OMD Canada, like many other mega-media management firms, has been evolving and restructuring as the demands for media innovation have grown stronger.
Among the changes under new president Lorraine Hughes, who took over from Ann Boden early last year, OMD recently brought all of its related agency buying groups (BBDO, TBWA, and DDB) into one building, albeit in separate suites of offices on different floors. Hughes says this was a way to help create a unique OMD culture, ‘an approach, a brand that is distinctive.’
OMD has now moved on to the next phase by implementing ‘Checkmate,’ a proprietary strategic thinking tool developed by OMD in the U.K. and U.S. The process is an important extension of the new OMD positioning: ‘Insights, Ideas, and Results.’
Hughes says ‘intellectual clout’ is the new point of differentiation for media management firms – planners and buyers can no longer just sit back and wait for account directors to provide a brief so they can simply buy media at the best rates.
‘Up until now, media has simply been seen as the delivery system for the creative. Now media is really seen as a communications contributor. It’s as much about ideas and the ability to generate and execute those ideas as it is about the numbers.’
She adds, ‘Good creative partnerships will revolve around the notion that it’s just not when and where we reach consumers, it’s how and why we want to connect with them. The how and why is so important and really requires more insight into the process than perhaps we’ve applied in the past.’
When staff training is completed early this year, the Checkmate approach will be implemented with help from The Ignition Group, a new insight-generating resource group within OMD Canada headed by Neale Halliday, director of communications strategy.
Halliday, a veteran account planner, moved to the media side of the business last September to help bring non-traditional thinking to OMD.
He believes that the evolution of media planning and buying is the natural outcome of a changing communications landscape where advertisers no longer can simply choose one or two mass media solutions. The business was more predictable when the only question was the length of the commercial message, but now he says media requires a more holistic or media-neutral way of thinking.
This is where Checkmate comes in. Halliday explains the process as one that first identifies the client’s business objectives and then brings in consumer and marketplace thinking before narrowing it down to the final communications strategy point.
‘It’s media-neutral in so far as we ask ourselves – what is the business problem? Let’s not worry about different media at all. Rather, let’s look at the consumers to see how we can build a strategy that will affect them. Then we’ll turn our attention to how we put that together and what kind of specialists we need to bring in.’
Halliday says that one of the best things about the Checkmate process is that it allows for bringing in outside experts such as PR professionals, TV program producers, and other content providers to expand the thinking.
The end result, he says, can be a million miles away from a 30-second spot, including such approaches as TV program production, tailored books or magazines.
