• by Tom Hespos , May 12, 2003

Over the past few years, we've learned to vilify risk aversion. We thought that brand managers and VPs of marketing on the client side weren't willing to risk their necks to make an investment in an unconventional medium.

"No one gets fired for recommending television," we told ourselves. The implication was that convention replaced innovation to some degree, especially in the poorly-performing economy of the past couple years. Anyone on the marketing side who executed something that didn't perform could very easily find their neck on the chopping block.

We had quite a few things to sort out in our industry. Standards, best practices, streamlined workflow processes - these things are helping to make online a viable medium. Additionally, it seems we're learning new things every day about the people we reach through online media. We know that we reach a lot of people who are tough to reach through television, radio and print because they are light consumers of those media. We know we reach a significant number of professionals at work, and these folks are also tough to reach through traditional media.

But is risk aversion the enemy we once thought it was? When we read about Samsung, Cadillac, Heineken and Powerade spending hundreds of millions of dollars to tie in with the sequel to The Matrix, can we continue to blame things on risk-averse marketers? Samsung alone spent a reported 100 million clams on product placement in The Matrix: Reloaded, and Advertising Age's article about the deal characterized it as involving "maddening secrecy, critical timing and logistical nightmares."

When large sums of money are being spent on media that are less measurable, less streamlined from a process standpoint and less compatible in terms of audience metrics, how can we continue to believe that aversion to risk is the biggest factor holding our industry back?

I won't pretend that we're going to find the magic bullet that identifies and solves all the problems in our industry, but every so often, we should do a reality check on the barriers to marketers spending more in our beloved medium. Sure, the soft market can be attributed to several factors, including the overall performance of the economy, the backlash against anything 'dot com' and our own internal struggles to make online marketing more palatable, but we should always be sure our priorities are in order and that we know what we have to work on in order to see more money spent in this market.

Could it be that we still lack integrated thinking? Online is still the red-headed stepchild of media. While we struggle with the integrated media puzzle, Powerade is running Matrix-themed television commercials and leveraging its product placement deal across multiple channels. New agencies are springing up that cite product placement as a core competency, while traditional agencies are serving as go-betweens for clients, linking Madison Avenue and Hollywood. The net result is that product placement is hot, and that it's playing a role in the integrated marketing mix.

We could stand to learn a bit from this.