By Mike Fantis, Vice President, Managing Partner, DAC
One of my guilty pleasures is bullshit bingo, it’s a game you can play in your own head and one that lends itself extremely well to the media sector.
You can pick up an easy point for “the right message, to the right person, at the right time.” In fact, I’d be willing to bet any client-side readers will have heard someone at an agency repeat the mantra at least once.
DoubleClick may have made the phrase inescapable in the late ‘90s, but it’s just as easy to imagine Don Draper dropping it in a pitch, probably to a tobacco firm. While the social mores, the clothes, the tech and the channels may have changed since the Mad Men era, the thinking doesn’t always appear to have done the same.
The problem is that while the business imperative – growth – doesn’t fundamentally change too much, customers’ needs are highly individualistic and contextual. Consequently, “right message, right person, right time” cannot work at scale.
Right message, right place, wrong budget, wrong strategy
As channels have proliferated, there are an awful lot more potential moments to drop the right message, but media budgets haven’t grown to keep up. In fact, marketers have been expected to do more with less for years.
One-size-fits-all media plans with a sole focus on driving CPA efficiencies across a single, or limited channel(s) is not a strategic use of those budgets for the majority of clients. A smart agency will always challenge this thinking as a false economy.
Visibility alone will only consistently drive growth in a very limited set of categories, typically those with short purchase cycles. For most clients though, the greater value lies in consultancy around how to use media to support specific business goals and audience insights to understand where the blocks in the road are.
Getting granular
In the case of a national chain it might make sense to put a greater share of the budget into promoting sites that are underperforming. However, the bigger win would be to understand what the root of the problem is, typically at an operational level.
This requires active listening at a postcode level, for example by monitoring customer reviews and social media posts, to discern where the issues lie and recommend remedial action based on those demonstrable audience needs.
Admittedly this is a step beyond what most planners would factor into a media strategy, but given the wealth of data at our disposal it feels remiss simply to keep doing what we’ve been doing.
No amount of nominally localised ads – dubbing the name of the nearest city into a streaming ad, for instance – can remedy the operational issues, such as poor customer service or store location that are the real reasons for stagnant growth and/or a lack of engagement.
Survival of the fittest
In a challenging media market, it pays to be on the front foot as it will become harder to pass off siloed strategies as ‘customer-centric’ much longer. Any agencies that have stuck to the tried-and-tested are at risk of being found out by the changing ways in which people search for and interact with brands.
As media buying across all channels increasingly goes programmatic, the trump cards of scale and media relationships will become less and less relevant. The incumbents’ innate advantages risk being eroded in time unless they can move upstream into insight-led business consultancy.
Moreover, zero click is fundamentally reshaping search. Agencies cannot hope to own every message, every time across every channel. Rather they need to understand which ones are most relevant to the audiences that are most likely to drive growth where it’s needed, whether that’s for a particular location, product line and so-on.
Equally, we need to stop thinking about media in terms of being a one-way street to influence audience behaviours. In particular, the SERP has become a far more nuanced place, one which offers brands a far richer understanding of their audiences through those elements they engage with – reviews, maps, Reddit conversations…
The value lies in better understanding intentions in relation to search queries and follow-up actions. By identifying which align most closely to specified business objectives, it becomes easier to segment and nurture the most valuable prospects by developing the right content to guide them through to conversion, a store visit, a review – or whatever the goal may be.
This is a meticulous process that takes a great deal of time and effort. It won’t work for agencies that have historically fitted their clients’ media around models that best suit them.
It’s time for agencies to get beyond the Mad Men thinking. Their job isn’t to ask how to get the right message across a particular channel to maximise efficiencies, it’s how to get the most useful message out to drive growth where it’s most needed. That means engaging those audiences most likely to act on it – and that will only happen if we truly understand their contextual needs.
