| THE TRAINING QUESTION
Besides the awards, the more important areas demanding attention are training and the need
to establish a code of fair practice between agencies, marketers, and the media. Every
agency claims that the former is advertising’ biggest bugbear.
However, not every agency can put its money
where its mouth is when it comes to training. The everyday business of business appears to
zap the energy to serve the long-term needs of ad people some of who get by, by being
incredibly efficient but not exactly effective. There are the Account Executives who are
too scared to contribute to the creative process ("the
leave-it-to-the-Creatives" attitude), the Creatives who can’t stand marketing
strategy exercise (the "dumb client meeting" approach). The tendency to send off
creative people to creative workshops, and media people to media seminars is an easy way
out, but it serves little to cross-fertilize the marketing process with different strains
of strategy, and big ideas. Can the 4A’s or SLIM fill this need by setting up a
training college for its membership? Lilamani Dias-Benson, the 4A’s board member in
charge of training, who is also a big advocate of training, has big plans for the
4A’s to have an advertising institute. There are no shortage of disciplines to cover,
and probably no shortage of trainers.
On the agency side, Q&E, the largest
independent ad agency (which also means it has no multinational agency links), has given a
lot of thought to the long term consequences of a shrinking talent pool. This year it will
open its advertising academy that will produce advertising ‘graduates’, using
resource people form Europe. The first batch of 12 student will follow a rigid programme
comprising ten modules. Interestingly this is not being run as a profit center, but as a
way of creating a talent pool that many have scoffed at in the past. Until now, the big
reluctance has been to invest in training because of the high turnover in agencies.
Q&E looks at it differently. Training is Kannangara’s top priority --alongside
building a creative reputation. The grad program will put trainees through the basics such
as introduction to Marketing, Media Planning and Media Buying. But with an aim to make its
people multi-disciplined, the trainees will also be exposed to Art Direction, Copywriting
and Web Design. Likewise the Lintas group taps into the ‘Lintas college’ system,
a full-time institute that the Colombo office, and all its offices worldwide can make use
of. JWT, the self-styled ‘University of advertising’ did not reply to training
questions posed to them at the time of writing. (Note: LMD now learns that JWT invested the entire prize money of Rs. 200,000
won at the 1999 SLIM awards, in a training program for sixty of the staff members). All agency heads agree that nurturing one’s human
resource is a pre-requisite for nurturing the brands they are entrusted with. But this is
the case of the squeaky wheel not getting the grease. As Ms. Dias-Benson ruefully
observes, "agencies in Sri Lanka will have to make better margins to be able to
afford (such) facilities."
SLIM is big on training. The institute wants to broad-base marketing education and its
Business School has franchised the Diploma in Marketing to the central Province Chamber of
Commerce. But ad people think there are enough resources within their ranks to have their
own programmes. The 4A’s and the IAA need to step up to the plate, they say.
SPECIALIZATION OR CONSOLIDATION?
The other issue in advertising, aside from a hunger for training, involves whether to
specialize --and go off into separate units--, whether to stop being glorified art-shops
or ‘boutiques’, or whether to drop the word ‘agency’, and become more
of a partner than intermediary. To put things in perspective, last year, the red-hot issue
was more rudimentary: the attack on the commission structure, and the need for marketers
to have more respect for the creative process. But with the pace of change, ad agencies
are themselves looking at what business they are really in. The business of producing ads
of course extends beyond translating briefs into artworks. Accountability, consultancy,
research projects, media buying and public relations, once the add-ons in the agency are
now viable business units. Translated: Clients need to pay for them. This makes sense. In
fact, the inherited lack of respect often sprang from agencies becoming the yes-men and
dirty-works departments of clients with no strategy. A Poster here, a launch conference
there, models handing out samples in supermarkets and a few ads sprinkled in-between was
once considered a ‘campaign’. Not anymore. "Superficial selling
gimmicks", as O&M Strategic Planner, Andrew Samuel puts it, "don’t have
anything to do with brand stewardship". The agency has some big-ticket consultancy
assignments that, on the face of it do not look like advertising. As has been discussed in
this column before (see "So Image Isn’t Everything", in LMD, January 2000),
the identity of the agency will revolve around who gets to be the keepers of the strategy.
Just as in every other industry, in
advertising, the world is a circle with an ever-decreasing radius. Wait-time gets shrunk
with the penetration of phones, distance crumbles with the availability of E-mail, and the
fragmentation of the media in keeping with the consumer segmentation (or is that the other
way around?) gives us communicators very little time to catch our breath. The abrasive
nature of marketing will generate hot-spots, controversy and miscreants. The unintended
consequences of technology and commerce, even E-commerce, will also bring opportunities
for new specializations within advertising that may never deal with creating ads at all!
So being ‘volatile’ is really a good thing.
With Integrated Marketing Communication,
damage control, CRM (customer relationship management), DM and PR taking on added
importance, the agency of the future will very different from what we have today --an
amalgam of consultancy and strategic planner, think-tank and creative partner rolled into
one.
Oh, and they might also create ads!
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