EMM in the News

Agency experience - Babes in medialand

Mediaweek: Posted 27 January 2004

Does the youthful nature of the agency world mean that clients are getting short-changed in their media plans? Kevin May investigates concerns raised by clients about inexperienced decision-makers managing their accounts

It is all well and good to have the youthful looks of a Pop Idol contestant, but if the grey matter beneath the trendy haircut isn't up to mapping out the right media campaign for a client, then the agency world needs to rethink its failure to retain many of its old hands.

This is the rather cutting viewpoint of a number of industry figures who are concerned that young planners and buyers in agencies do not have the experience they really need to handle big-money advertising campaigns.

One agency boss estimates that a "significant percentage" of key decision-makers have less than five years' experience in the industry while some major clients sometimes fail to have a single account executive with more than 10 years in the job.

Although the youthful vibrancy of the industry is a key attraction for agencies trying to recruit new talent, there appears to be a danger that media budgets might be spent unwisely because of a distinct lack of experience among decision makers.

It's no coincidence that planners/buyers with, for example, two years experience can expect to be disparagingly referred to as two-year-olds.

And the concerns do not simply come from ageing media players, privately disgruntled with fresh-faced colleagues heading for the bars of Soho every night and then striding in with a youthful zest every morning.

The evidence is there: around 60 client bosses across Europe with responsibility for media budgets totalling $9.2bn in fastmoving consumer goods, luxury products, entertainment, motoring and pharmaceutical industries have raised the issue, according to a recent study.

A majority of the respondents (55%) to the OMD/Effective Media Management survey said they were concerned at the levels of expertise of agency individuals they dealt with on a regular basis.

Eighty per cent also argued that sector-specific expertise was not a prerequisite, whereas media experience was.

The emphasis on how much clients value the quality of the planners and buyers handling media accounts is demonstrated simply by 96% arguing that staff are the only significant difference between principle media agencies.

EMM chief executive Stephen White says the survey has highlighted a growing concern: "The most important part of the media agency world is the people involved and our standards have dropped and are dropping."

Already there are three areas that are causing concern to clients and some agency bosses: a lack of continuity with staff working on individual accounts; the ability to retain staff once they have achieved a decent level of understanding; and the socalled "sector prejudices" of less-experienced staff.

"A lot of the time they get to a certain experience level and then they just disappear or they change jobs," says Mark Holden, executive planning director at PHD.

"Also, clients are worrying about whether a planner has a propensity to spend money in one particular area."

Sector choice Holden notes that younger planners and buyers have a tendency to use online and ambient media for a schedule, while some older staff may have an affinity to established, traditional media, such as TV.

"People are asked to be objective, but they're using the sector they know best," he says.

Having a more rounded knowledge of the various media platforms their agencies have at their disposal helps planners and buyers create better strategies.

"Agencies need to be more in touch of how we make money and deliver solutions to that objective," notes one client marketing director who responded to the survey.

Clients' dissatisfaction with agency representation does happen to coincide with the tightening of belts by many advertisers and the agencies themselves.

Staff retention has become increasingly difficult with the inevitable cost-cutting measures implemented when a recession kicks in - leading to senior planners and buyers looking elsewhere for more financial security as they approach middle age.

Mark Dickinson, marketing and new business director at OMD, agrees with some aspects of the OMD/EMM survey, but says it is ultimately a recessionbased problem.

"During a recession, some people in agencies are thrust into areas they do not have much experience of - and I think that many staff, in a short space of time, can become a credit to the agency," he says.

"This is a young person's business. The energy and vitality of it means that it attracts a younger age," Dickinson adds.

Agencies consolidate While some believe the lack of experience at some agencies can be blamed on the difficult economic climate, others suggest that the growing trend toward the consolidation of agencies into larger organisations is a key factor alongside the everincreasing emphasis on costs.

Holden disagrees that the relative inexperience of many planners and buyers is simply a result of difficult economic conditions. He says that, at a more fundamental level, it is simply a matter of "profit and loss".

Nigel Potter, joint managing director of Total Media, says that, in his 30 years of working in the industry, it has always been in big agencies that the experience levels of planners and buyers are low. "In the big agencies, people move around a lot and people come and go very quickly," he says. "Here we have senior people with much more experience working on the accounts day to day, making more strategic decisions."

One marketing boss says the client wants the agency planners and buyers to show they have a background in dealing with all sectors of the advertising industry - a move that, arguably, can be achieved only with experienced people.

Another says agency veterans know better than to provide "hundreds of pages of data with just lots of analysis which no one reads" and to keep it simple in their presentations to the client - while another highlights the growing "death by PowerPoint" syndrome resorted to by many inexperienced agency staffers.

As the trend toward agency consolidation continues, some believe clients will inevitably find themselves in the situation where increasingly more junior staff will handle their accounts.

There is a growing argument that, when a merger or buyout takes place, larger agencies naturally filter out their senior staff for both cost and structural reasons. This inevitably leads to some of the most experienced people within an agency being left by the wayside, giving younger members great opportunities - but at what cost? Best training EMM's Stephen White claims one of the first solutions is to make sure certain staff are given the best training while a subtle change in the culture of the industry would ensure planners and buyers are not striving to reach the chairmanship of an agency by their early-30s.

The last point is arguably the most difficult to change, if that is where the problem really exists - one of taming aspirations.

If the young people in the industry do mirror their Pop Idol counterparts in terms of their aims, there is little hope - every one of the show's contestants would undoubtedly be happier propelling themselves to the pinnacle of their careers as soon as possible rather than first gaining experience with a string of critically-acclaimed albums.