Ever since the word integration reared its head, agencies have been clamouring to create business models to deliver the necessary seamless communications. However, this has not been an easy task, given the traditional silo mind-set that existed – and in many cases still exists – among ad firms.

With this realization in mind, Black Bag creative recruitment and strategy brought together representatives of two very different agency models – Grip, which has abolished the notion of separate divisions altogether and DDB Canada, which houses a slew of niche brands like interactive unit Tribal DDB and Karacters Design Group. Our goal? To figure out if any particular model works best.

Moderator:

(A) Joan McArthur, consultant Black Bag Creative Recruitment, Toronto

Panel:

(B) Jon Finkelstein,

partner-creative, Grip, Toronto

(C)David Hamilton,

partner-creative, Grip, Toronto

(D)David Leonard,

president, DDB Canada, Toronto

(E)Neil McPhedran,

managing director, Tribal DDB, Toronto

(F)Mike Welling,

consultant (former VP brand development, foods at Unilever Canada), Toronto

McArthur: Anybody want to take a crack at defining what integration is?

Welling: One of the issues has been whether it’s a series of activities in different mediums, or a consistent and cohesive presentation of the brand. Integration can encompass anything from the packaging of a brand, to how a call centre answers the phone, and CRM – it’s about how it engages and gets the message out.

Leonard: In a pitch, somehow agencies master it. It’s successful because you have a compressed time frame, you have 100% focus. You try to replicate that environment with a current client, it’s very tough.

Hamilton: The pitch is the one time when

the profit silos are set aside. It’s not about direct fighting for dollars, versus events

or interactive.

Leonard: I think you’re right. If you have pressure on people in those different disciplines to put their P&L first, you’re never going to get there. I encourage clients to ask their agencies ‘how do you earn your money?’ If you ask most of the agencies in Canada, it’s still 85 above the line and 15 below. We’re more 60/40. It’s a good indicator of whether an agency’s committed to the big picture.

Hamilton: An unfortunate thing happened where a lot of the agencies were talking about integration but not delivering on it. I think clients were forced to make it happen, and they’re better at it than most agencies. But along the way some confused brand-architecture guidelines with integration.

McArthur: We have two models here. In this corner, we have DDB with many brands that cover off the disciplines and over here, we have Grip, a blended environment with different specialists within the brand.

Leonard: It doesn’t matter what your org chart looks like and how you display it to clients. They want to feel like there’s leadership and someone with the power and authority to bring forward the right resources at the right time. It’s casting. It’s that dead-ass simple. We could do that with a bunch of things that are called separate brands, in the same way that Grip is doing it. If I had it my way, we wouldn’t have separate brands, but we don’t present ourselves in a pitch as here’s the Tribal guy, or the Rapp guy and so on. It’s here’s the interactive thinking at the table. It’s similar but different in how it’s branded.

McPhedran: One of the changes I’ve seen is that five years back, there would be this process where other disciplines would come in later. Now we’re at a place where we start a project off together. We brief together, we cut the strategy together. We’ve broken down those barriers.

Hamilton: I think David’s nailed it with casting. If you get the best people working on a client’s business, then those results will come to bear, regardless of what the discipline is.

Leonard: You need to have people who will go toe-to-toe with you and challenge your thinking. But there are people in shops that don’t feel they can come forward, or they don’t have the experience. Those are the ones that retrench and go back to the familiar.

McArthur: Doesn’t DDB have a new designation in the account area?

Leonard: The brand integrity group. It’s a handle that was put on the group three or four years back. It’s trying to unify the people that are leading business across the disciplines. We still have a long way to go to make it real, but at least an environment exists where it’s okay for these people to go through training together, etc.

In a traditional agency model, the dependency was on the mass creatives to crack the idea, and then it filtered down to everyone else. Maybe that was by default, maybe it was because in many cases, the talent wasn’t of the same calibre in many disciplines. I think you have to get to a place where you have the level of idea types and creative types in those different disciplines.

Hamilton: A year and a half ago, we were a traditional-model mass advertising agency. With the addition of Bell, we had to grow. The way we’ve chosen to go about that is to keep it as a single profit centre and have brand teams, as opposed to divisions. So instead of traditional writers and art directors, we have a writer, art director, design guru, interactive guru, etc.

Finkelstein: With only one profit centre, it becomes less important about what you’re doing from a channel perspective and more about how you want to disseminate ideas. That’s one of the things that attracted me to Grip. A good idea is a good idea.

Welling: I wholeheartedly commend the idea of trying to get to one P&L. If you get people focused on a common end objective, you’re more likely to get people working together. Still you can deal with a bunch of different agencies – one that can do everything under one roof, or a bunch of ad hoc groups – but the process you go through has to start with: What’s the brand? What’s the idea? What are the objectives? Who’s the target audience? How do they live their lives? Once you have all that stuff, then you

can decide objectively: ‘Does TV really fit the mould?’

And no idea should go forward to a client, unless you can demonstrate that it can express itself in a whole bunch of different ways.

