Commentary

Creative and Media: Holy Matrimony or Bridezilla?

It's been a couple of decades now that the first of the big media-only shops started opening up. The idea that singular media buying entities could yield greater efficiencies by nature of their "clout" and allowed creative shops to be more strategic and "creative" started an evolution in the agency business that led to the mitosis of traditional agencies into two separate entities: the creative shop and the media hot house.

Seemed like a good idea then, and continued to seem like a good idea for some time. Media was being turned into a commodity by agencies advocating efficiency yields over quality of buys, and clients wanted it that way. At this time, in the late 70s, the ascendancy of creative had begun. Creatives were free to think about images and feelings and zeitgeists and art without being any where near those number-crazy nerds.

When it has come to the online space, however, interactive marketing operators have given deference to media when it comes to setting priority for the two primary components of online advertising. Creative often times was getting short shrift, and since media constitutes the bulk of the advertising costs (as it does in all media), it only seemed to make sense to spend more energy focusing on it.

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Something that seems to be happening with organizations focusing on online media marketing and advertising is that creative, for the first time in a long time, if ever, is starting to gain closer and closer scrutiny from the media folks. For the entirety of most of our careers, whether it was overt or not, creative almost always drove the advertising plan. But recently we are starting to see comprehensive communications packages being driven by media rather than creative.

This can be traced to the increasing desire on the part of advertisers to connect the dots on their marketing communications programs and make the vehicles for their distribution accountable. It is online media that has insisted from its beginnings on accountability and that emphasis is turning eyes towards other media. But what this also means is that every component of a communications that can be influenced has fallen under the purview of those responsible for the media. Why is this?

For one, there has been both a real and perceptual decrease it eh power of pure creative as messaging. Clutter, fractious environments, consumer savvy, and a now long tradition of well-received creative not yielding the results clients were hoping it would have all led to a kind of reassessment of faith in reliance solely on good creative to have significant impact.

Another reason is because, as Greg Smith put it recently in a conversation with AdAge's Scott Donaton and MediaEdge's Lee Doyle, media folks are now responsible for "counting the beans," and the beans now include creative performance. Creative is, after all, something that can be influenced and its effects can be read. Only media is in a position to do the reading because only media has been willing to do it all this time. So it is that creative has come under media's auspices for online.

What this suggests, of course, is not that media professionals need to be controlling creative (heaven forbid some of my ideas ever were manifest in an advertisement!). What this means is that it is time for creative and media to come together again. I know some shops out there are doing this; some have always. But the general modus operandi has been, on a grand scale, to keep the two separate. This is bad for online media and, really, it is bad for all media.

Marrying creative and media together again allows for better collaboration, better communication, and can reduce the chance for error on a technical level. It creates the conditions for a stronger shop because the balkanized fiefdoms of creative versus media are rendered null. Borne of these circumstances is the opportunity for more emphasis on larger and longer-term strategy because the conceptual world both media and creative are operating in is now larger.

Could such a union last until death do they part? I don't know, but if the life of one and the other are dependent upon being together, it will.

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