Commentary

Venice Festival: Next Question, Please!

VENICE--Believe it or not, the marketing industry is still debating the question of bundling versus unbundling our services. Monday afternoon at the Venice Festival of Media, two creative leaders, Chuck Porter and John Hegarty, spent a fair amount of time pondering the potential of bundling media back inside the creative agency. This morning (Tuesday), I sat on a panel of media CEOs and the very first question readdressed the top: "What can we do to resolve the bundling question once and for all?"

We solve it by retiring the question -- and the word -- entirely. I asked the audience to help me eliminate from our collective vocabulary the word "bundled" as it relates to our industry.

Bundling is a legacy concept that, for better or worse, is evoked in reference to some past era. Or, it is used as a way to somehow dictate where people should sit, who should own the client relationship or controls the P&L.

It's time to move on. More accurately, it's time to move forward. Last week at the IAA conference in Washington, a really smart Frenchman said: "Solutions for the future won't fit in the containers of the past." Indeed.

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In our search for integration, which our clients demand and deserve, we should stop debating an archaic concept. Instead, we can aggressively pursue new models of partnership, open architecture and any possible mash up required to deliver brilliant ideas and solutions to our clients. (Much like we have achieved through the Leo Burnett/Digitas/SMG collaborative model.)

All of us have to operate with an open-source mind-set and redirect all the energy we have expended in a philosophical arm wrestling match with creative agencies into issues that challenge us every day.

Curiously, in a question posed to the Venice audience before the panel started, the dilemma of the talent gap was decisively selected as the most pressing issue we face as an industry. Our clients want more strategic thinking, more actionable human insights, more digital innovation, more creative opportunities to leverage content. The list goes on. These broadening expectations require an ever-expanding scope of talent, and we have to get that right to preserve our ability to connect our clients' brands and messages to people. While this morning's panel returned to the talent topic, it received only about three or four minutes of comment.

Talent is a topic that deserves our passion, focus and attention. So let me make a proposal to all conference planners and panel moderators who will be tasked with selecting topics and content areas over the next several months. Let's re-purpose any time or energy that might otherwise be devoted to the question of rebundling media, and direct it into an imaginative exploration of how to better inspire our current talent. And how to entice tomorrow's talent to join our ranks.

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