Some thoughts from Paul Cowan
Engaging with integration: a prognosis for our industry
Paul Cowan, Communications Director & Managing Partner, Clever Media
I am not alone in believing that we are in the first phase of a communication revolution which will ultimately have an impact on every dimension of our society as profound as the industrial revolution.
The difficulty we all face is to find the space and time in the maelstrom of simply reacting to the challenges our changing environment creates; to see the opportunity and to recognize the imperatives that we as an industry must respond to in order to shape the revolution, rather than just have it happen to us.
The proliferation of media, the lowering of technical barriers to entry and the changing face of how people ‘consume’ communication all force a reassessment of how messages are communicated that the communications industry as a whole is scrambling to respond to.
It is the reassessment of media that provides our particular industry with its most significant opportunity. In order to fully exploit it we will need to collectively rise to the occasion and think differently about what we do and the way we do it.
The strategic high ground (although their paranoia over everyone from brand designers to management consultants prevents them from appreciating it as such) enjoyed by advertising and direct marketing agencies is shifting under their feet and the reverberations will extend way beyond ATL communication and into any and every channel.
The reason is simple. The old assumption that at least 50p in the marketing pound gets spent on advertising (the chief reason for the inflated multipliers that ad agencies manage to sell themselves for) is being overthrown. The response is for these traditional agencies to busily add in live event, digital, film and design capabilities to their core offer, to create something integrated.
They are worried and so they should be. Media that has previously been nothing more than peripheral is suddenly part of a huge strategic reassessment that will define how the communication revolution will play out. The challenge to marketing spend will be mirrored across the full spectrum of communicators and channels through B2B into internal comms and beyond.
Our opportunity is to seize the strategic high ground. Our imperative is to redefine our thinking and behaviour as an industry to give us all the opportunity to do so.
People are bombarded by more messages than ever before; whilst increasing sophistication and the emergence of an expectation of being a participant not just an audience, sets the dynamic away from traditional broadcast model communicators (ads, network TV, direct marketing) who ‘send’ messages and towards the communicators who deal in and understand engagement.
Yep, stand up at the back of the class; our time has come! However, the shift we have to effect is important and challenging. We need to rise above discipline-specific definitions of what we supply.
If all we have is a hammer then everything looks like a nail, we have a video/live event/website to provide - what is the question? Our need to make a sale in a non retainer, project-led industry is understandable but if not readjusted will prevent us ever becoming communication architects and forever cast us as painters and decorators.
When some people talk integration they don’t mean engagement; they haven’t shifted mindset, rather just broadened the sales pitch. One original specialism is adapted to accommodate other tacked-on disciplines to send more messages.
The concept of ‘Integration’ is only given power through engagement, whether through interactivity, open participation, FTF dialogue, self authorship or whatever mechanism. Overlaid across the sum of the parts a greater whole is created through coherence of tone and strategic purpose but without engagement it passes its target like a ship in the night.
Our industry needs to stand up and redefine itself first and foremost as disciples of engagement through communication and secondarily be capable of appreciating and contributing to coherent ‘integrated’ themes across media.
How far we individually want to configure ourselves to contribute to the coherent whole is a question for each of us to wrestle with.
At Clever Media we offer both the functional excellence to add value to the executional ‘parts’ of Live Events, film and digital and the strategic breadth to add value to the whole. Ours is of course not the only way and the fragmentation already out there will foster and sustain smart, small, fleet footed specialists. There are arguments on both sides and room for all, but my advice for what it is worth is to choose carefully and see it through, anyone left in the middle is dead.
Either way what we sell has to be broader than what we do and much more about how and what we think about communication. n