McArthur: We’ve talked about the stumbling blocks of separate P&Ls. But there are hidden ones too. For example, it seems to me that clients are attracted to agencies for star quality and that means big TV campaigns.

Welling: This is why your media planning organization has strategically become much more important. And why, certainly within Unilever, media planning comes right at the front of the process.

We went through the big emotional debate about whether we would have separate creative and media planning http://agencies.we/‘>agencies.We came to the conclusion that we wanted to do that, for a couple of reasons. Inside a creative agency, the ones who get rewarded are the creatives. We wanted a place where hopefully the best media minds were. We didn’t want them tied to a creative agency. You have to put in checks and balances to take out biases and put objectivity into the game.

Hamilton: Is your assumption that when an agency gets a brief they come out with a TV ad?

As a creative, one of the things you learn early on is to think of it as an outdoor board first. If you can capture it as outdoor, it will extend.

Welling: But back to the client, one of the biggest problems is that the senior people delegate the job of managing the brand. And very few clients are investing their time in mentoring and nurturing the junior talents.

Ian Gordon, [a former marketing director for Unilever’s homecare business] came up with the term ‘brand manglers,’ instead of brand managers, because you get a lot of junior folks who go tearing off in different directions and pretty soon you have a whole bunch of things happening and they don’t tie back to the idea.

McPhedran: [Sometimes] a junior client will walk in the door, fresh out of university. He gets handed the Web site. In some segments, that could be the key communication point.

Hamilton: There’s another interesting trend happening. For a long time if you were a Unilever guy, your next job was at Unilever. Now it’s: ‘I need to get this project noticed because I want to go to company X for the next job.’

Welling: The notion of having a career

in an organization for an extended period

of time is actually frowned upon now in

favour of: ‘Wow, you have a large variety. You’re somebody used to change and blah, blah, blah.’

McArthur: It’s dangerous, because brand consistency goes by the wayside. Does anybody have any examples of great integration?

Leonard: Unfortunately, not enough of it is happening. I go back to Bud Light. It’s that simple thought of men helping men be men.

Welling: Becel is clear in its expression of heart health. From the brand’s strength to attributes, to what it is in the consumer’s mind, it’s consistent, which is why it’s a market leader.

Leonard: Dove’s another one. What Ogilvy & Unilever UK did with the Campaign for Real Beauty. That’s a really simple idea.

Welling: Unilever Canada and O&M Canada are major catalysts for Dove and how it’s presented worldwide. When it’s global brands, we tend to discount the influences of the local managers. We’re really active contributors back to that process.

Axe in Canada is another great one. Knorr is another brand where the work in Canada is having a far greater influence on what gets done not only here but elsewhere in terms

of integration.

Hamilton: They’re all brands that have stayed true to themselves in terms of product offering as well. Apple is an example of that too.

The products they bring to market are somehow true to what their core belief about that brand is. Another example is the Harry Rosen brand. I shop there and I get the DM and the magazine every quarter. It’s a very cohesive image and relationship they have

with men.

Finkelstein: The core essence of Mini, what it represents, how it looks, how it’s communicated, whether through TV, radio, Internet, event, CRM, guerrilla – it’s killer no matter what.

Welling: What you’re talking about is a brand that has an edge. You’re not trying to appeal to all people. It’s like that with the Bud Light campaign; it’s the same for Dove. It doesn’t mean you can’t have mass successes.

Hamilton: It’s having courage to say, this is what you need. Yeah, it might piss off this group, but it’s true to the idea and it’s what we think is right.

Welling: If you’re at an agency and you’re dealing with a client that’s not working well, I sure hope that your leaders inside your agency are sitting down and having conversations with that client. ‘You give us a review every year, well guess what? We’re giving you a review every year.’ That sounds easy to say, but if you don’t, it’s like living in an abusive relationship. You just remain a victim.

Finkelstein: If you take those examples we talked about and trace them back to the agencies that created them, they’re also brands that are committed to a point of view.

Welling: But not all of them. Some of them are traditional agencies that have been bashed around over the years re: what they’re supposed to stand for, but it’s the people inside that have made a statement: ‘This is what we believe in, and this is the way we’re supposed to behave.’

Leonard: There’s a related barrier. You look at prime organizations and some want to operate in a soup-to-nuts full creative environment, and others feel they will be the integrator. They decide they’ll take on that role, but they don’t fulfill it. They parcel out the ad stuff, the promo stuff and the interactive stuff. Well that’s an impossible recipe for integration. The more fractured it is, the tougher it is to do.

Welling: There isn’t just one model for an agency or client, which is why you can have different models; you just have to find the right manager for all of them.

Leonard: As an industry we are so staid when it comes to architecture of a company. How you set up a team, or layering or corner office – let’s get out of that. Let’s get on to great thinking, great casting and representation of the right people at the right junction of the process and dispense with these traditional titles and all the other crap that teams do.

Hamilton: I wish we did more of it, but on the whole, we’re hard on ourselves. I think the ad agency has been better at reinventing itself than most industries. But absolutely we should do it more, and the client should too.