With the recession still hanging over the region’s advertising and marketing industry, it would have been understandable if a negative mood permeated proceedings at the first AME Festival.Instead,both delegates and speakers engaged in a lively discussion of how the industry is realigning itself in the face of some of the biggest challenges it has ever faced.
What came out of much of the twoday event was the urgent need for a new business paradigm that would address the rapid changes in sector,both in terms of the economic downturn and new consumption models.
Speaking at one of the AME Festival breakout sessions, Omnicom Media Group’s Asia-Pacific CEO Barry Cupples pulled no punches in his summation of the current marketing environment:“ The business model is broken.
We need to be provocative about how we are going to deal with that.”
Recession as opportunity
Unsurprisingly, the downturn was seen to be at the heart of many of the challenges the industry is facing. With clients searching for better returns on reduced budgets,it is up to agencies to deliver — and that could mean a wholesale reassessment of how they do business. “This is a recession we have never seen before,” said OMG’s Cupples. “But this is also a world we have never seen before, with con-sumers we have never seen before.”
Addressing the thorny topic of shrinking budgets, Cupples pointed out that it was the responsibility of agencies to make this work. “You don’t have to spend more, you just have to be wiser with how you spend it,”he said.
Like many at the festival, Nick Brien of Mediabrands said the economic downturn had made it imperative for the agency model to move out of its comfort zone and engage with talent outside of the traditional marketing
framework.“This recessionary environment is a fundamental gamechanger,’ he said.
Agencies should see themselves more as CJs — content jockeys — he added, brandishing his point with a request to the audience:“Let’s mix it!”
This collaborative thinking was echoed by a number of those on the client side. For instance, Sanjay Behl, group head, brand and marketing, at Reliance Communications, said the economic climate was having a major
effect on marketing partnerships.“The recession is an opportunity to sleep with some strange bedfellows,”he said.
The design element
Whether necessitated by the recession or not, collaboration was a major theme of the two days.However, one of the most vibrant discussions on the topic came not from an agency head, but from a design specialist — Dick Powell, founding partner of design consultancy Seymourpowell.
Powell emphasised the need for closer partnerships between marketing and design industry professionals, referring to a lack of effectiveness between the two sectors,which often fail to understand the importance of consumer behaviour over technology.
“There’s often a push-pull where marketing and technical teams work together,”he said.“Left to our own devices, we tend to work without a clear, consumer-led vision.To be effectively creative, we need to think differently and accept that anthropology comes before technology.”
Powell argued that many manufacturers, while attracted to the concept of innovation, rarely capitalised on opportunities to introduce truly innovative products to the market.“Most businesses are like giant jellies. They
get terribly excited by innovation, shake around a lot,then go back to operating in exactly the same way they did before.”
Powell’s parting shot to the audience was the advice that agencies should fill the gap in their offering by establishing designated product design facilities. “The process of creative thinking is the same, regardless of discipline. The product should be developed with ad agencies,rather than separately.That’s the best way of doing it.”
Client agency
Tempestuous at the best of times, the client-agency relationship is rarely framed in romantic terms. However, for the speakers on the panel of the AME Debate, talk revolved around notions of marriage,loyalty and fidelity, while even speed dating and bedhopping were mentioned as possibl frameworks for future cooperation models.
Keith Smith,president,international, at TBWA Group, began with a reasonably conciliatory statement, saying that agencies produce the most effective work when working in concert with the client.“The closer we can work together, the more we can share the issues, the better the work and the better the accountability at the end of the day,”he said.
Smith emphasised the need for trust in the realationship.“If the marriage is right, then it should be a long-term marriage,”he added.
Rahul Welde,vice-president,media, at Unilever Asia, Africa, Middle East and Turkey, agreed — but only to a point.“We should be seeking to make relationships stronger,”he said,before adding that longevity was not the only factor in making a partnership work.
According to Welde,it no longer matters so much who the partner is,or how long the two sides have worked together, as long as the relationship achieves the desired results for the brand.
