he and Partilla were working on the agency side for a major electronics client. “We came up with a spectacular and original media idea,” he said. “The client loved it. Then we presented it to the cable network that would partner on the project, and they loved it. The only thing is, when the meeting was over, as the agency of record, the only way in which we stood to benefit is that our client was pleased and we got to keep the account for a little bit longer. The cable network not only took over control of the project; it made millions of dollars off our idea. In our eyes, it was clearly a flawed model.”
Partilla agreed that taking control of a project whose creation it had in effect financed was the network’s prerogative. It also prompted him to strongly consider the evolving and growing importance of media. “We’d spent our careers at ad agencies. And looking forward, every job in that world seemed like a variation on the same theme. With 90 percent of most ad budgets dedicated to the media spend, we saw an opportunity for a new, idea-led model where we’d come up with additional creative ways to amplify the effectiveness of the creative spend.”
D’Arcy agreed. “Before, the focus at Time Warner and most media companies was on sales. But now we’re in an era where media has become everything and the relationship between media and consumers has changed from intrusion to engagement, ads have to be more relevant and entertaining than ever.”
“How do you bill for your creative services?”
“We don’t,” D’Arcy said. “We work exclusively