One of the issues I’ve been wrestling with the past few weeks is getting our media team connected with the creative team on a project that’s still a few months from fruition.
It’s essentially a chicken & egg issue — we’re not ready to commit money to media buys, but we need approved creative. The creative is dependent on a budget, and I don’t want the team to produce work that will get axed if we find out we find out we don’t have the budget to actually run the work.
With all this rattling around in my head, I’ve been looking at ads—specifically mobile ads (although it’s not what we’re developing)—through the lens of what happens when media buyers and creative teams work well together and what happens when they don’t.
Examples: Zyrtec vs Cartier
Click on a screen below for the play-by-play…
What did we learn here today?
To be fair, trying to find the Cartier ad a second time proved to be a challenge. They didn’t seem to devote much of their budget to actually running the ad (although the fault could lie with the app). Once I did find it again though, I found ways to view their site outside of the app.
The Zyrtec ad isn’t as engaging, but it’s there every time I fire up The Weather Channel app. But no matter how many times I see the their ad, they’ve effectively thrown their money out the window because I can’t do anything with their offer… it’s a dead end. A good media buy and a good creative execution fall apart because the teams (seemingly) didn’t communicate. Had the media team understood the medium, they could have tasked the creative team with developing a web page specifically for this campaign, allowing the audience to receive the PDF via email or find a nearby store where they can buy the product.
I’m not sure how to wrap this all up other than to say that media buyers and creatives should be working together as early in the process as possible and the more communication that takes place, the better. I’d love to hear thoughts from both creatives and media buyers on the challenges they face working with each other.
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2 comments... read them below or add one
Media and creative have to work together as a team if you want to do truly effective work. Take for example the Mini campaign in which the car drove around the margins of the page – or the ad in Rolling Stone where the Mini zig-zagged through the staples. Something like that simply doesn’t happen without media and creative working together.
A far more pedestrian example would be a campaign I helped develop for American Speedy Printing Centers (yeah, not nearly as glamorous, but…) we were tasked with doing a series of ads in a franchise selection catalog. We didn’t place the ads in the “printing franchise” section – we placed them in other franchise sections identifying the benefits of printing franchises instead. Not over-the-top, but it was effective.
The key was not only the media and creative being involved at the outset – but also a clearly defined target market and objective. Without a clear target, media can’t identify unique media opportunities that effectively target the prime audience – and the creative can’t craft an effective message.
Point is, it takes all disciplines working together to do good work. Surprisingly, it also makes it a hell of a lot easier, as well.
Excellent post, Kyle. This is one we could build on for months.
Over the years, I’ve found my media dept. colleagues to be the ones who know what the media world is up to. Not just what kinds of things are being done in which media, but which mags/stations/papers are looking to do something new or are about to try something that our audience will like – so how we can partner in that effort and leverage it to our clinet’s advantage. Their insight into the details of that world can really spark creative executional ideas that make the entire campaign much more resonant with the audience.
Too often, they’re simply viewed as buyers of space and time rather than partners in the process, much to our clients’ loss.