‘Too many vested interests among clients, creative agencies and media agencies.’
‘The temptation to always see new media as sexier than old media.’
‘Client companies organised by discipline, each with individual budgets, that makes media neutrality virtually impossible.’
‘There is no single currency that can adequately measure the relative impact of investments made across different media.’
‘People who talk the talk of wanting something different, when in reality they’re asking for the same thing with a different wrapper.’
In order to understand how to overcome some of these difficulties let’s look back to see how communication strategy has emerged to be such a dominant part of the marketing agenda.
THE REVOLUTION
Historically, the way brands spoke to their consumers was through individually planned ‘units’ of conversation; some PR, some direct mail, some point of sale, some advertising.
These ‘units’ may have had individual strategies, but rarely did these strategies ‘touch’ each other. A PR strategy was written separately from a direct mail strategy,
usually by people in different client company departments or in separate external agencies. Different channels were used to do different jobs and, as long as all the jobs got done, then that was fine.
Advertising became the dominant form of brand communication as it was clear that
it worked hard. Therefore, choosing the advertising channel became something of a default choice. The sheer power of broadcast media, especially television, to reach mass audiences reinforced this habit.
Therefore a good advertising strategy was the centre-piece of the thinking. Its purpose was to enable the creative content of the advertising (and not the placement of the advertising in media).