Consumers,

Context and a

future for

Communications

Planning

By James Caig,

London, 2010

INTRODUCTION Flux defines our era of communications.

Technological innovation accelerates with

each year, and is often driven by consumer

demand.

It’s not only critical for marketing

professionals to keep up. We have to address

the many questions posed by such intensive

change.

Are agencies designed to help clients meet

the demands of the next five years, or the

next ten? How should they be remunerated?

How many agencies, exactly, does a brand

need? And what should their roles be?

The media agency, in particular, is under

threat. It suffers from a commoditised

marketplace and a relative lack of influence

with clients - compared with more ‘creative’

agencies.

Despite this, I want to argue that the future of

marketing could still belong to

Communications Planning.

The paradigm shift in media consumption has

created new and complicated

communications challenges. At heart, though,

people’s internal and external motivations for

their behaviour remain pretty constant.

Communications Planning, the home of

genuine consumer insight, should be valued

more than ever.

What has undoubtedly changed is the need to

match this insight with a more nimble and

more flexible approach to marketing

campaigns.

If it is to seize this major opportunity, the

discipline of Communications Planning needs

to change. It will only secure the influence it

deserves with clients if it risks innovation in its

own right.

If Communications Planning agencies can

change the way they engage with clients, they

can be the ones leading brands into the

communications future.

Chapter One

PARADOX CITY

Are media and content converging or

diverging?

As consumers of media we demand more

content across more platforms, but expect

devices that support them to aggregate

everything for us.

As industry ‘experts’, we observe trends and

shifts, but evaluating their trajectory has

become incredibly difficult.

Knowing how to respond to them is almost

impossible.

As the interests of content providers,

consumers and advertisers occasionally

coalesce, so they are equally likely to pull in

opposing directions.

It is these contradictions that in particular

characterise the change we see around us. If

we want to understand how Communications

Planning might change, it’s critical to get

closer to these changes, and what they mean

for consumers.

i) A (chat)room of one’s own?

Media can atomise communities, or create them.

The teenager in the bedroom is as likely to be

interacting with someone in another timezone via

(for example) Skype, World of Warcraft or

Facebook, as he is with his family downstairs

watching TV. The capacity to create communities of

interest around ever more niche areas has never

been more accessible, or more scalable – the long

tail dynamic of an inexhaustible supply and demand

projected beyond the world of commerce.

And yet, we risk a social world polarised by limits to

access of the virtual one. For those already

excluded, further automation and de-

personalisation of social transactions could

exacerbate the problem.

In short, is the web social, or anti-social?

Of course, in some cases the choice has been

superseded anyway. The X Factor, far from being

killed off by media fragmentation and real-time

social networking, has in fact been reinvigorated by

it. I know someone who won’t watch it unless their

favourite TV critic is tweeting at the same time, as

it’s like having a friend next to you on the sofa.

ii) The shock of the old

Technology is changing people’s behaviour, but the

motivation behind that behaviour may not be so

new.

Online communities allow a new kind of sharing

economy that hasn’t been possible, or desired, since

the days before capitalism.

This idea isn’t even new itself. One of Marshall

Mcluhan’s Four Laws of Media, the rule of Retrieval,

stated the unlocking of a previously latent

opportunity as a condition of media innovation.

Less clear is the extent to which users, given

limitless freedom and access to new ideas and

information, will actively seek out those new ideas.

On one hand, it’s never been easier to wander off

the beaten track for that hard-to-find book, film or

CD. On the other, Google’s algorithm-induced trend

of customisation points to the way to a very likely

world where we have ‘designed out’ novelty, and we

all have information served to us based on what

we’ve previously seen.

We also shouldn’t conflate technological advance

with a human desire to change. DVD rental didn’t

die with the advent of Video on Demand. In fact,

LoveFilm worked out the real problem with being a

Blockbuster customer wasn’t the DVD format, but

the inconvenience of having to rent and return them

in person.

We need to look for the behaviour, not the

technology.

iii) Behaviour precedes attitude, not the

other way around

Product usage is the most effective form of brand-

building.

Ask anyone who ‘loves’ a brand why they do, and

it’ll be down to their experience with the product or

service.

But most marketing objectives are premised on

quite the opposite: build brands to change minds

and drive action.

Even as ideas from Behavioural Economics provided

the empirical argument for focusing on behaviour

not attitude, the advertising industry is already

retreating to the tried and trusted to articulate

brand positioning. Hovis, with its two minute TV ad,

won the IPA Effectiveness Grand Prix in 2010, for

goodness’ sake.

The best marketing channels, those that fit the

entry-level definition of ‘identifying and meeting

customer needs’, such as Retail, Telemarketing or

Customer Service, effect behaviour as a lever to

shift attitudes. They are also frequently the

channels that also receive the least funding or

attention.

The main problem, of course, is the industry’s

obsession with tracking people’s attitudes. Despite

the reverence for Millward Brown data, these

measures remain merely indicators of interim

perceptions of advertising. They are, frankly, bugger

all to do with how people feel about a product or

service, and a million miles from telling you

anything about how and why people use it at all.