Unsurprisingly, the agencies fired back, saying that such short-term thinking breeds uncertainty, which does not lend the right atmosphere for the best creative work. Instead,Smith proposed that agencies widen their talent base and bring in more non-traditional creatives. Welde was unrepentant, however, saying that the client-agency partnership, should be “more like an amoeba” with the best way forward being a situation where
the two sides can continually transform the nature of the relationship.
Digital futures
Any discussion of new business models in the marketing industry would mean nothing without opening the floor open to a debate around digital media. Keynote speaker Dr. Jeffrey Cole,director of the University of California Annenberg School for Communication, kicked the discussion off by analysing the impact that technology is having on media consumption.
Cole pointed out that in the US, which is an indicator of the trend globally, the average consumer spends US$260 a month on communications such as broadband and mobile that did not exist a generation ago. Even the poorest citizens are spending $180.“Broadband in the last year has moved from a luxury for some to a necessity for all,”he noted.
But the increasingly digtal consumer does not mean the end of traditional media. As an example, Cole noted that as television gained popularity, radio adapted to the changing environment and learned to coexist with another major media. Likewise, TV will continue to be the major holder of advertising budgets because the majority of consumers still like the TV viewing experience. Speaking on the Digital Panel, Gary Wang, founder and CEO of online video sharing website Tudou.com, said he saw a similar situation in China, where TV is still widely in use due to the simplicity of measuring effectiveness and reach.
But for digital, the most pressing question is one of payment and it is here that Cole saw the most optimism. “People in the digital world are saying ‘I am now willing to make the same deal with digital as I did with TV’ and accept advertising for free content.”
AME CASE STUDY TUDOU
Gary Wang, founder and CEO of Tudou, took to the AME stage to remind industry players that 2009 would be a crucial year for video advertising platforms in China,with the sector expected to triple, or more. “After US$85 million of funding for Tudou,we can finally see growth,” he said. Maybe because of the economic crisis, we see advertisers seriously moving budgets on to online video, a very encouraging sign.” Driving this shift is online video’s audience demographics. According to Wang, the audience for traditional broadcast television are middle age women and people over 60. In contrast, the online video business is driven by 18 to 25 year-olds in China’s first- and second-tier cities. However, he added that the industry would need “at least six to nine more months before the people in China can detect that this [platform] works.”
But while online video in China may be on the up,Wang had a warning for any potential predators out there:Tudou is not up for grabs.Wang said that even if the company wanted to engage with wealthy suitors, China’s tough regulations on media ownership mean a bidding war is out of the question.
AME CASE STUDY TOURISM AUSTRALIA
As the incoming executive general manager, marketing , at Tourism Australia, Nick Baker had just taken the reigns at a national tourism board whose last campaign was received so badly that even the country’s Prime Minister felt compelled to speak out against it. But rather than adopting a low-profile response, Baker took a risk and teamed up with renowned director Baz Luhrmann to build a marketing push around the movie Australia.
The US$32 million campaign highlighted the idea of transformation, a key theme of the movie.TVCs, directed by Luhrmann, used elements from the movie to show how visitors could transform their lives through the Australia experience.The campaign utilised a strong social media component, including a Facebook page that has in excess of 250,000 members. Even the movie’s less than spectacular commercial and critical success did not dishearten Baker. “It is a nice feeling to know that 23 million people have paid to watch a very long-form version of your ad,” he said.
AME PLATINUM WINNER
Yellow Treehouse
Aim Proximity and Colenso BBDO were briefed to make New Zealanders reconsider the Yellow Pages as a relevant, contemporary brand.The agency challenged an Auckland resident to build a restaurant halfway up a redwood pine tree using nothing but contacts from the Yellow Pages book, website and mobile application.
The results were unprecedented.The ‘Yellow Treehouse’ was featured on over 200,000 websites globally and in the pages of over 80 magazines. It was reviewed on TV and in print.With a media spend of just NZ$400,000 (US$210,000) the campaign reached 55 per cent of the country’s population.
What drove awareness was the conversations around this idea,” said James Hurman, planning director,New Zealand, at Colenso BBDO. For the AME judging panel, the essence of the Yellow campaign was even more basic.”They took the product — a product that in many ways was dead — and brought it back to life,” said DDB CEO John Ziegler. “It is a great campaign that shows just how simple the real opportunities to change our client’s business are.
