[Video] Graham Warsop tackles so-called Agency ‘Integration’
Jessica Hubbard, Deputy Editor; 13 November 15
Today’s marketing and advertising professionals are faced with rapidly evolving technology platforms, shrinking budgets, and a reshuffling of the entire client/agency relationship…amongst other challenges. We interviewed Graham Warsop – Founder and Chairman of the Jupiter Drawing Room – at the Johannesburg IMC Conference, to unpack some of these challenges and how best to tackle them.
“I think one of the biggest challenges that marketers face is how you make sense of the landscape that’s out there at the moment,” says Warsop. “Ten years ago, you basically had a selection of above-the-line media to put your money in and decide how you’re going to allocate it across those channels.”
When trawling the Internet in preparation for a presentation, Warsop says he found the traditional four Ps of marketing, but when he dug a bit deeper he discovered a further 16 Ps – showing just how diverse marketing has become in terms of disciplines and channels.
He adds: “So a marketer today must put a tremendous amount of energy and effort into finding a way to bring those disciplines together – because when you have a consistent message and your brand touchpoints all give the same tonality, the same personality, the same brand character, your money works infinitely harder.”
Warsop points out that ‘collaboration’ often means that you have little choice around who you work with.
“The client will say ‘I need you to talk to my internal communications company or my PR company, or even my digital agency’. So the trick is, if you’re the lead agency, you normally have the responsibility of coming up with the big idea, which is then supposed to cascade down [to all other agencies, disciplines, platforms and channels].”
He adds: “And in my experience the way that you make it work is you bring all of the partners on that journey with you, so that they don’t feel that they’ve just been given something to execute, they feel that they, at every stage of the journey, have input. If they come up with a better idea, it’s on the table and we go with it.”
Warsop explains the importance of having everyone buy into the concept from inception to completion, particularly when they go through each milestone. “I think that helps to allay the sensitivity around ‘well it’s the ad agency telling us what we should be doing’.”
When explaining the analogy behind the Cradle of Humankind idea, Warsop says that the focus was all about a higher form of integration, since there is a wrestle to integrate the communications discipline, particularly traditional and digital.
“My point there,” he says, “is does the world really need another standalone digital agency or a standalone ad agency?… and the answer is clearly no. So there’s the wrestling of the advertising disciplines, but what about the marketing disciplines? What happens if you put a shopper marketing company with a TNS type research company, or Group M and a media company, around the same table with your advertising communications agency?”
Graham Warsop, integration, IMC
He maintains that your focus will then shift to the business side of solutions rather than the communications side of the solution.
“And when we’ve tried it and when we’ve used it, it really has been tremendously inspiring because people that you normally don’t really work with make such fantastic contributions to the conversation,” he adds.
“When we talk about the challenge of integration, you can’t divorce it from the necessity of having something really strong and powerful to integrate, because integrating rubbish – there’s no point, why would you? In fact, it would probably work against you more than if you didn’t integrate it.”
He explains that every discussion around integration has to involve quality of content – and quality of work.
“My point is you need to choose a partner who is absolutely committed, whether it’s a traditional channel, like for example the Unilever brief we got for OMO Skip which produced the ‘Oo eh eh slap slap’ campaign that went viral – it was tremendous.”
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