It seems almost sacrilegious to say it, but maybe convergence isn’t all it was cracked up to be.

The AOL/Time Warner experiment was an expensive disaster. Bell Globemedia scaled back the convergence unit formerly headed by broadcast industry vet Kevin Shea. CanWest Global still embraces the idea, but thinks it might work better in local markets. And still, after several high-profile examples of multimillion-dollar converged buys, no one seems to be able to point to solid figures that prove they worked.

Many buyers still maintain that the only thing new about today’s converged media buys it that they’re concentrated within the properties of one media owner, a change that’s good for the media owner, but can be bad for the client. And secretly, many media execs and creatives have observed that while the strategy for several recent convergence campaigns was impressive, the execution seemed to falter into humdrum advertorial and corporate video-quality programming.

Chris Staples, creative partner at Rethink in Vancouver, for one, isn’t afraid to shout his convergence misgivings from the rooftops.

‘I’ve been completely underwhelmed by all of the convergence campaigns I’ve seen,’ he says. ‘What seems to be missing is a focus on a big idea. If you have a big idea, it’s really easy to spill that idea out into virtually any medium. People are making a media selection first, then they are saying we have to stuff some content into these various media holes – instead of asking, what’s our big brand idea?’

Scott Neslund, managing director at Toronto’s Starcom Worldwide, says convergence programs could be a lot better if media agencies took a bigger leadership role in matching opportunities with their clients’ brands. The programs where the media owner develops the creative product, he says, often result in inconsistent quality.

‘You’ve got some that don’t come out quite so well. The quality of the messaging looks a little cheap, to be honest. Then you get some other ones that you look at and say ‘that’s pretty good’ and I’m amazed they were able to pull it off.

‘But you want all of it to look great like you do when you produce a 30-second TV spot. That’s the issue. Therefore, I think a creative agency partner is very important to this process. They have to be included and they have to guide the messaging along with the different media sellers, because that’s what they do and they do it very well. There’s clearly a role for them in this process.’

Questioning custom content

Bruce Philp, managing partner at GWP Brand Engineering in Toronto, has mixed feelings about convergence too, and his misgivings are also rooted in concern that the creative product is not always what it should be.

‘At its worst, convergence is nothing more than a Trojan horse for bundled selling,’ he says. ‘At its best, what you get is a media company that owns positions in broadcast, print and the Internet, and they are able to do some very useful things. One is being able to actually generate their own audiences.’

It’s this ability that convinced GWP to get involved with a new convergence program scheduled to launch early this year (Philp declines to name the client) – but it’s going to be a different sort of undertaking from what has been seen in the past.

It will be anchored in the observation that because consumers make most purchases based on a number of cognitive steps, the use of cross-platform campaigns allows an advertiser to follow a consumer all the way through a process that eventually leads to a sale – with the opportunity to tailor a message in each medium according to the interest and level of involvement the consumer has at that time.

A media-owner presented GWP with the opportunity to implement that observation by sponsoring programming that, although not tailored for its client, is a perfect fit. Philp says it will seem very natural to have the firm’s client sponsor this information-driven program. Self-interest will be obvious, but he says it won’t mitigate against brand credibility.

‘But all of this turns on the quality of the content,’ Philp emphasizes. ‘If the content serves the brand too directly and too specifically, then its credibility is called into question and you have a loser on your hands. It’s comforting for us that this programming was being created anyway and it was waiting for a relevant sponsor.’

The decision not to create custom content for a client is the right way to go, says Staples. He’s very much against dressing advertising up as something it is not, pointing to Ford’s blunder with No Boundaries (the WB cancelled the show halfway through, citing low ratings). Muddying the lines between advertising, editorial and programming, he says, is something consumers can see right through, and it does more harm than good.

‘People can smell a blatant commercial a mile away,’ he says. ‘They’re not going to sit there watching advertising disguised as entertainment. I say advertising should be advertising, and stick to being good advertising.’

Sounds great: but did it work?

Another common stumbling block for convergence campaigns has been measuring success. Many are multi-year programs spanning a wide variety of media with a wide variety of messages and a wide variety of goals – making measuring their effectiveness extremely complex.

‘In terms of what needs to be measured to figure out if these things work – it’s the typical measures of the brand: brand recall, brand attributes, brand sales – everything they do to judge if a 30-second TV spot is effective can be applied to a convergence program,’ says Neslund.

‘Does your target group look at your brand in a healthier way than it did before the program? Was the convergence program a reason for that? All of our clients tend to measure the health of their brand through a lot of research. And that research should be applied to these convergence programs as well.’

