Paid, owned and earned just more silos

CONSULTANT
Jeff Estok 
Managing partner
Navigare

Absolutely not! Anything that creates additional silos is a bad thing. Silos are the natural enemy of collaboration, are wasteful, and encourage duplication of effort. Which is exactly the opposite of what is required for success in today’s digital marketing world: speed, agility, and the sharing of knowledge.

Organising around paid, owned and earned media has a channel, rather than consumer, bias and further reinforces outmoded ‘campaign’ thinking, rather than being reflective of today’s environment of being ‘always on’.

So if that isn’t the answer, what is? The round table that we would create has three seats at it: the Insights Champion; the Content Champion; and the Ecosystems Champion. Working in unison they create and deploy relevant and compelling brand content when the brand is the creator; and respond to consumer-generated brand stories. And importantly, they all feed into each other to help maximise each other’s efforts. Insights help maximise content engagement, which helps maximize audience engagement through shareability.

DIGITAL EXPERT
Keith Timimi 
Chairman
VML Qais

Nothing is more frustrating than a great idea that gets butchered in execution. Why does it happen so often? Blame lies equally with siloed organisations and über groups of generalists trying to perform specialist tasks.

So how do we square this circle? People consume media and utility in an incredibly fluid way. Simultaneously using multiple devices, they hold ongoing light-touch conversations with hundreds of people. Brands have been redefined as humanised entities in this landscape—and need to learn the art of discourse and influence.

Marketers need to develop an understanding of marketing as an ecosystem to nurture, rather than the discrete procurement of lowest-bid deliverables. And agencies need to bring both insight planners and channel planners to bear, in order to determine both how we want to influence conversations, and where are all the places we should be having them.

MEDIA STRATEGIST
SK Biswas 
Chief Strategy Officer
Havas Media APAC

In the famous ‘Elephant and the Blind Men’ story, Buddha compares the blind men to preachers and scholars, who see only a part of the story and cling to their own views. 

Organising teams around paid, owned and earned (POE) media could lead to a similar scenario. 

We have plenty of POE preachers and scholars. With the onslaught of digital media, there was a need for more of them, and now we have too many and very few integrators. I firmly believe agency teams need to be organised around integrators or people with holistic knowledge, who can tap into specialists. 

Organising teams around POE will create more silos. We all know that these disciplines are interlinked. For example, more often than not, paid media drives earned media. Offline word of mouth is far higher in volume and delivers significantly higher impact than online word of mouth. That is why it is not just good enough to understand POE media, but it is more critical to understand the inter-linkages and the content dynamics. 

Agencies need more integrators and consumer-centric preachers who understand inter-linkages, rather than siloed POE scholars.