The Wall Street Journal-20080213-Venture Reunites Media Planners- Creative Executives
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Venture Reunites Media Planners, Creative Executives
Full Text (947 words)Questions for . . . Susan Gianinno
Company: Publicis USA, a unit of Publicis Groupe
Title: Chairman & Chief Executive Officer
Publicis USA has formed a new division to bring media-planning thinking into its ad firm. The new division, called Optimedia Inside, is a joint venture with Optimedia, a media-buying firm owned by France's Publicis Groupe, Publicis USA's parent company.
Publicis USA, which works for advertisers such as Citigroup, Procter & Gamble and T-Mobile, says the move is to get the ad firm thinking more about how people consume media, knowledge that it says ad firms lost in the late 1990s when media-buying and -planning functions were stripped away from ad firms to create separate businesses.
Publicis is the latest ad firm to create a new entity aimed at getting creative executives and media-buying and -planning folks to work more closely. It's a critical issue for Madison Avenue because of the proliferation in types of media and ways to consume them. Publicis USA says the new group will help it break the heavy dependency on traditional television and print ads that many ad firms have had for decades.
Below are excerpts from our conversation with Ms. Gianinno about Publicis's latest move.
WSJ: What will the new division do?
Ms. Gianinno: It will work with creative people to identify the best target audience, insights about those people and how they consume and relate to different media. It's so that thinking can influence the creative process. It's a way for us to give clients bigger ideas and to bring everything together, as opposed to having the marketing disciplines siloed like they are now.
Right now, the interactive people do their own take on the consumer, the ad-agency people do their own take on the consumer, and the shopper-marketing people do their take on the consumer. Everyone creates their separate briefs. Part of what we are doing is readdressing what happened when the media-buying companies went their separate ways from ad agencies several years ago.
WSJ: Was that a big mistake [to separate media planning and buying from creative services]?
Ms. Gianinno: Well, it wasn't a big mistake from the perspective of marketers gaining media-buying efficiencies. If you were a client at the time and your central organizing principle was 'how I get more ad time for less money,' it was a brilliant idea. If you were a media- buying company, you wanted to make sure there was some strategic rationale to that buying, so the media-buying companies fought very hard to bring the planning function with them. They fought to take it.
Was it a mistake from the standpoint of going countertrend with the consumer and its increasingly interesting way of relating to the media? Yes. It was a disservice to ad agencies' ability to create ideas that took advantage of the new way consumers relate to the media. Was it good for creativity to separate out media thinking? No.
WSJ: So now you are offering planning, but that service is also offered by Optimedia. Isn't a client just paying twice for similar services if they use your firm and Optimedia?
Ms. Gianinno: If I were a marketer, I would say there is a danger of that, and if they are paying for a planner who does a strategy on digital -- paying for a planner to do the strategy on shopper marketing and paying for a planner to do strategy on media -- then, yes, they are. If it's not all being brought together they are not only paying more, but they are confusing the issue. Everyone knows it's better if it all comes together, but nobody wants to lose business.
WSJ: Whose fault is it that different types of advertising and marketing agencies don't work better together?
Ms. Gianinno: I know that marketers have rightly been critical of the ad agencies for being self-serving and getting as many assignments as they can and cross-selling across all the companies, but the truth is it works both ways. One of the biggest barriers to making unified thinking possible is the silos that exist at the client -- the marketers themselves. Marketers all have their digital departments, their design units, their shopper-marketing units and their media units that work outside their advertising units. Those people who run those different units don't want to work with one team. The digital team likes working with the interactive agency, and the shopper- marketing folks want to work with the shopper-marketing firm. The elephant in the room: As marketers are criticizing agencies, it's marketers that have to change and streamline.
WSJ: According to a recent survey of marketers, 76% believe media buying and planning should be reunited with creative in some way. What are the biggest roadblocks to making that happen?
Ms. Gianinno: Marketers aren't there yet. They all want it, but many are putting the burden on agencies and media firms to do it. Marketers' organizations aren't there; they have profit-and-loss structures and management challenges. Marketers say they want it, but they won't change how they operate. That is an issue.
There is another issue and that is talent. We really need some new talent or new types of people. You can bring a whole bunch of planners into the creative firms, and it wouldn't be helpful, because they haven't been educated or cultivated to work with creative people. They also don't know how to inspire creative ideas. A lot of media and creative people are not used to working together. Account people at ad agencies don't understand media. And you have the fact that the media landscape is changing so quickly and still changing and nobody has a clear handle on it.
