Lions for media agencies recognise how far they’ve come

More than 10 years ago, it was O&M India that won the first Media Lion for India with their work for Kodak.

This year, Creativeland Asia has won a couple of metals for outdoor - another seemingly specialist area.

We're going to see more of this in the years to come - and the winner will be the media agencies.
I had breakfast two weeks ago with GroupM's Irwin Gotlieb. The conversation was about consumers, insights and targeting. Of course, words like data and analytics also featured, but were muted in comparison.

A few months ago, I spent considerable time with Mindshare's global head of invention, George Michaelides, and we spoke about consumers, insights, compelling ideas and measurable results - lots of words that I could so easily imagine featuring in conversations with strategic planners and creative heads.

It wasn't that long ago, after all, when the media's remit was to negotiate for time and space and to place ads (and plan, of course). The creative agency was the one with the ideas, the media agency's job was to get the consumer to consume the communication.

Back to Cannes and back to the BBDO India win for Gillette, for a campaign called 'Women against lazy stubble'. BBDO India chairman and national creative director, Josy Paul, assures me that a large part of the credit for the win goes to Mediacom. Without their contributions, he says, the idea would have remained smaller. Mediacom did a lot more than just buy time and space; they were sitting at a table with the client and the creative agency to see how, creatively, the media agency could amplify an already strong idea.

O&M India's Sumanto Chattopadhyay and his team had to sit with the managing director of The Economist India to understand how the internet worked and how SMS campaigns worked to arrive at the campaign that won them an Outdoor bronze at Cannes.

This cross functional knowledge, now a rarity, will become the norm. Media agencies have, perhaps forced by the necessity to be different, been coming up to speed on brands, on consumers, on PR and digital for some time. Most importantly, they have, by roping in talent like George Michaelides, been honing up on the strategic planning and ideas areas as well. So in the imminent and impending crossing of frontiers, I'm backing the media agencies. And in a couple of years, we'll hear of a Mindshare or a Mediacom winning a Film Lion. I'm not kidding.

This article was originally published in the 1 July 2010 issue of Media.