I was having lunch the other day with a media owner. He was asking me for some people he could hire for starting an in-house creative department. A few things emerged from that conversation:

1. Clients just don’t seem to have the budgets to pay for new creatives or a medium specific execution (say a print ad that needs to be reworked for OOH). They are the ones asking if the media owner could do the production too.

2. A lot of his clients are new to advertising, and to the medium. He’s growing the long-tail.

3. He wants to move beyond media budgets i.e. Increase wallet share from the client (media+creative).

4. Consolidate the media budget & throw in the creative execution for free – particularly for large MNC clients who don’t have in-market specific creatives.

5. Media agencies are increasingly coming to him with content/integration/production ideas as part of the media buy.

5. The media owner has most of the production talent in-house, though they are mostly involved in putting out his product into the market.

6. Other media owners already have established in-house creative teams/agencies. So this model clearly works.

When I asked him about the consumer strategy, brand-fit, execution details etc – he was fairly confident that it could be worked out. He wasn’t really seeing spectacular commercials coming out into the market anyway.

My recommendation to him was to just have a roster of freelance creative talent whom his company can tap upon, depending on the projects. Saves the media owner from the hassles of managing a department & the associated costs. I did refer him to a friend of mine, a suit, working in a creative agency, for being the go-to person he could hire on a full-time basis to do project management.

And I left the lunch thinking that we media agencies haven’t quite leveraged the media owners fully enough yet.

PS: There’s no such thing as a creative agency & non-creative agency.

Tags: creative services, media agency, media owner

This entry was posted on Friday, July 30th, 2010 at 12:03 pm and is filed under Advertising, Media. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.