But, in cases of good marketing, we see an

intriguing blurring of the lines between product,

service and advertising. Campaigns on the whole

are becoming more participative, which provides an

extra layer of interaction between brand and

consumer – should the consumer want such a thing,

of course.

The real solution is, of course, to market something

tangible and differentiating about your product,

that people actually want. Sadly, many brands still

resort to generic or clichéd claims. In 2010,

convention required brands to promise ‘value’,

which became the currency across a number of

categories, and therefore increasingly meaningless.

Value, de-valued.

So, the new world is a paradoxical one.

But what do Communications Planning

agencies do about it?

The answer is, I think, buried somewhere

amidst all these contradictions. After all, the

opposing forces we’ve identified are, at heart,

a range of new behaviours from a huge

amount of people.

More accurately, the answer is buried

somewhere in all the assumptions we

continue to hold as marketing professionals

dazzled by new technologies and new ideas.

Quite simply, not everyone is as besotted with

this stuff as we are. And even if they are,

they’re not as self-conscious about it as we

suppose them to be.

Even if we consider those for whom this new

stuff comes naturally, that doesn’t mean that

they’re all alike.

The answer is, as it always was, to do with

people, and the context in which they decide

to do what they do.

Chapter Two

MARKETING, RE-

INVENTED

Context.

It really was ever thus.

In one rather dispiriting sense, the questions

asked of marketing by these developments

are nothing new. Understanding what people

want, and why they want it, has been

ostensibly part of marketing’s DNA since it

was invented.

In another sense, the democratic digital

revolution of the last few years changes

everything for the marketing industry. The

confluence of data, convenience and

connectivity we see now might just represent

the moment the industry has to finally fulfil its

promise to buyers and consumers. Marketing

can ‘identify a need’ pretty well these days.

But it never really cracked ‘meet that need’.

At least, not in a way that couldn’t be shown

to be really in the interests of the shareholder,

as opposed to the customer.

The reason ‘value’ feels like a platitude is

because brands’ only real commitment to

value for users is that which guarantees

customers will reciprocate that value. Return

on investment, they call it.

Which would be fine, were it not that brand

loyalty works in pretty much the same way –

merely applied in the opposite direction.

Paradox City tells us it’s never been more

important to understand the context of a

consumer’s decisions and motivations for

their behaviour, but the good news is it’s

never been easier for organisations to identify

and use contextual insight. The data,

behaviour and interaction might just make it

possible to reinvent marketing in a way that

truly benefits consumers, and drives loyalty

for brands and organisations in the process.

This isn’t about technology, being connected,

or the promise of value.

It‘s about what the technology, connectivity,

value message actually amount to.

It’s about UTILITY, in terms of convenience,

product efficacy, or expertise.

The internet means it’s never been easier, and

more important, to stop selling what we want,

and to start helping people with what they

want.

WHY MIGHT COMMUNICATIONS

PLANNING OWN THE FUTURE?

Another section, another paradox, I’m afraid.

Communications Planning agencies have

always been best placed to understand

context.

And yet they are probably the most

threatened discipline in the current climate.

Communications Planning is the natural home

of consumer insight. Advertising agencies are

brilliant at articulating what a brand

represents, consciously framing in consumers’

minds how it behaves; digital agencies have

become owners of brands’ virtual shop

windows, 0ptimising the design and

functionality of the most prevalent form of

interface brands have with their customers.

But Communications Planning has always

provided the ‘where’, ‘when’, ‘who’ and ‘how’

to the other agencies’ ‘what’.

And really, what these other Ws (and an H)

add up to, is ‘why’.

Agencies that create brand content are

manifesting a top-down, brand-centric point

of view on the world. It’s been incumbent on

media and communications planning

agencies, and will continue to be, to ask why

the consumer might care about this point of

view.

Agencies whose expertise is in making things,

or producing content, will always be valued by

advertisers – for two key reasons.

Brand Content

Consumer Context

i) Scarcity

Their specialism will always seem

sufficiently beyond the reach of clients

for them to assume they could do it.

(There are a few exceptions, of

course).

ii) Relevance

This expertise is also finely honed to

appeal to the way clients think right

now.

In short, advertising agencies add value and

give their customers what they want.

Communications Planning, meanwhile, enjoys

neither of these luxuries.

Brand owners (marketers, media managers,

etc) often feel they could, with a little more

product knowledge, do their media agency’s

job. Worse, as media agencies attempt to

diversify their services, the quicker clients are

catching up and taking those skillsets in house

– from SEO and paid search, to social media

and community management.

More fundamentally, Communications

Planning doesn’t offer easy solutions. The

discipline asks clients to think beyond their

four walls and deal with the world, and its

people, outside. It asks brand owners to

grapple with some of the contradictory trends

of Paradox City. It asks businesses to cede

control to customers in ways they’re simply

not ready to do.

It’s easy to imagine why, when faced with this

onslaught, brand owners find solace in areas

where they can assert control – over an

approved message, over creative execution,

over a media plan and campaign outputs.

Is this the fault of clients, or agencies?

