Articles
Unbundling! A Most Important Trend In Advertising/Media Management
What is it?
The increasing trend among clients searching for an advertising agency today is to look for a creative agency and a separate media agency. Major national advertisiers from Burger King to Chrysler to General Electric and regional accounts from McDonald's to auto dealer groups to colleges and universities have determined that the unbundled approach delivers the best media service and effectiveness.
While cost-cutting and media savings are most often noted as motivation for unbundling, we believe the real issues behind these changes are strategic; i.e., finding the best media talent and ensuring that it is focused on your own business.
Advertising agencies have devalued the meda service function for the past decade, cutting back on media personnel and resources to maintain agency margins in the face of flat media billings resulting from low inflation in media prices and client pressures on agency compensation.
At the same time, it is no secret that the world of media is becoming increasingly complex and challenging. Mastering all of the new media options to position your advertising above media fragmentation, noice and clutter may be the biggest single challenge in advertising today. It is apparent that many quite competent ad campaigns have not been productive because of the flawed media strategies. Increasingly, advertisers agree and are seeking the best strategic meda talent they can find to attend to their business.
Ad agencies dominated by creative, account management and financial specialists often do not see this increased importance of media strategy in the overall advertisting equation. Media agencies, focused on media only, know full well that their strategies must enable the ad messages to break through media noise and clutter or they will quickly become unemployed. They devote the manpower, research and data resources needed to achieve top performance.