Last night I had an interesting discussion with an account manager friend of mine from a major advertising agency. She was full of enthusiasm about the prospect of 5 day long sessions her whole company is going through in order to be fully immersed in the digital environment. The purpose of this is to ensure that their clients come to them for digital expressions as well as above the line work and that they are fully capable to integrate interactive media solutions into their planning.
Scary stuff.
Until recently digital agencies have been the guardians of the interactive world, delivering innovation to clients and taking real swathes of advertising revenue for online deliveries. Ad agencies on the other hand have been either buying up effective digital agencies or inserting digital teams into their offices to deliver solutions for clients. But neither of these approaches has allowed digital agencies a place at the table for strategy and development of client work – instead there has been an attitude that the planning (by which I mean the strategic planning of accounts including working out audience identification, projected media use, what will and will not speak to them etc) is done by the real professionals – the ad agency planners – and then the digital guys will come along and make a website.
This has let clients down because solutions have been proposed and sold in with no reference to digital teams and outmoded content delivery has made them look well, outdated (being polite).
Digital agencies as guardians have been offering clients that online and interactive support they need for their communcations. But digital agencies have failed to bring the back up and research to justify their pronouncements so clients have been left knowing they need digital, but not knowing what.
Above the line agencies are finally starting to realise that digital strategy has to come from people who understand digital – and so they are educating themselves to be those people. The danger for us is that they actually get really good at it. If that’s the case then digital agencies will be left as fulfillment houses, or become internal departments with little creative input into design and build. I don’t know about you but that wouldn’t make me leap out of bed in the morning.
But there’s still time. A real engagement with the online and interactive environment takes more than 5 immersion days, and there is a reason why we all work in the interactive arena – we love it. We love it more than any of the other public media available for creative people to get involved in. So we have a head start. And good planning is not as difficult to acheive as it might seem, we just have to attach the right importance to it and bring a digital sensibility to it so that large clients, familiar with the statistcs, research and vision that accompany pitches from ad agencies feel comfortable and at home with our propositions.
Perhaps we should take a leaf out of my friend’s company’s book and immerse ourselves in advertising…
Digital planning