FOCUS - CREATIVITY IN MEDIA: Media solutions give topspin to traditional ad campaigns

Okay, let's forget about the Internet. No, really. Let's pretend it never happened, or that it is, in fact, not a medium at all. What that leaves us with are the stalwarts of "old", traditional media - print, television, radio and magazines - as well as familiar friends such as POS and outdoor. Unfortunately, even if we were to eliminate the Internet, the job of the media planner does not get any easier. In fact, there is no such thing any longer as a "media planner". No, what we have today are "communication planners" - highly skilled, highly talented, highly focused and highly stressed. And sorry, media is no longer media - these days, we talk about "contact points". When "old" media first started its massive fragmentation about a decade or so ago in Asia, it happened at a time when research companies discovered that the average consumer had a growing amount of disposable income. This was the good news. The bad news (at least for marketers and their agencies) was that there was a corresponding drop in the amount of leisure time. In other words, the more people had to spend, the less time they had to spend it in ... or at least, the less time they had to listen to advertisers trying to tell them where to spend it. And so began the immense effort to find new and interesting ways to arrest a consumer's limited attention span. What had happened was no less than fundamental, tectonic change - the balance of power had shifted from the seller to the buyer. "Choice lies with consumers today, and it is an extremely powerful thing," said Starcom Greater China MD Andre Nair. "A lot of the problem lies with technology; it has made life more stressful. Let's face it, if we wanted more leisure time, we'd invent machines which were less efficient." The bottom line is that media solutions must make more strategic sense than ever, and the creative twist matters most of all. "However, it cannot be creativity just for creativity's sake," Mr Nair warned. "Any media idea today demands synergy between the medium and the communication message." Hence, most communication plans today include more than a simple media buy. The straightforward print/TV scenario still plays a major role, of course, but it tends to be complemented by a range of other options. These include innovation in existing media, new uses of POS, novel ways of penetrating the target audience's lives, the media stunt, or even a truly new medium. Take for example, the "filler" TV programmes put together by Whiskas for China. Ranging in length from one to five minutes, these fillers consisted of a series of footage clips of cats at play and interacting with their human owners. The only ID which Whiskas placed on the fillers was a simple logo at the beginning and end of the fillers, which were offered free-of-charge to television stations across the mainland. Those spots are now airing on more than 50 networks nationwide, giving Whiskas valuable - and best of all, free - promotional airtime. The aim was not to promote Whiskas catfood itself, but to promote the ownership of cats in China, where pet ownership as a whole is miniscule. Whiskas' logic, therefore, was that if they could get more people to own cats, these people would then buy more Whiskas. And the TV stations went for it because they are desperate for content, and were happy to exchange what would otherwise have been dead airtime in return for some colourful, uplifting, non-controversial programming. Other examples cited by Mr Nair include the Kit Kat benches in Beijing parks and at Hong Kong bus stops; and the Speed Post posters stuck on the inner and outer doors of lifts in prime office buildings in Hong Kong. And then there's Real Me, a new magazine recently launched in China with Redwood playing the role of publishing consultant and P&G an advisory consultant at initial stages of the project. Aimed at women, the magazine was started up to provide P&G with a quality medium for its advertising. However, beyond what Mr Nair described as "subtle communications messages within the editorial", Real Me is not exclusively a P&G vehicle. It accepts advertising from direct P&G competitors, for one thing; but the flipside of this is that Real Me's subscriber base now forms a brand new database of several hundred thousand women who are prime targets for one-on-one communications with P&G. "Media solutions such as these can be effective in isolation and with smaller budgets," but they are usually a component of bigger, broader, traditional media campaigns," said Mr Nair. "It is these 'extras' which offer the main campaign topspin."

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