• by Erik Sass  @eriksass1, March 22, 2006

Media and brand agencies are lagging behind other players when it comes to embracing "engagement," Joe Plummer, chief research officer of the Advertising Research Foundation, told MediaDailyNews Tuesday in an interview following the release of an ad industry definition for engagement -- "turning on a prospect to a brand idea enhanced by the surrounding context" -- during to the ARF's annual conference.

"The agencies are struggling the most," said Plummer, a top resarcher at some of Madison Avenue's biggest agencies before joining the ARF about a year ago. He conceded: "I don't have a lock on this."

Plummer recognized the irony of this situation, saying: "It's interesting because in a way [aencies are] the most creative in their sense of the business." But the evidence speaks for itself, he said, as all other industry sectors seem to be moving ahead with engagement: "The media--especially the media companies that have multiple platforms--and the advertisers are really pushing this. Some of the most conservative advertisers are pushing this."

Here, Plummer cited examples like auto giant General Motors Corp.

"They're used to sitting there and pushing two or three buttons, and now they're sitting there in Detroit pushing two or three buttons and it's not working."

So what's going on? For one thing, the creative departments of ad agencies are burdened with both horizontal and vertical barriers to institutional change, with divisions of labor overlaid on rigid hierarchies, Plummer said: "There's a social class mentality... inside ad agencies that is totally unhealthy. The superstars are the ones who create TV ads; the idiots are the ones who create a new package, or an event."

Zooming out a bit to look at agencies in their entirety, Plummer also said segregating creative duties into a single department was a mistake: "The worst thing that happened to the advertising business was the creation of a creative department." The distance resulting from this separation, Plummer went on, is a main cause of agencies' inflexibility.

"Except for the people in charge, everyone has a little part, and it's really difficult to see how your part relates to everybody else's part."

Beyond these structural factors, however, Plummer blamed complacency. "They've had an enormously successful business model, working around mass TV. It was unbelievably efficient and profitable... now, they're not stupid--they see where things are going... they know they need to change but they also know 'we make 85 percent of our money in television.'"