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Being One With Interactive
By: Sarah Welstead Publication: Marketing Magazine June 24, 2002, Pg. 35
If you work in marketing for any length of time, sooner or later you're faced with The Integrated Marketing Slide. It's the one with a circle in the middle labelled 'Agency X', from which protrude about 18 arrows. At the end of each arrow are the names of Agency X’s ‘sister companies’, one of which is ‘Our Interactive Partner’.

Except that ‘interactive’ or ‘new media’ marketing should not be sitting at the end of an arrow – it should be right there in the middle along with all the traditional work, accorded the same respect and included in the strategic plan along with everything else.

Consumers no longer attach a hierarchical value to various media. To them, television is not inherently ‘better’ than the web any more than the telephone is inherently ‘better’ than email. Every medium has its advantages and disadvantages, depending on its context.

When the Interactive Partner is on a separate P&L from Agency X, they are fighting each other behind the scenes for their ‘share’ of the client’s budget, even though they may be owned by the same parent company and all the money ends up in the same place anyway. But there are too few account services people who actually understand enough about traditional and new media to be able to strategically assess all the client’s options. So the money is allocated to the department or division that makes the loudest noise in the boardroom, instead of where it will deliver the best results to the client.

Up until the past 5 or 10 years, this was a flawed but workable model. In the ‘information age’, in which everyone is expected to know more, know it faster, and know it for less money, however, ad agency models which keep traditional and new media in strictly separate silos are effectively demonstrating that they no longer understand how their consmers communicate. Clients, who aren’t nearly as gormless as agencies would often like to believe, are now resisting the whole AOR model and creating their own solutions: they either create their own network of partners, or simply hire and train someone internally – which means even fewer dollars for the agencies.

It’s obviously unreasonable to expect the average agency account exec to know details like the how to make javascript work within html, what PMS colours don’t translate well to the web, why a Flash video works at different speeds on different computers, or how to develop a regression analysis model for effective database marketing.

But an individual who calls him/herself a ‘marketing professional’ should be aware that, these days, almost any marketing campaign is going to touch the internet at some point. More importantly, anyone claiming to be a ‘brand champion’ is supposed to be aware that in order to build a brand identity, all communications have to work consistently across all media. It is therefore imperative that someone, somewhere in the agency, actually understands both traditional and non-traditional media. Trouble is, agencies have spent so many years creating the divide between ‘creatives’ and ‘suits’ that they seem naturally disposed to creating a gap between ‘traditional’ and ‘new’ media.

We see the consequences of this gap all the time, and in two ways. The first is something like the following: over lunch, some VP Group Account Director who doesn’t really know the difference between a pdf and a banner ad sells a client a $20,000 website using a very pretty paper mockup created in Photoshop, only to find out, a week before the thing is supposed to go live, that the back-end software costs alone are more than $15,000, the colours they used in the mockup don’t work on the internet, and it turns out that the URL is already taken by some other company in Australia. The ad agency loses money, the client is furious, and no one has any idea who to call to fix the problem in time to meet the deadline.

The second way the knowledge gap becomes apparent is in developing strategy. A good strategic marketing plan is always predicated on the same things, regardless of medium: Address the business challenge, set goals, and execute a plan that is designed to achieve measurable results. But somehow, experienced marketers who cut their teeth in traditional advertising are frequently uncomfortable, unable or unwilling to apply this same strategic thinking to new media. This teaches the junior account exec that traditional media is for the ‘real agency people’, while new media is somehow for computer geeks or teenagers, and can function as an afterthought to the ‘real’ strategy.

When agencies cling to the notion that broadcast advertising is somehow more legitimate than online marketing, they discourage junior staffers – who are, presumably, more comfortable with technology than their older mentors – from making digital marketing initiatives a natural part of any strategic plan. Not only does this result in potential revenue and client loss for the agency, but it means that there will continue to be a serious shortage of multi-disciplinary account services people who have the skills to successfully manage campaigns which are becoming increasingly complex.