Marketers gave agencies their advice this morning at a Cannes in Cairns panel titled ‘Brand VS. Performance? There are better questions to be asked’.
Mish Fletcher, chief growth officer, Asia Pacific at IPG, asked questions to Leah Jackson head of digital, Goodman Fielder, Mel Hopkins chief marketing & audience officer, Seven West Media, Nicole Smart director of media, marketing operations and performance, Optus
The panellists were in agreement that the old performance vs brand question is out of date and, on occasion, can actually be detrimental to a company’s growth.
“I couldn’t agree more,” Hopkins said in response to the statement.
“If you want to build out long term value, you are sort of screwed. I’m fearful of such a big swing to performance marketing. Maybe we will be back here in three years having a discussion about how many brands have been damaged by this model”.
“Understanding each other’s craft is so important, we need to pull it all together,” Smart said.
Jackson made it clear that this differentiation was not how she looked at her budget split anymore. “We look at our spend in totality, plan all of our spend end-to-end”.
Hopkins agreed that looking at marketing spend in a holistic way is the way forward: “the traditional funnel dead”.
“It’s more a marketing loop.The funnel is from 1980, need to move on”.
The importance of brand was evident, Hopkins said, when Optus suffered a cyber attack last year.
“Because of the strength of the brand prior to the attack Optus was able to rebound after four months”.
Fletcher asked the marketers what their advice for agencies would be.
“Do CPMs matter? We’re quite liberal with CPMs,” Jackson said. She added that she would like it if agencies upskilled her team more and challenged them with new things and creative ideas.
Hopkins said she would like it if agencies focused less on efficiency, saying that is just hygiene, and detracts from thinking about impact.
Smart said “we need to bring back the village”.“We need agencies to be working together.”
We need to get of the “vs” mentality she went on and work together for the good of the industry.
