A lot of my notes for the shiny new agency session came from an earlier panel of clients; Paul Bay speaking in his former role as International Media Director at Levis and Giovanni Fabris, former International Media Director, McDonald’s who outlined the following as being what they thought their media agencies were good at;
- Understanding the daily life and behavior of the customer
- Using that knowledge to talk to the customer when the brand is not (i.e. when they are not in store or consuming the product in some way)
- The holder / keeper of The Big Idea – being the conductor of the orchestra
- Helping the client to create better briefs
- Giovanni used the analogy of a a media agency being a GP – I wouuldn’t take a pill given to me by some new practitioner I happened to meet in the street without consulting my GP – so why would I use a new supplier / channel etc without consulting my media agency?
- Being a long term business partner (which led me to the thought that agencies could play a role as part of the corporate memory)
- Providing a synopsis of the media and mareting landscape
- Finding and filtering fresh ideas and suppliers
- Providing consistency across multiple channels
- Brokering co-opertition (their word) deals between competing media owners and brands
Interestingly, with the exception of the last, most of these looked like fee based consultancy services.
[...] IMM09: Give ‘em what they want: Clients on media agencies → [...]