P&G, Integration and Siloes

To read the headlines you would think we live in a curiously binary world. Facebook’s wonderful; Facebook’s on its last legs. TV is dead; TV is still the most effective medium ever invented; printed media forms cannot survive; print circulations increase as readers seek the truth behind the stories.

And so on.

This week we had a wonderful example of what I mean. One day we have Bill Duggan from the ANA tweeting: “P&G is bringing media and creative back together! REUNITED!”

A couple of days later we had: “P&G’s Marc Pritchard calls for an end to the archaic Mad Men model”.

Bill Duggan is a highly respected commentator; and ‘Marketing Week’ (where the Pritchard headline comes from) is a fine magazine. And they’re both right; and they’re both wrong.

The media business is increasingly about integration, which as a concept goes far beyond making sure your press and OOH messages look vaguely as if they might be related to one another.

Today’s integration isn’t just about conventional advertising; it encompasses all forms of communication, from PR to experiential, from online influencers through to the way that customer facing staff interact with those consumers they come across.

And this is where Pritchard’s point resonates. His ANA address speaks of ‘partnerships with agencies’ as opposed to working through them. Advertisers use multiple specialists and it’s wrong to suggest that any ad agency can either supply all those specialist services, or indeed consider the benefits they bring objectively.

I speak as one who was once physically threatened by an account man in a sister creative agency for daring to suggest that maybe non-advertising solutions might serve the client better than yet another straightforward TV campaign. …

… read on at bjanda.com

Originally posted by Brian Jacobs on The Cog Blog at BJ&A
2nd March 2018