Strategy launching a new publication called MEDIA is a bit like Ford launching a new four-wheeled motorized vehicle called CAR. Or Kellogg launching a new box of cardboard crispy bits called CEREAL.
But this is media about media, and it’s a big wide field, covering everything from product immersion in movies (p. 1), to media creativity (p. 11), to recency planning (p. 20). In fact, there’s so much going on, so many different ways to come at what is undoubtedly the most important invention in the history of Western civilization, that it’s hard to know where to draw the line.

Conventional broadcast TV

Media planners would be the first to say the genesis of an ad campaign needs both a mommy and a daddy. The creative department’s input is of course crucial, they’d say, to maintaining an advertiser-client’s brand standards or sparking a fresh idea in presentation.
But the days of invisible planners and researchers hunkering in back rooms crunching numbers and serving up a media platter for the creative department’s big ideas are long gone: Media experts have their own companies, advertiser-clients are becoming more sophisticated in the buying matrix, and deals are being done with media conglomerates that, on occasion, make traditional creative an afterthought.

The explosion of campaigns where media companies have done it on their own – without agency creatives – no doubt attests to the media community’s increasing creative and technical resources. At some point, however, someone has to create the promos, art direct the newspaper ads or write the radio scripts, and it’s only because the media owners are filling in that gap that agency creatives can be dispensed with.

Walter Odenthal works at Skoki, a small back-country hiking lodge located one mountain range east of B.C.’s Lake Louise. I don’t know Walter very well but he looks like he’s in his mid 40s. He’s tall and like most mountain people, very lean and very fit. Rumour has it he came from a well-to-do family in Germany. Some say he’s a concert pianist.
What I know for sure is that he builds magnificent hiking trails, and in my conversations with Walter, I detected a strong parallel between planning mountain hiking trails and planning media campaigns.

Erwin Ephron, partner at New York media consultancy Ephron, Papazian & Ephron, is known around the world as the father of recency planning. When he first started preaching his approach in 1995, he says many in the industry interpreted the idea that ‘a single exposure can have an effect on which brand a consumer will buy’ to mean, ‘oh boy, now advertisers can spend less money.’ Ephron soon disabused them of that notion by explaining that advertisers don’t need heavy repetition, but instead they need more weeks of advertising.

The media planning and buying industry cannot decide whether it is staring into the abyss or about to take an exciting leap into the future. Profit margins are under siege from an aggressive client audit culture and agencies’ willingness to undercut each other on price in their desperation to win and retain business.

So I came home from work the other day, and there it was. I kind of knew it would happen sooner or later, but when you actually lay eyes on it, it’s still a bit of a shock.
I’ve seen advertising on the little blue plastic mats in urinals, looped videos running on cubicle wall monitors and I’ve read about Zig’s bathroom makeovers for the W Channel, so obviously it was just a matter of time before advertising popped up in the can at home.

About 25 years ago, when I was a media planner working on the Thrifty’s Jeans account, I spent an inordinate amount of time helping to redefine the client’s target group. Thrifty management wanted to keep their store’s youthful image but also wanted to expand their customer base beyond the teen segment that accounted for their initial retail success.

What with CTV swapping The Associates for The 11th Hour, the CBC planning just one new series and Global skewing its focus again to reality TV, the outlook for Canadian dramas this fall is pretty grim.

At a time when spending accountability is top of mind, the majority of companies are still unable to measure the return on investment (ROI) of their marketing campaigns, according to a recent study from international management and technology consultancy Accenture. Meanwhile, those with measures in place generally underestimate their costs, which should include the entire process, from research through to creative.

Media buyers looking for ‘deep discount’ rates similar to those that their U.S. counterparts are getting from suppliers south of the border are finding some flexibility, although media buyers are reluctant to speak about deals.

Canadian media companies are dabbling in creative territory, as more and more global, American-based brands ask them to re-jig ad campaigns for local markets.

Nielsen Media Research (NMR) has ventured into fusion territory with a new data linking system, and plans to have a data fusion program up and running with sister company ACNielsen early next year.

Outdoor Canada, the country’s only national outdoor sports magazine, has just completed its second year of new ownership and a revamped, more-focused editorial direction.