Media owners are the Santa Claus of our industry. They fly in and out of our lives on their station wagon sleighs, showering us with gifts large and small, putting smiles on our underprivileged dials.
Think back to when you first started in media. Day to day duties consisted of getting coffees, checking confirms and sitting mute in meetings. When you’re sitting at your desk surrounded by a mountain of paper you couldn’t help but think, “Why did I just waste 3 years of my life in university?”
When all of a sudden, out of the dark mist strides a glorious media owner, like a knight of the guard and, what’s that in his hand?? No it can’t be – a stress ball? For me? And a branded pen and notepad!! All of a sudden you have gone from being completely irrelevant to the focus of somebody’s undying attention.
While the gifts might start off fairly miniscule you soon graduate from notepads to mouse-pads, mouse-pads to coffee, coffee to drinks, drinks to lunches, lunches to events and before you know it you’re on a ski trip doing Jager bombs and have completely forgotten about all those emails piling up back at the office.
Now, while these things are all quite nice, are they really necessary? And, more importantly, are they really doing the job they are intended to do for the media owners? My thinking is absolutely not.
Initially your brain is a malleable block of clay, and any attention you receive from a rep will surely stick in your head and resonate long after your first media party hangover has faded. But with so many brands constantly bombarding you, eventually the noise of them all shouting for your attention starts to mimic that of a drunken State of Origin crowd.
I’m sitting at my desk right now, and am literally unable to count the number of items I can see that are branded by media owners. And none of it has swayed one dollar of my media decision making. But the reason they persist with it, I suspect, is due to the very simple fact that it is bloody difficult to find a solution. If we don’t care about pointless stationary and free lunches...what do we care about?
Well I can only speak for myself but the one thing that matters the most to me at work is my career. Find a way to enhance my career and all of a sudden you have my undivided attention. Imagine if media owners took the tens of thousands of dollars they spend every year on meaningless shit and invested it in my career. Not only would I benefit from it, but so would my company, my clients and in turn the media owners themselves.
Without naming names some do this very well and they are to be congratulated.
In an industry as insular as ours, where your reputation is a whole lot more important than any amount of training you may have had, if you can find a way to raise someone’s profile, whether it be within their own agency or throughout the landscape, I guarantee you that your brand will be ingrained in their psyche for years to come.