Media agencies of the future will need to be data led, remunerated on ideas and far more efficient to be successful, Stewart Gurney (pictured) head of comms planning ay PHD told Australia's university advertising and media lecturers.
Speaking at the Media Federation of Australia’s ‘Lecture the lecturers’ day last week. Gurney said that media buying revenue had dried up. Pointing to the example of the rumoured 92% discount promised by one agency on its TV buy in order to win the business, Gurney said that media owners were also feeling the pain on such deals.
As a consequence, Gurney posed the potential solution of returning to full service agencies to the 40-odd media lecturers from around Australia gathered in the room, but said the he personally did not think this would be the solution.
Instead he said that he thought the successful agencies of the future would be an agency with “a majority of media buying being automated and a higher emphasis on intellectual property”. Charging for its ideas was something that media agencies could learn from “advertising” agencies.
He then went on to describe the creative agency process as a “bunch of people who sit around and come up with mental ideas”. He qualified this comment however by adding that he thought clients liked the tension created by having creative and media agencies play off against each other.
He concluded by suggesting that the media agency of the future would be “data-led, remunerated on ideas, results driven, nimble, real-time, more efficient, integrated and still consumer centric.
