• by Tom Hespos , November 12, 2002

Everyone who reads my column regularly knows that I will take an occasional pot shot at large agencies. It’s not a bias. I just dislike the fact that many large agencies seem to be trying to turn interactive media into a commodity. Although many large agencies haven’t yet figured out the magic formula that will allow them to make money by planning and buying interactive media, there are quite a few other things that they do very well. One of these things is training.

Many big agencies have very formal and very intensive training programs that they require their planners and buyers to participate in. Usually, it takes the form of a class that holds weekly or bi-weekly meetings for about three or four months. Over this period of time, rookie planners and buyers learn all about the media basics. Often, they’re given a product from the agency’s account roster, and they have to develop a communications plan for the product by the end of the course.

“Media School,” as it was called at Young & Rubicam, was one of the most exciting experiences I had at during my tenure at that agency. Many of the higher-ups in media at the agency participated by writing entire sections of the course and presenting at our weekly meetings. My supervisor was in charge of the section on media math, and she developed a great little deck that explained the basics, as well as a short quiz for the class. Other folks at the agency contributed sections on various media vehicles, basic media concepts, how to do a post-buy analysis and other such topics. You could see that Y&R was committed to training its people well, because so many different experienced people participated in Media School, and because everyone who came into the media department at the entry level was required to attend, whether they were a planner or a buyer.

My younger sister works at Universal McCann, and she is just starting to get into their media training program, which means she’s expected to not only keep current with her workload on her account, but also to attend and complete the training course. This means a lot of long days at the office. When she told me she was in the training program, I smiled and let her know that it was going to be one of the most challenging things she does at her job, as well as one of the most rewarding.

Why am I talking about training this week? Mainly because the separation between interactive and traditional media still exists, and we still have a lot of people in the interactive industry that can’t tell you definitively what a GRP is, how to calculate a BDI or how Nielsen develops its ratings for television.

This is nothing to be ashamed of. Heck, I often pick up my copy of my old Media School training material whenever I forget something. But there are a lot of interactive planners out there who don’t know this stuff, and I think it would be a good idea if they invested the few days it would take to get up to speed on traditional media concepts.

After all, a lot of the debates that are currently going on in this space are related to traditional media in some way. Integration of metrics, bringing GRPs to the web, updating research methodology and audience-based buying and selling are all debates that probably wouldn’t be on the agenda if traditional media didn’t have some influence over interactive.

If you are running the media department at an interactive shop, you might want to take a quick look at the arsenal of traditional media knowledge within your department. Over the coming months and years, your people are going to need to be able to speak two languages. If they’re fluent in only one, it might make sense to start investing in some training.