Trust me, media and creative are at their best when working together

What we’ve all seen is that the separation did benefit many agencies through building scale and volume. This worked very well for quite a while, but clients have started to see this separation as something that isn’t to their benefit. Something that is even hurting their marketing efforts, and ultimately making their job harder.

Let’s look back. In the mid-to-late 90s, agencies started to spin off media services to create media shops and creative agencies that stood on their own. The thought was that doing this would help margins and allow both types of agencies to bring on additional business while avoiding conflict. Most of all, they would generate huge scale to maximize cost savings.

For the most part, this did work. Agencies grew, money was made, scale was achieved – and it almost looked like this was a good idea. Except it wasn’t.

Too many cooks

What about the client? They now have a creative agency, a media agency, and maybe even a specialized performance digital agency or experiential agency. This means a collection of at least 3-4 separate agency relationships to manage, and it’s on these clients ultimately to get all the individual agencies to work together on just the basics. Not to mention form a cohesive strategy or creative idea. The billing itself is a full-time job for clients.

And the work? For media and creative, the process of coordinating is one fraught with delay and miscommunication. This is not always the case, but when you have two separate teams, sometimes the objective can be muddy.

Creative tends to be focused on the big idea, and campaign concepts. Without media sitting in some of these meetings, it’s hard for creative to think down the funnel, into how that concept comes to life within each channel and each execution.

Big ideas are great, and necessary. But since every consumer‘s attention is now fragmented between individual media consumption channels, the media perspective is now more important than ever. How and where are individuals consuming the big idea? Media can help creative find the best way to get that idea across in the end user’s channels.

Out-of-context

Media people are inundated with vendors pitching new, unique units and placements. These are all things that could use a creative eye on the big idea and overall objective vis-a-vis execution. With the two disciplines separated, a media person might recommend this new rich-media unit. But, the communication from the vendor all too often amounts to just the unit spec, which is then passed to creative.

The creative team gets these specs, oftentimes without any context, and without an idea of how this unit will look in the real world., They then build creative that fits the space, but that might not fit the environment where this unit lives and which does not take full advantage of the attendant opportunity.

Clients who have found, or rediscovered, the full-service solution, can streamline the process. And while not every campaign has PR-worthy placements or creative executions, all the elements tend to work harmoniously. These united campaigns often get into market faster, have better results, and most importantly, understand the places they show up.

Spot the difference

As you’re moving through your daily life, see if you can spot the united media-and-creative effect in the ads you see. The multiple billboard messages on the highway, the bus shelter creative that knows it’s a bus shelter, or the Reddit banner ad that references Reddit.

These are location-aware, but also often embody the ideas that spring from discussing what’s possible. Can video be embedded in the unit? Could we extract the audio and have it live on its own? Can we rotate multiple messages in the banner? These are the media and creative discussions that open up new ways of using space. They are the standout campaigns, and they come from media and creative working in tandem from the start.

So, how do we get there in this disconnected agency world? Outside of recombining the creative and media agencies, as many have done quietly, you can start by changing the way you work. Creative and media need to be in the same room, from the very beginning and all along the way after that. A creative concept review might not lend itself naturally to the invitation of a media person, the same way a media mix meeting might not make room for creatives. But, what’s important is the thinking that happens when these two disciplines meet.

If brands want to speak with one voice, then they need to make sure their creative and media agencies do as well – and that starts with bringing everyone together again.