Peter Tutlys is senior manager, group account director, advertising, media and promotion for RBC Financial Group, and one of the drivers behind the first big convergence campaign developed by Toronto’s M2 Universal with CanWest Global. He says that the program was extremely successful – and he has the brand health research to prove it.

RBC used traditional metrics to measure the success of the program, such as tracking mechanisms, as well as third-party research to measure consumer attitude, awareness, and other areas.

‘We found in a pure dollar-for-dollar media buy, from awareness and media investment ratio and other metrics – we fared well,’ he says. ‘To all the naysayers, I say there are some gems out there. The tricky part is finding them.’

Fred Lautenschlager, advertising manager, Cadillac, at Oakville-based General Motors of Canada, is another advocate for large-scale national converged buys. He says the company’s integrated ‘Innovating Tomorrow’ program with Bell Globemedia, also implemented by M2 Universal, was successful on many levels – sales, advertising effectiveness, awareness and consumer attitudes – as well as being cost-efficient.

‘Clearly the key metric is sales results, and we have seen success in growth with the launch of our new Cadillac products. But it’s a combination of seeing some short-term sales results and some longer-term attitudinal issues. Customers are also saying, I’ve got to look at Cadillac again because they do have products for me – and they’re back into innovative design.’

On the media-owner side, Roseanne Caron, VP integrated media sales for CanWest Media Sales, says convergence has been successful for her clients as well and, likely because of her extensive research background, she recognizes how important it is to demonstrate that success.

Right from day one, Caron says she has believed that CanWest had to be committed to helping clients track the performance of a campaign.

‘We’ve conducted pre-post surveys on Canada.com to measure shift in campaigns, whether that’s awareness or consumer attitudes. We’ve even used our call centre in Winnipeg to experiment with how we can track advertising effectiveness and provide consumer insights. It’s very much in the early stages, but there is potential.’

The future of convergence

Both of the convergence leaders – Bell Globemedia and CanWest Global – remain committed to the concept, although BGM seemed to be cooling to convergence with the departure of Kevin Shea, group executive VP of convergence, this past October.

At that time, Ivan Fecan, president and CEO of Bell Globemedia, said that the company was stepping back from the type of projects Shea was working on to concentrate on its core business.

Although it was assumed that statement meant the media conglom was no longer interested in convergence, Sandy Muir, BGM’s VP marketing and advertising sales, says that couldn’t be further from the truth.

‘We were experimenting with things such as place-based media. When they talked about going back to basics, they were really saying we are not going to grow those kinds of businesses – they take too long and the payout is uncertain. We’re going to stay with what we know, which in our case is print, TV and the Internet.’

Muir adds that BGM still has a convergence team in place, led by Andrew Saunders, VP of integrated sales.

‘Andrew has a long list of clients that he’s currently working with. We haven’t stepped away from convergence, and there’s still a lot of interest at the client and agency level.’

Over at CanWest, Caron says the commitment to convergence comes from the top, and that support has helped to create an environment of co-operation across the different divisions.

But while there is still media-owner commitment, and there have been some successes, even those driving the convergence train say there is a lot of room for improvement.

Caron says the lead time for program development has been the biggest challenge. As the integrated group gets more experience, lead times for programs have been getting shorter. Establishing at the beginning who is going to be working on the program and putting a dedicated team in place has helped, as has assigning a team leader to be the conduit between the client and CanWest.

There is also a trend at both media houses away from blockbuster national converged buys and toward smaller-scale regional buys.

Caron points to ‘Believe BC,’ a program developed to boost provincial pride and highlight what is great about living and working in the province, as an example. It has recently been adapted for Montreal as a new program called Momentum Montreal. As well, Athlete of the Week, a Montreal program that had been sponsored by DaimlerChrysler, has been taken into Alberta and will likely also move into B.C.

Going regional has worked well for CanWest because it owns a lot of local newspapers, but even Bell Globemedia, with its large national properties, is looking at smaller-scale programs using regional editions of the Globe and Mail and its Internet properties.

Finally, Neslund says, a general trend towards greater involvement by the media and creative agencies could help to ensure that the convergence campaigns of the future meet with success.

Media agencies such as Starcom are starting to build in-house convergence departments, like Imprint (see ‘The revolution takes root,’ page 3), staffed by experts from a variety of backgrounds. They will be able to co-ordinate campaigns in much the same way as the convergence divisions of the media-owners, but they will be blind to media ownership.

‘I think media can bring a lot to the table to ignite the process,’ Neslund says. ‘As media professionals, we have a responsibility to show our clients when these opportunities exist. Things like creating Imprint mark the way we’re going to do that in future.’