• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, March 2, 2007

LAS VEGAS -- A bit of tension over the subject of unbundling media services was apparent Thursday during the opening remarks at the first general session of the American Association of Advertising Agencies Media Conference here. AAAA President-CEO O. Burtch Drake kicked off the session by expressing concerns over a wholesale view of unbundling, while Media Conference chair and GroupM North America CEO Marc Goldstein made an impassioned case for why unbundled media services should "control" the strategic planning process.

Acknowledging that "the toothpaste is out of the tube" in regard to unbundling, Drake pointed out that "there are a large number of AAAA agencies that do not unbundle their media and have no plans to do so. Just as there is no one method of agency compensation, there is no one model for structuring an advertising agency and a media operation. There's different strokes for different folks."

Drake said there's plenty of room in the marketplace for varied media services structures, some which have media being driven by unbundled media shops and others as part of a full-service or integrated approach.

Conceding that it is "sometimes a sensitive topic," Group M's Goldstein made a case that control over media should remain with dedicated media shops.

"At the end of the day, it's really a debate over who controls the strategy for the client--the media experts or the advertising agency experts," he asserted, adding that media agencies have earned that right by investing in the technology and research to "better understand the consumer, the impact digitization would have on traditional and evolving media, and the role of media and technologies in communications.

"Others before me have said this to this body, from this stage, and I say it with the same conviction: strategic planning is done best when it is done by the experts in the media practice. When it comes to the issue of control of the communications and media strategy, I personally don't believe that the genie can be put back in the bottle. We in media are the ones who have made the critical investments in research needed to master the blizzard of new communications options, and we are the ones who have invested in the research to track how effectively we are using these options on behalf of clients. We in media have developed the expertise and the understanding of the consumer to be better able to deploy these communications options in the service of our clients' brands."

Goldstein, who made this point as one of several challenges that the media services business would need to deal with in the next 12 months, went on to say that media agencies also needed to "collaborate" with creatives and to "stop arguing over control."

Other challenges flagged by Goldstein included the need for compromise over the issues surrounding the deployment of TV commercial ratings before the next upfront marketplace negotiations begin; the need for greater diversity in the advertising business and in attracting multicultural candidates to the media services business; the need for media agencies to expand their capabilities in creating original content; and the need to embrace paperless "Biz" systems for buying and selling media.