Ogilvy Australia might have appointed a head of media, but it's not making the leap into media as other creative shops have attempted.
Former COO of The Media Store, Saurin Worthington, took on the newly created post earlier this month, but she won’t be buying spots and dots. Ogilvy CEO, David Fox, said the industry doesn't need more media agencies, it needs more collaboration across the agency landscape instead of a "race to the middle".
While it follows bold moves into the media space by other traditional creative shops such as McCann, Leo Burnett and M&C Saatchi, Fox and Worthington are adamant the creation of the role isn’t a signal Ogilvy intends to do the same.
“That horse has bolted – I won’t put the toothpaste back in the tube,” Fox said.
“I just think about the amount of investment and infrastructure you have to do as an agency to compete with a GroupM or any other media agency and I can’t justify it. What we can justify is bringing media thinking in to make the creative product the best it can be.”
Recently, there has been a trend for agencies to expand their capabilities broader in a bid to offer clients a solution to the ever-expanding agency rosters, which are often hard for marketers to control or justify to the board. This has resulted in several media agencies launching creative offerings and creative shops building media arms in order to minimise silos between the two disciplines.
Worthington’s role is designed to do that without Ogilvy trying its hand at media. The position has two key focuses: helping to build media thinking and platform solutions into the creative work Ogilvy does and to foster better collaboration between Ogilvy and external partners. Worthington said this includes media agencies on a client roster and traditional media owners, giving Ogilvy a better understanding of what creative options exist on their platforms.
“My job is really to open that communication up, to challenge our team as much as the client and the media agency or the PR agency or whoever that partner is, but just with a media lens on it,” Worthington said. “It’s to be a positive collaborator or conduit between the big idea and the big execution”.
Ogilvy isn’t the only agency looking at other ways of meeting client demands without building new capability outside of its key offering.
Advertising network Dentsu Aegis, which bought creative shops Soap and BWM a year ago, incentivises collaboration between its agencies by having one P&L, so each agency doesn’t have to build separate capabilities on their own.
BWM Dentsu Sydney executive planning director, Megan Hales, told AdNews that this means clients get the best of both worlds, with the creative shop able to pull in skills across the network, including media, when it needs that expertise.
“For us it’s great because we know where our core capabilities are, with the knowledge that we can then flex to pull in equally as a market-leading resource for our specialist partners,” Hales said.
Behind the news
The full-service debate isn’t anything new on the agency landscape, with the unbundling and sometimes rebundling of media and creative dominating future-facing discussions for some time. Last year, McCann ramped up media planning and buying, with the traditional creative shop seeing its media move from comprising zero to 10% of the revenue of its Sydney office. Leo Burnett picked up media duties for Diageo in 2014 and last year added Canon media to its books, picking up the planning account without a pitch. If in 2014 talk of full-service ramped up, 2015 was when action finally started to match the rhetoric.
But creative agencies’ growing media expertise doesn’t sound the death knell for media agencies. In fact, some industry insiders have suggested some creative shops that have moved in that direction have started to pull back as the realities of the investment needed to deliver media services become apparent. The media business is cost-prohibitive – both in tools and staff. It also doesn’t mean that full-service capability can’t be done – especially for independents that have often been launched with that offering built in, but it’s not as simple as it used to be.
It’s no surprise then that creative shops are looking at other ways to continue to drive and own brand strategy without having to tack a media shop onto the back of its service. For large networks that arguably won’t want to build too many competitive competencies under the one roof, looking at ways to have media and creative agencies work better together could be key in addressing the uncomfortable gap between the two disciplines that clients are currently facing.
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