• by Alistair Robertson , Maggie Summers , June 8, 2018

Not so long ago, most agencies offered an integrated service that covered both media and creative services. Then, as clients pushed for greater buying efficiency and more strategic decision making, (and holding companies smelled opportunities to grab larger pieces of the pie) the disciplines became decoupled.

But now, integration of media and creative is a hot topic again. Here’s what you need to know and how things might shape up.

Why reintegrate now?

The short answer is due to the commercial environment in which both agencies and brands now live. As never before, every piece of marketing is subjected to performance metrics, the days of the “creative whim” long gone.

Technology has also given us the ability to hyper-target consumers based on location, interests, purchase behavior, loyalty and many other signals. Meaning we have the right, and frankly it is the consumer’s expectation, to speak to them in a more personalized and relevant way.   

Added to which, consumers are curating their own branded content and experiences. Meaning brands and agencies alike must continually plan with a consumer-first approach — all with the goal of creating a virtuous circle of creative and effective communications.

Neither discipline can go it alone

It’s because of these reasons that we need to ensure that every marketing experience delivered is relevant and meaningful. And today neither creative or media can do this independent of each other.

Expanding that thought from the modern day to the future, it becomes obvious that clients will need truly integrated teams. Whether that is via more unified, less partisan, integrated agency team (IAT) processes or by employing agencies that have integrated teams.

What needs to change?

One of the biggest changes in the future should be how both media and creative are briefed. Today it is commonplace for media to be briefed separately from creative. But as content and context become further entwined, it’s essential that both skillsets are briefed together and both disciplines work as one through the planning and creative processes.

The planning process specifically must become more collaborative and less about sharing media buys or creative concepts that have already been agreed to. This change would allow media strategy to more powerfully inform creative as well as creative better guide media execution ideas. Ultimately forcing disparate agencies to be more accountable for each other’s work.

This is not pie-in-the-sky thinking; some clients already are already pushing their agencies in this direction. P&G, for example, has recently announced that it wants expertise from its different agency partners to work in a more business-centered fashion.

What’s stopping it all?

The tangential work streams the new process of briefing simultaneously may cause — as different players within IAT structures fight for dominance — may make many clients hesitate in embracing this new methodology too quickly. Ultimately, the onus will fall on strong clients, who are able to unify often siloed internal environments, to define very clear swim lanes to facilitate and guide agency collaboration.

Where do we go from here?

It’s unquestionable that the most successful campaigns will almost certainly only come about by media teams and creatives working closer than ever before — much like many creatives and social content practitioners have learned to do over the last decade.

Media teams, with new insights to increasingly complex mediums, will have to work closely with nimbler “maker creative” teams to not only share functional media details but also review learnings and media strategy. Ultimately allowing the creative team to consider a real time, performance driven perspective throughout the creative process.

It’s this dynamic mix of talents that will surely benefit clients’ businesses the most and allow brands and agencies to not only meet consumer’s expectations but exceed them.