• by Marcelo Salup , April 11, 2006

I grew up in the Spain of the mid-70s; we marched, threw bricks at the police and violently questioned authority. I still do. Question authority, I mean.

In 1974 I discovered advertising. I spent my first eight years on the creative side--first in Spain, then in the Dominican Republic, then in the U.S., where I won a couple of Addy awards. Then I switched to media and spent 14 years basically with one company, Foote Cone & Belding. In the last five of those years I was international media director, a job that allowed me to travel all over the world and meet literally hundreds of our people. In between I had my own agency for 3 years and did tons of retail advertising. Presently, I work for a highly integrated agency in Miami, Grupo Uno, as director of marketing.

If I could boil down everything I've learned to one single word, it would be "people". And I don't mean people in the warm, fuzzy, "I'm a people person" kind of way. I mean brilliant, intelligent, intellectually curious people, warts and all.

The latest round of "reinventing the wheel" and all the subsequent clichés and discussions about re-integrating creative and media (though, honestly--why stop there?) just brings the importance of people (warts and all) to the forefront.

Want to reintegrate creative and media? Hire media people back. That simple.

Media companies were created out of two different, but coexistent phenomena: the greed of ad agency leaders, who thought they could increase their revenues and margins by selling media services separately--and the happy coincidence that media people were getting fed up with being left to the last five minutes of the agency presentation and needed their own intellectual space. Media agencies--and the subsequent emphasis on media--gave us the opportunity to run our own shows, make more money, contribute directly to a client's success and have fun.

So. Want to reintegrate creative and media? Hire the media people back, pay them good money, invest in their tools, respect their intellectual achievements and make them a part of the mix. In two years, tops, the industry will have reintegrated.

What about making media people part of the mix? Lately one hears a lot about this issue, mostly centering about old-fashioned (and clichéd) ideas about how to generate ideas. I'd like to throw a couple of wrenches into that machinery too.

Can media people "step up to the plate" and bring great ideas to the table?

Can anyone doubt it? I mean, think about the huge size that leading media companies have achieved in a relatively short time. Think about their ability to attract top talent. Think about the talent at the top. In my years of flying around the world, every good creative director I've met can match a media director idea for media idea--while every good media director I've met can match any creative director idea for creative idea. So, hire the brilliant ones--not the one with blinders.

Can both disciplines coexist?

At FCB they did, and rather well. At Grupo Uno they do, and really well. I think there just needs to be a couple of tweaks here and there. Instead of writing the "creative brief" and the "media brief" and the this brief and the that brief, why not have a document that only contains three items?

1. What is the brand all about?
2. What is supposed to happen at the end of this particular effort?
3. Who are the consumers and what are they all about?

That's it. An intelligent account leader, bolstered by intelligent creative, media, and other persons, will figure out what to do better than if someone keeps dumping information into the document in an attempt to have the document be all things to all people.

What about buying power? Keep it. Centralize the buying. However, in moving beyond national broadcast television, I've realized that creativity is more important than bulk--what you propose to your rep can have more impact than the bucks your agency buys. Besides, the toothpaste is out of the tube: people who negotiate right now will keep negotiating and they know what the rates are.

Cutting the Gordian knot. Personally, I think that it will be media agency leaders who are going to reintegrate the business. They already have talent in-house, they already have access to the media and they are leading the effort to prove to clients what they add to their success through econometric modeling. From there, it's a small jump to just taking over creative by--hiring the creatives!

But the ones who need to make it happen are the clients. To me, it's a fairly straightforward plan:

1. Insist that it happen by bringing both creatives and media (and direct marketing too, for that matter) to the planning meeting at the same time. One team. One brief.
2. Demand one single strategic document; make both sides work together.
3. Stop applying TV metrics to every media; sometimes CPM is not the right metric.
4. Tie compensation to results--but clearly define what the results should be, and then make both sides measure their performance. No fuzzy "awareness" unless the awareness has a measurable purpose.
5. Stop holding media-only or creative-only pitches. How about if a client were to hold a "persuasion pitch"?

A lot of agencies would also add: Pay well. However, I assume that a client will pay as little as possible, so it is up to us, the agencies, to prove our worth. Free market economies and all that.

Adam Smith, the inventor of capitalism, proposed the existence of an "invisible hand" which rights the economies that go too far astray. Align "persuasion" at the top, hire the brilliant people who will work to make persuasion happen, and everything will fall into place.