The lucrative sphere of media independents
The advertising practice is fast evolving. It is collapsing into focused niche services that require distinctive aptitudes and skills – creative boutiques, special events groups, pr consultancies, direct marketing agencies, graphic design studios and media independents.
Media independents (mis) are planning and buying specialists engaged in securing the most cost-efficient combination of time and space usage for advertisers. Mis are not fully adequate but they are independent of the traditional agency structure, and of any professional creative or production operation. In the philippines, the number of mis has grown – starcom, mindshare, universal media, carat and optimedia, among others.
Today, it is by far the most lucrative area in the advertising practice. The bulk of a client’s marketing communications investments is allotted for purchasing media, and that the proficiency and buying power of mis are uppermost in the list of motivations most clients heed in handing over their budgets to an agency rather than do the job themselves.
What was originally thought to be a fleeting nonpareil has turned out to be a hefty and immutable feature of the advertising industry. Mis are no longer described as mere media brokers or buying shops. They have grown into streamlined organizations that hire skilled media talents. And since they have no other agitation, and no other pressures are brought to bear, mis are able to perform the expected function with undivided commitment and attention.
Extreme ‘mi’ concepts
There are two opposing schools of thoughts on mis, with very different views held by the very people we expect to hold them. The first view is that the mi trend will lead to the demise of many traditional agencies, particularly the medium-size ones, which cannot afford to match the talents available within mis. This radical position believes that clients get a better service from mis since they hire extremely skillful and fiercely competitive personnel who do nothing but dedicated media work.
Mis claim to provide better value for money and wiser use of allocated media budgets that pave the way for a more palatable financial deal. This perspective also contends that there is no reason for advertisers to use a full service agency to plan and buy their media requirements, unless the agency is willing to waive the fixed 15 percent commission in favor of a compensation scheme more acceptable than what mis are offering.
The second belief espoused by the traditional ad agencies is that there will always be a need for the grander resources and productive interconnections, which full service agencies can deliver. Advertisers without an experienced marketing service group need support in formulating and implementing their marketing and advertising plans. Mis, without a doubt, can perform excellently the media function, but may not be able to render the other program reinforcements clients may demand.
This outlook maintains that by using mis, clients lose the benefits accruing directly from the intrinsic structure of the full-service agency where creative, media, pr, and account people work in synergy towards a common direction. Mis are criticized on the basis that media work is brought down to the lowest common denominator–cost. Furthermore, as mis are often dissociated from the creative demands, they are seen to be less competent than their full-service counterparts in making media choices compatible with the requisites of the creative strategy.
At the end of the day, the choice between these two varying schools of thoughts rests with the clients who can be advantaged or disadvantaged – depending on their careful or haphazard assessment of their needs – by their chosen partnership. Mis source their clienteles from a wide range of possibilities – advertisers, ad agencies and pr companies without media departments, and creative specialists. They are now well-entrenched operations rapidly re-shaping the advertising landscape.
Recently, campaigns and grey launched the independent media planning and buying company, mediacamp. Boy pangilinan, twice chairman of the association of accredited advertising agencies of the philippines (4a’s-p), and the longest serving director and treasurer of the advertising board of the philippines (adboard) heads the new mi, which is part of mediacom worldwide, the eighth largest agency in the world. Boy works with a team of seasoned media strategists and skilled negotiators – assistant vice president chiqui lizada, and media directors, chuck nitorreda and irene choa.
On the same event, a revolutionary media planning and buying software that can create the most effective and cost-efficient tv schedule in minutes was unveiled. The proprietary technological tool took more than one year to develop, in conjunction with vinta systems inc. And leading media research companies, agb philippines and acnielsen philippines. Since it was developed locally, it is the only one able to interlink all local data structures. There is reportedly no other media planning software in the market that can claim to be as accurate or as fast.
Mother of all softwares
Peter valdes, a hotshot filipino software developer created the ultimate media-planning program. His claim to fame in the global it industry was, and still is, the tuvalu management software – a product that continues, up to this day, to generate billions of dollars annually in revenues for ibm worldwide. It was a software-development tour de force that earned him a slot in the "who’s who in the computer industry" and "who’s who in worldwide information technology."
Valdes calls this product the media optimization and administration systems (moas). "with this new system, the long hours (sometimes even days), that media planners put into media planning and buying will be cut into minutes. Even major revisions can be done in a few minutes. This gives the media planner, and his client, more time to evaluate, and reevaluate, other plan scenarios and still meet the advertising deadline," he declares.
Currently, media planners utilize a combination of commercial and proprietary programs to automate portions of the media planning process. Although automated, this method still takes time since the output of one program has to be manually entered into another program. In fact, if the media planner has not invested in expensive commercial optimizer engines, the created plan would most likely fall short of client’s expectations, not to mention the media planner’s. The moas, on the other hand, fully automates the entire media planning process – from creation, editing, evaluation, and optimization of the plan up to the creation of broadcast orders and competitive reports.
Valdes confides, "the real winners with moas are, of course, clients. Moas will save clients millions of pesos in advertising expenses since the system can efficiently minimize the total cost of an advertising plan by effectively hitting only specified target audiences. It also frees everyone from other media planning constraints like, say, budget."
Given today’s limited advertising budgets, moas can provide a client with a media plan that maximizes its effectiveness as measured by tarp (target audience rating point) or reach. And if the client wants a plan that can achieve the desired level of reach and frequency, moas can, and will, readily churn out that preferred plan. In addition, valdes says, "the system can automatically produce competitive reports from raw data collected by media services companies, furnish clients with critical and useful competitor related information that will guide future advertising campaigns, and assess the quality of the plans."
Valdes led the overall architecture and development of the moas based on specific directions supplied by pangilinan. "as with any commercial software product, we plan to update moas at least once a year in order to address the ever changing needs of users in different parts of the globe," valdes says. This early, he is looking at other sophisticated artificial intelligence-based algorithms that will allow the client and media planner to extract intelligence or insight from consumer research surveys and use this to create more focused and sharper media plans.
With moas, valdes and his partners in mediacamp see a revolution in media planning and buying not just in the philippines but around the globe as well.