See the full list of AME winners at www.media.asia
What came out of much of the twoday event was the urgent need for a new business paradigm that would address the rapid changes in sector,both in terms of the economic downturn and new consumption models.
Speaking at one of the AME Festival breakout sessions, Omnicom Media Group’s Asia-Pacific CEO Barry Cupples pulled no punches in his summation of the current marketing environment:“ The business model is broken.
We need to be provocative about how we are going to deal with that.”
Recession as opportunity
Unsurprisingly, the downturn was seen to be at the heart of many of the challenges the industry is facing. With clients searching for better returns on reduced budgets,it is up to agencies to deliver — and that could mean a wholesale reassessment of how they do business. “This is a recession we have never seen before,” said OMG’s Cupples. “But this is also a world we have never seen before, with con-sumers we have never seen before.”
Addressing the thorny topic of shrinking budgets, Cupples pointed out that it was the responsibility of agencies to make this work. “You don’t have to spend more, you just have to be wiser with how you spend it,”he said.
Like many at the festival, Nick Brien of Mediabrands said the economic downturn had made it imperative for the agency model to move out of its comfort zone and engage with talent outside of the traditional marketing
framework.“This recessionary environment is a fundamental gamechanger,’ he said.
Agencies should see themselves more as CJs — content jockeys — he added, brandishing his point with a request to the audience:“Let’s mix it!”
This collaborative thinking was echoed by a number of those on the client side. For instance, Sanjay Behl, group head, brand and marketing, at Reliance Communications, said the economic climate was having a major
effect on marketing partnerships.“The recession is an opportunity to sleep with some strange bedfellows,”he said.
The design element
Whether necessitated by the recession or not, collaboration was a major theme of the two days.However, one of the most vibrant discussions on the topic came not from an agency head, but from a design specialist — Dick Powell, founding partner of design consultancy Seymourpowell.
Powell emphasised the need for closer partnerships between marketing and design industry professionals, referring to a lack of effectiveness between the two sectors,which often fail to understand the importance of consumer behaviour over technology.
“There’s often a push-pull where marketing and technical teams work together,”he said.“Left to our own devices, we tend to work without a clear, consumer-led vision.To be effectively creative, we need to think differently and accept that anthropology comes before technology.”
Powell argued that many manufacturers, while attracted to the concept of innovation, rarely capitalised on opportunities to introduce truly innovative products to the market.“Most businesses are like giant jellies. They
get terribly excited by innovation, shake around a lot,then go back to operating in exactly the same way they did before.”
Powell’s parting shot to the audience was the advice that agencies should fill the gap in their offering by establishing designated product design facilities. “The process of creative thinking is the same, regardless of discipline. The product should be developed with ad agencies,rather than separately.That’s the best way of doing it.”
Client agency
Tempestuous at the best of times, the client-agency relationship is rarely framed in romantic terms. However, for the speakers on the panel of the AME Debate, talk revolved around notions of marriage,loyalty and fidelity, while even speed dating and bedhopping were mentioned as possibl frameworks for future cooperation models.
Keith Smith,president,international, at TBWA Group, began with a reasonably conciliatory statement, saying that agencies produce the most effective work when working in concert with the client.“The closer we can work together, the more we can share the issues, the better the work and the better the accountability at the end of the day,”he said.
Smith emphasised the need for trust in the realationship.“If the marriage is right, then it should be a long-term marriage,”he added.
Rahul Welde,vice-president,media, at Unilever Asia, Africa, Middle East and Turkey, agreed — but only to a point.“We should be seeking to make relationships stronger,”he said,before adding that longevity was not the only factor in making a partnership work.
According to Welde,it no longer matters so much who the partner is,or how long the two sides have worked together, as long as the relationship achieves the desired results for the brand.
Unsurprisingly, the agencies fired back, saying that such short-term thinking breeds uncertainty, which does not lend the right atmosphere for the best creative work. Instead,Smith proposed that agencies widen their talent base and bring in more non-traditional creatives. Welde was unrepentant, however, saying that the client-agency partnership, should be “more like an amoeba” with the best way forward being a situation where
the two sides can continually transform the nature of the relationship.
