Has the tendency to research dangerously creative ideas until they are lying curled up on the floor begging for mercy similarly enslaved creative media ideas, and is there much guesswork around assessment these days?
I started my career as a graduate media research executive at ACP in the early ’80s. When a media planner needed to find out what a series of print schedules was likely to deliver in terms of reach and frequency, they’d get on the dog and bone to tell me all about their plans so I could complete an analysis.
The work entailed reviewing the hard copy Morgan Readership Survey which looked then pretty much as it looks today.
I’d transcribe hundreds of pairs of readership numbers for the lucky candidate titles into a ledger, in precise order, prior to keying them into a dumb terminal linked to a mainframe computer somewhere in the USA. This seemed pretty fancy at the time but my mobile phone would probably thrash that baby in a game of chess these days.
Although HAL would pretty much run the schedules and return them instantly, the process of isolating the data, recording it and keying it in could take hours, and drove a generation of media researchers nuts. Some media planners liked evaluating dozens of schedules across six demographics and were lucky to survive.
One thing hasn’t changed. Media planners never had any spare time then either. If they were under the pump, they would plead for the evaluations straight away. Sadly for their karma, there were no short-cuts.
Except, that is, for guessing.
After a few months in the job I began to see patterns emerging. Not mathematical genius John Nash patterns, but patterns nevertheless. Media evaluation was a pretty mind-numbing process, so to entertain myself I used to guess the outcomes. I should add that guessing reach is not too difficult. The real trick is to guess the frequency and distribution to within a standard deviation.
So now when media planners pleaded, I’d offer to guess the results. I’d like to apologise now to anyone who invested millions of dollars in campaigns, the outcome of which I had guessed. A special apology to Gary Morgan who is entitled to add me to the list of people he doesn’t talk to anymore.
With some schedules I could pretty much do it during the conversation, but I realised this un-nerved your faint-hearted planner. So I’d typically offer to call them back in half an hour which had the effect of making them more comfortable. I was all about customer satisfaction in those days.
These days, schedules can be optimised 10 different ways in 10 minutes which means media planners have more time to talk the budgets up and the media down. They can assess likely performance against a wide range of traditional demographics, product and service usage data, psychographics, value segments and the use of other media.
So with so much data and so many models and resources and optimisers around, I’m wondering whether there is much guesswork left in the game these days.
The supplementary question is: Has the tendency to research dangerously creative ideas until they are lying curled up on the floor begging for mercy similarly enslaved creative media ideas?
It’s hard to shake old habits so I thought I would just guess what Phil Hayden was thinking and put it in this article. The prospect of being killed first by Phil and the editor dissuaded me. Phil started Bellamy Hayden with Simon Bellamy about four years ago and they have since won about every second media strategy prize awarded, so there are voodoo dolls of them everywhere.
Phil acknowledges that creative agencies often have to go through dozens of hoops backwards to get their ideas up, but reckons that the proliferation of media channels and research can actually help carry ideas rather than crush them.
“Clients are very involved in the channel-planning process these days. They can actually see how creative ideas can go to work in the new channels as well as the traditional media. A key requirement of creative ideas is how they play out in the media and now there are more ways for this to occur,” he says.
Phil observes that in some ways research has not changed as much as the media industry has and that some things are simply not measured.
“If there were new tools available to measure the exploding media options and the various ways in which consumers respond to them, perhaps research could get more ideas over the line,” he says.
No one has ever been able to guess what Graham Webster is going to say. Graham started Customedia with Malcolm Stewart in 1997. He must be smart because the agency’s office is a short stroll to Manly Beach.
Graham is a declared advocate of research to test the likely impact of creative having witnessed plenty of creative presentations where a menu of options is tabled.
“I have some sympathy for the client who is about to unload $5m into the media on an untested idea and insists on the use of focus groups to determine the most powerful creative approach,”he says.
Graham reckons that real synergy is achieved when the creative and media brains’ trusts come together at the start of the process. Ironically this is best facilitated in the more traditional ‘full-service’ agency environment. In this environment it is possible to exploit the power of serendipity and lateral thinking by wandering in and out of each other’s offices kicking ideas and options around “no appointment required”.
Graham reckons there will be those that describe the idea as a bit old fashioned but there is evidence that a school of thought is emerging around the proposition.
“A number of creative agencies have been hiring in media strategists and I’m betting the next trend will be for media agencies to hire in creatives,”he says.
Don’t get me started but my guess is he’s right.
is the managing director of Adstream. E: fittoprint@bandt.com.au
