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YES |
MAYBE |
YES |
| BRIAN STOLLER Digital lead, MindShare Asia-Pacific |
JASON KUPERMAN Vice-president, digital development, Omnicom Group |
MARK CRIPPS Regional digital director, McCann WorldGroup |
| “The best campaigns not only integrate digital components; they utilise digital to create a two-way dialogue with consumers, either through response mechanisms or audience-monitoring elements. These campaigns learn from themselves, allowing both creative and media to adapt rapidly to the shifting market perceptions the advertising can create. To provide the best strategies as well as financial economies of scale for clients, agencies should have integrated years ago. As behaviours, not GRPs (gross rating points), are becoming the media currency of the future, integrating digital now is a necessity to stay on top of the market.” |
“While theoretically a single agency should be able to service all the integrated needs of a client, both digital and non-digital, there are often practical realities that can make this approach tricky. It is undeniable that digital should be a part of every agency’s business and that every agency must be able to have basic conversations with their clients about digital. However, this does not automatically mean that every agency organisation is ready to integrate its digital groups operationally. It means that the heads of the ‘traditional’ agencies need to be diligent and smart about the way they work together with their digital specialist partners to service a client’s needs – including sometimes letting digital partners drive the strategic (and budget) conversations. The ultimate goal is to deliver best-in-class services, and each agency should be honest with itself about what path it needs to take to do that in the digital space. It will depend on the agency’s digital talent depth and the make-up of its client business.” |
“Regardless of marketing discipline, migration to digital is inexorable and we need to be prepared for that. That’s why McCann Worldgroup established a global task force with regional digital directors to guide online marketing so it becomes an integrated part of our service mix. But does integration mean the death of specialist digital agencies? The answer to that is a strong ‘no’. Clients will still demand to work with digital specialists. And specialist talent (in digital as elsewhere) will want to sit with likeminded folks. Because of this, individual specialised agency disciplines and brands should be encouraged to flourish to the extent that they become the leading agency in each market. For those clients who want an integrated approach, the individual disciplines become ‘invisible’ and work together in a joined-up way under a single umbrella group. For those who want specialist digital advice, the specialist digital agency is still there.” |
Is it time to integrate digital?
MindShare and McCann Sydney both recently announced that they were merging their digital operations into traditional agency structures. Is it time for agencies to stop treating online marketing as a standalone discipline?