Digital futures
Any discussion of new business models in the marketing industry would mean nothing without opening the floor open to a debate around digital media. Keynote speaker Dr. Jeffrey Cole,director of the University of California Annenberg School for Communication, kicked the discussion off by analysing the impact that technology is having on media consumption.
Cole pointed out that in the US, which is an indicator of the trend globally, the average consumer spends US$260 a month on communications such as broadband and mobile that did not exist a generation ago. Even the poorest citizens are spending $180.“Broadband in the last year has moved from a luxury for some to a necessity for all,”he noted.
But the increasingly digtal consumer does not mean the end of traditional media. As an example, Cole noted that as television gained popularity, radio adapted to the changing environment and learned to coexist with another major media. Likewise, TV will continue to be the major holder of advertising budgets because the majority of consumers still like the TV viewing experience. Speaking on the Digital Panel, Gary Wang, founder and CEO of online video sharing website Tudou.com, said he saw a similar situation in China, where TV is still widely in use due to the simplicity of measuring effectiveness and reach.
But for digital, the most pressing question is one of payment and it is here that Cole saw the most optimism. “People in the digital world are saying ‘I am now willing to make the same deal with digital as I did with TV’ and accept advertising for free content.”
AME CASE STUDY TUDOU
Gary Wang, founder and CEO of Tudou, took to the AME stage to remind industry players that 2009 would be a crucial year for video advertising platforms in China,with the sector expected to triple, or more. “After US$85 million of funding for Tudou,we can finally see growth,” he said. Maybe because of the economic crisis, we see advertisers seriously moving budgets on to online video, a very encouraging sign.” Driving this shift is online video’s audience demographics. According to Wang, the audience for traditional broadcast television are middle age women and people over 60. In contrast, the online video business is driven by 18 to 25 year-olds in China’s first- and second-tier cities. However, he added that the industry would need “at least six to nine more months before the people in China can detect that this [platform] works.”
But while online video in China may be on the up,Wang had a warning for any potential predators out there:Tudou is not up for grabs.Wang said that even if the company wanted to engage with wealthy suitors, China’s tough regulations on media ownership mean a bidding war is out of the question.
AME CASE STUDY TOURISM AUSTRALIA
As the incoming executive general manager, marketing , at Tourism Australia, Nick Baker had just taken the reigns at a national tourism board whose last campaign was received so badly that even the country’s Prime Minister felt compelled to speak out against it. But rather than adopting a low-profile response, Baker took a risk and teamed up with renowned director Baz Luhrmann to build a marketing push around the movie Australia.
The US$32 million campaign highlighted the idea of transformation, a key theme of the movie.TVCs, directed by Luhrmann, used elements from the movie to show how visitors could transform their lives through the Australia experience.The campaign utilised a strong social media component, including a Facebook page that has in excess of 250,000 members. Even the movie’s less than spectacular commercial and critical success did not dishearten Baker. “It is a nice feeling to know that 23 million people have paid to watch a very long-form version of your ad,” he said.
AME PLATINUM WINNER
Yellow Treehouse
Aim Proximity and Colenso BBDO were briefed to make New Zealanders reconsider the Yellow Pages as a relevant, contemporary brand.The agency challenged an Auckland resident to build a restaurant halfway up a redwood pine tree using nothing but contacts from the Yellow Pages book, website and mobile application.
The results were unprecedented.The ‘Yellow Treehouse’ was featured on over 200,000 websites globally and in the pages of over 80 magazines. It was reviewed on TV and in print.With a media spend of just NZ$400,000 (US$210,000) the campaign reached 55 per cent of the country’s population.
What drove awareness was the conversations around this idea,” said James Hurman, planning director,New Zealand, at Colenso BBDO. For the AME judging panel, the essence of the Yellow campaign was even more basic.”They took the product — a product that in many ways was dead — and brought it back to life,” said DDB CEO John Ziegler. “It is a great campaign that shows just how simple the real opportunities to change our client’s business are.
See the full list of AME winners at www.media.asia