BMW has accepted that a fragmenting media and marketing landscape has left marketers, not agencies, as the smartest people in the room, although agencies are catching up just as the notion of ‘full service’ makes a comeback.
That’s according to BMW marketing boss Tom Noble, who was a panellist at a recent Marketing and Media Outlook breakfast staged by The Australian Financial Review and Nine Entertainment Co. Noble said the complexity of bringing communications plans together was increasing rapidly and that media and agency partners were slowly coming to grips with it.
“What we have realised over the last couple of years is the only people in the room that are across all this stuff are the clients,” he said. “So the clients have to deal with all the different aspects. Because most agencies and also media partners have split everything up, as a client you’re sitting there saying, ‘How am I going to pull this one together to make it work?’
“But what’s happening is agencies are restructuring themselves. So now the digital person actually sits with the offline people and there is much less of a digital division between the two. It’s the same thing from a creative point of view. We have mainstream creative people with digital media but then you’ve got the media folk. In the past I would deal with a newspaper person or an online person or a TV person. Now they’re all coming together.”
Noble also suggested there was a reconfiguring underway of the unbundled agency environment between media and creative advisors. “It’s all starting to come back together now and I think agencies and clients understand the medium is as creative as how you deliver the message,” he said.
Noble also flagged BMW’s priority for creating and owning content as another key theme for the carmaker, on a global basis as well as locally. “The other thing from a digital viewpoint is that most brands are digital media owners,” he said. “You have a Facebook page, you have a website, you have a YouTube channel. So we’re in the media game, but how do you as a brand actually ensure that the media you control is as interesting as possible?
“Munich has figured this out and done a really good job at creating content for us in conjunction with what we do ourselves. We will go to where the customer is to communicate and engage. As a result of that, the shift towards digital means there are content opportunities. We can tell deeper stories. Streaming video is a way of addressing that, for example.”
This article first appeared in the 18 May 2012 edition of AdNews. Click here to subscribe for more news, features and opinion.
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