21st August 2003
| Marketing
By David Wethey
I suppose I shouldn't say it, but 'integrated agency' and 'through-the-line' are not phrases that lift my spirits.
Many moons ago I joined a splendid agency, Pritchard Wood & Partners (PWP), to replace a fellow called Frank Lowe who was off to join another fine long-dead agency called Bensons. PWP was my first agency and I wasn't to know how exceptional it was to rub shoulders with creatives like John Webster, or Stanley Pollitt and his young crew who invented account planning.
My training included having the lexicon of marketing jargon explained to me, and I learned the difference between above and below the line.
I instinctively knew where I wanted to be. I saw myself as an above-the-line, above stairs, above average sort of person. Nothing wrong with sales promotion or point-of-sale of course. PWP had people who looked after that sort of thing. But advertising was my passion, for the creative excitement, and the cleverness of strategy and planning - what Lee Daley of Red Cell calls the creative work before the creative work.
In those days you didn't talk about integrated agencies, because all proper agencies were full service anyway - and that included media. Clients understood integration, because it had always been their job to make sure that terrific advertising ideas were reflected in all contacts with consumers.
There was no obligation to buy the complete package from one agency, but most clients did, because there weren't many specialist shops until the late-70s/early 80s.
Fast-forwarding to 2003, it is often more convenient and better value to work with an integrated agency. Integration in that sense is practical and attractive, particularly if the client has been working with a creative agency offering no below-the-line skills. But as we know the problem for integrated agencies is that they don't offer the most obvious integration of all - creative and media. The planning and creative geniuses who design the satellites should work hand in glove with the rocketry experts in media planning and buying. That's true integration - and its time has come again. Not in the sense of through-the-line (above plus below). More along the line. Let us bring the 'line' to life.
For generations it has just been a horizontal state line, like where North Dakota meets South Dakota. Nothing happens there, it is just a boundary.
My vision is that we reinvent the line as a sort of marketing communications Route 66 along which creative agencies will be collaborating with experts in media planning, sponsorship, content, programme making, music, brand entertainment and more. For me the whole future of the creative agency lies along that line.
It is not just that the agencies will be able to help clients more fully exploit the potential of great hairy advertising ideas. It is much more exciting than that. They will have an incentive to come up with even bigger, even hairier ideas specifically designed to work along the whole length of the famous line. Clients will hopefully come to see that a sharing of intellectual property rights could open up substantial new revenue streams for clients and agencies alike. Along the line. You heard it here first.
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