Are media neutral solutions feasible? Join the debate.

Ranga Somanathan
CEO, Starcom MediaVest Group Malaysia

When an agency is not compensated for going the extra mile, they will likely take the easy way out in their planning and buy simple, easily executable media. Hampered by consumers who are now in a continuous state of partial attention - not caring about ad messages targeted at them - taking the easy way out is going to be exacerbated.

When a client engages an agency and compensates them accordingly, they will do all it takes to create media neutral solutions. Furthermore, media neutral solutions stem not from media but from consumers. A typical consumer-centric media plan has a high probability of being media neutral. A brand-centric media plan will tend to have media bias. What marketers should be asking is whether they can reach and talk to customers in the right and relevant environment. So, media plans can definitely be media neutral, but the credit for this goes to client procurement departments, for they know what they are buying. Media neutrality is not just an outcome, it is a process. 

Phil Hayden
Managing partner, Naked Communications

The intent of the question is: ‘Can the traditional agency model cope with the new media world?’ The answer is resoundingly, no. That is why there is a new model in Asia.To be media neutral you have to execute everything equally, or nothing. Traditional agencies claim to execute everything, in reality it’s just a double-digit number of dizzying channel specialists their holding company has bought interests in that week. A strategic communications answer could be advertising, or a mobile application, an event or re-decorating the delivery trucks. Naked fundamentally breaks the nexus of planning or buying and executes nothing in-house. Our holistic planning model delivers strategic direction and channel or content choices. We subsequently go to appropriate executional partners, we do not park agency overhead at the client’s door to purport as ‘the way forward’.

In this way we eschew the flawed model of remuneration against varying channel commission or time spent. Every agency executing in-house is skewed by varying margin extraction, skillset bias or resource payrolled originally for the biggest client’s needs.

Media neutrality is only ensured today by agency positioning and structure. Few qualify.

Simon Woodward
CEO, UM China

Simply being more time-efficient in channel selection is not the answer to commercial survival. Every media agency has the objective of becoming media neutral but shareholders’ expectations may drive business practices into areas where neutral planning is compromised. Change in business models needs to be as rapid as media and technology evolution. The resulting new opportunities mean clients rightly expect channel neutral planning and execution, but this can sometimes compromise volume-driven unit costs, and make profit margins challenging. Agencies need to adapt, focus on clients’ business and link their remuneration to performance-based returns. This cannot be simply linked to a cost reduction KPI, but more on value delivery, a combination of cost and quality and innovation, driven via client deals with media that have a vested interest in client, channel owner and agency benefits. Clients need to justify this internally, with more sophisticated measurement metrics and data sharing and ideally a basis for commercial rewards for all parties. This would be a better solution to support investment into efficiency than simply choosing the most time-efficient channels.

This article was originally published in the April issue of Campaign Asia-Pacific.