Ever since I read that Dostoevsky got some of his inspiration for “Crime and Punishment” from a little article he saw in a St. Petersburg newspaper, I’ve combed the nooks and crannies of every paper I so much as glance at. So far, old Fyodor has nothing to fear from me in the fiction department, but I do run into some tidbits that come in handy here.
For example, last week there was a squib headlined: “Publicis Venture Aims for Efficiency” in The Wall Street Journal. And I kid you not, this is what it said:
“Starting next year, Publicis Groupe will let clients get media, digital and creative services from the same single provider–part of an effort to offer marketers more efficiency and boost the sagging fortunes of its Leo Burnett unit.”
So in other words, in their infinite wisdom the agency holding company’s management has figured out that integrating all these services is a good idea. And why might that be? Because, as the article continues:
“Many marketers believe that ad agencies spend too much time fighting with their digital and media partners over how to spend the marketers’ ad dollars, hampering advertisers’ ability to get the right mix of services.”
Now, is it just me, or does this new arrangement Publicis is proposing sound remarkably like the way things always were until fairly recently–i.e. all the essential services required to transfer a client’s message from his or her brow to the brows of the audience for that client’s offering united under one roof and (more tellingly) combined into one P&L statement?
Sounds awfully familiar to me. Mainly because that’s the way it always was and should have stayed. Of course, digital added a new wrinkle. Just as television did when it first appeared. (A “revolution” that we should never forget was originally going to spell the end of radio, something that will undoubtedly come as a big surprise to the folks at Clear Channel.) And the only reason media and creative ever agreed to their uncontested divorce was because some people with a greater interest in their agency’s finances than their clients’ calculated that you could add 1+1 (profit streams) and get to a 10 (profit torrent). There was never anything in it for clients.
The fact is, the objective of all clients and their advertising partners remains a fairly basic one: use the enormous, seductive power of communications in all its myriad forms–working as one–to convince consumers that their interests and ours couldn’t be more aligned if Eddie Lampert owned 50.1% of both of us. I admit, a boiled down description if ever there was one. Then again, while we’ve all heard of people dying from complications you rarely hear of anyone biting the dust due to simplifications.
But to bring this jeremiad to a close, had I read this article in The Onion I would have chuckled and moved on. The fact that The Journal and presumably the management of Publicis deemed it newsworthy is a crime. The punishment for which awaits a host of largely innocent Raskalnikovs otherwise known as the shareholders of agency holding companies.
It seems to me that digital has always been the spanner in the works. About five years ago agencies were pushing “integration” as the 21st century solution. 360 degree branding as Ogilvy called it. But it became extremely complicated when they actually attempted it. A website is a completely different animal than a print or TV ad. Which is why agencies generally farm that function out. It takes a very different skill set to produce a site. And agency creatives generally don’t want to associate with web geeks. Granted, there are some very successful integrated campaigns. The key factor is always strong concept that drives all the communication.