Is the media planning art about to go client side?
By Wayde Bull, Planning Director at Principals.
If you want a sneak preview of the way in which your marketing department might be structured in future, there’s no better place to look than The Coca Cola Company in Atlanta. In their search for new ways to add value to the world’s most valuable brand portfolio, they’ve long experimented with brave organisational structures and agency partnerships.
Back in the early 1990’s Coca Cola filled their advertising agencies with dread by forging a partnership with the Creative Artists Agency, to help the business tap the diverse creative talents of Hollywood and take their first tentative steps into branded content. For several years CAA created the bulk of Coke’s flagship brand advertising, drawing from a loose federation of creative minds, operating entirely outside the ‘pins in maps’ agency model. This experiment set the precedent for Coke’s hiring of smaller creative shops that create the bulk of its advertising today.
In the late 1990’s Coca Cola hired a design heavyweight, David Butler as its in-house VP of Global Design, with the mission of bringing joined-up design thinking to Coke’s global products and systems. One of Butler’s big breakthrough projects, that’s just about to see the light of day, is a self-serve vending machine (with elegant curves crafted by Italian car designers Pininfarina) that’s capable of dispensing over 100 different Coke beverages into a single cup. It’s set to become Coke’s biggest gamble on equipment innovation in their history. A brave new way to market that’s designed to answer consumer’s insatiable desire for variety, collect real time information about customer preferences and help lighten Coke’s carbon footprint. Now that’s design with serious purpose, that’s being driven from the inside-out.
Last week Coca Cola announced that their latest high profile recruit is Ivan Pollard, a former global partner at Naked, who is moving from London to Atlanta in the role of VP Global Connections. For Coke’s media agencies, Pollard’s arrival client-side must ring warning bells. For what does it mean for one of the world’s most prolific media spenders to draw such heavyweight communications planning skills in-house?
The rationale, as reported in the US trade magazine Advertising Age is to have Pollard “lead the company’s efforts to engage consumers through paid, owned, shared and earned media”. Just as Butler, the design champion, is tackling complex marketing projects from inside the business, so Pollard will shape complex communications programs from within.
Coke is recognising that consumer views of its brands are no longer shaped principally by paid messaging. AdAge cites a recent Coke analysis of its YouTube traffic. Of the 150 million views the brand achieved, just 25 to 30 million of those views could be attributed to content placed there by Coke. It’s clearly time for big brands to recognise this power shift and approach media planning in a much more open-source and user-inclusive way.
Many media agencies and their clients in Australia have begun to embrace the paid, owned, shared and earned media framework as it’s a powerful way of distinguishing between different forms of customer interaction with brands, that each need careful management. Paid media is the familiar tip-of-the-iceberg advertising and sponsorship activity that’s now a sub-set of the total media planning task. Owned media include company websites, blogs, games and in-store displays. Earned media are positive brand mentions found in editorial, social networks or search results. And shared media are exchanges between brands and users where the content generated isn’t owned outright by either party, such as Facebook Likes and comments.
It’s the interplay between these different forms of media that drives the overall cut-through of brands in the market today. Procter and Gamble’s recent viral hit, Old Spice Man, is an excellent example of how its television commercials (paid media), were redistributed on a brand microsite and Facebook fan page (owned media), then boosted by mainstream and social media mentions (earned media), to ultimately deliver over 1 million Facebook ‘Likes’ (shared media).
To orchestrate a brand’s messaging in this co-created world, marketers will need to become more ‘hands on’ in rallying agency side and client side resources in real time. Pollard’s arrival at Coke may signal that the best practitioners of this integration art will sit client-side in future.
First published on AFR (www.afr.com) - 28th October 2010
