Excellent line up of speakers at the Westminster e-forum on Wednesday including Robin Wight, Alex Wright from Agency.com, Paul Edwards from Publicis, Michael Nutley from New Media Age, and Matt Nicholls from Grand Union. Too many good things to write about in one post.
Robin talked a lot about integration, citing the morphing of WCRS into The Engine group as an example of how they’re adapting to the changing environment. ‘Consumers are already fully integrated’ he said, ‘it’s the rest of us who are trying to catch up’.
He put up a model for how he saw offline/online integration working in the future (apologies to Robin for the second rate rip off but it’s just to illustrate my point)
Curious how one dimensional this model is. It’s not about offline media and online, it’s about TV and online. It completely ignores the role of other media – hardly integrated or (dareIsayit) media neutral. Almost seemed like this was a justification for why his agency should carry on producing expensive TV ads, only they’d be 60 second ‘blockbusters’ and 10 second ‘shorts’ instead of 30 second spots. Oh and then they’d also be producing audio visual web virals to complement these, the example he used being the (admittedly good) short film they’d produced for 118 118 as a rip off of the W & K Honda sound epic which was downloaded 2m times and passed on to an estimated 3m more ‘for zero media spend’ (but no doubt a production budget some way beyond zero).
On the plus side, he had some good points about the need to combine awareness building messages processed through the cognitive mind with those more emotional connections established through advertising that ‘engaged’. Together they fuse to acquisition. Another example came from the recent Sky activity for 24 which, whilst targeted at hardcore 24 fans has managed to galvanise 1 in 15 of 24’s 800,000 typical audience into following a convoluted web, mobile and text based trail.
Personally, I would have liked to hear more of his thoughts on the creative challenges of the web. The role of agencies like his in creating properties and brand ideas that are attractive, usable, mutable, easily propagated. But I guess he wasn’t strictly asked to do that. More later…
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