I would argue that Communications Planning

agencies need to employ some of the insight

skills I’ve venerated here when assessing their

own client’s motivations and desires. It might

start with the client, but if the agency doesn’t

change its behaviour when fully aware of the

consequences, they only have themselves to

blame.

This cannot happen any longer.

What used to be merely the role of

Communications Planning agencies is now a

fully-fledged responsibility.

They need to re-assert the importance of

context in the decisions that individuals make,

and demonstrate the knife-edge impact

context has on a brand’s relevance.

And they need to understand how hard it will

be for a client to change.

I believe Communications Planning can prove

its value to a client base fixated on using

media to drive margins rather than loyalty

But I don’t think agencies can achieve this in

their current form.

They need to change.

In the final section, I want to outline some

ways in which I think this might happen.

Chapter Three

TEN PRINCIPLES FOR

COMMUNICATIONS

PLANNING AGENCIES

Start making stuff

Producing content isn’t about encroaching on the turf of

agencies that already do this. But it is absolutely necessary

if communications planning agencies want to sell their

insights as effectively as they do their media buying.

Making things turns the abstract into something tangible,

turns an idea into a campaign. Connecting the consumer

insight more explicitly to the execution makes it easier to

protect against the forces of non-marketers within the

client organisation, and prevents agencies looking like

they’re too smart for their own good.

Define your

proposition

Communications Planning could learn from account

planning here. What is your product? What do you want

different clients to think, feel and do as a result of

interacting with the product? Is that prolonged string of

diversified services starting to look like a shopping list?

What exactly is it you’re trying to achieve?

This sounds harsh, but I’d be surprised if many agencies

find the time to do this in any meaningful way, at least in a

way that would be relevant to its clients. Some design

thinking here wouldn’t go amiss here, either, to regain

control over how the agency is perceived by those that

come into contact with it.

Reject interim

metrics

A discipline obsessed with context should publicly look

down its nose at attitudinal tracking. Such data is

advertising-focused, and entirely unrelated to behaviour

in the real world. Briefs that include such data as evidence

or targets should be rejected until they contain desired

behavioural or business outcomes.

I believe we need new contextual metrics, and that

agencies should be developing new measurement

frameworks to illustrate what is required (see #1). One

form of this might be measurement purely around

participation, as opposed to awareness: perhaps mobile or

location-based, centred around in-store interactions, or

monitored and aggregated across digital destinations –

whatever the form, the approach and the

recommendations should be communicated to the client.

Real-time planning

It’s no good simply talking about this, it needs to be done.

Whether you have license to or not, make a habit of

monitoring and reporting weekly on campaign

performance, and highlighting opportunities for a

campaign to move in a different direction.

Data is Communication Planning’s greatest weapon of the

next few years, it needs to be used. Search data, buzz

monitoring, interaction measures, facebook likes – all

used currently either to inform post-campaign

measurement, or for optimisation within the individual

channel.

We need to establish was of inter-channel optimisation in

real time.

Everything’s a

channel

What actually constitutes content is going to become

even more fluid, and the outlets available for content

distribution are going to be increasingly numerous. Brands

will be looking for advice on how to navigate this new

terrain in a more integrated way than they currently do.

The opportunity is for communications planning agencies

to provide the overview - the ‘why’ that precipitates the

‘what’.

Agencies should become literate with stuff of Content

Management Systems, with what’s happening in mobile,

in the retail space, with social connectivity – and be

making recommendations across the piece. It should be

the job of communications planning agencies to remind

clients that nothing exists in isolation, not the other way

around.

The aim should be to solve problems, not raise them.

Smart resourcing

Back to the design thinking in #2.

Arguably, no one client should be resourced the same

way. From a planning perspective, I’d like to see agencies

getting braver with the skillsets that are placed at the hub

of the account.

If everything’s a channel, and nothing occurs in isolation,

why wouldn’t we want to have a team that consists of at

the very least some combination of communications

planner, data analyst, programmer, creative.

Skillsets, not

departments

It’s tempting, when something like social media comes

along, to recruit practitioners who sit separately within an

agency set-up as the function beds in. For a new practice

to truly be ‘at the heart’, though, it needs to be diffused

throughout the agency, not segregated off and practised

only by individuals who don’t get enough access to clients’

business to know how best to apply their skills.

Advocate

automated buying

Counter-intuitive, I know.

Media agencies already compete with their own clients in

SEO, PPC and certain aspects of social media. Google and

Facebook already take advertising on a bid basis, and the

convergence of TV and the internet means a similar

system for TV sales houses can’t be far away.

My guess is that this will happen anyway, so why try to

prevent the inevitable? Instead get stuck in to helping

clients with the transition. It will at least avoid clients

adopting the new process behind the agency’s back, and

should assist in migrating the perception of the agency to

something more consultative, and more valuable.

Empathy over

experience

You don’t have to have loved, or even experienced, a

client’s product to be able to plan effectively for them. But

you do need to be able to intuit how people who do, or

who have, really feel about it. Empathy is where it’s at for

planning.

That’s the real quality for a client-facing planner – not

media knowledge.

Agencies should look for different perspectives, and

potential recruits, from tangential disciplines where

consideration of the perception of others is paramount.

One UK advertising agency has recruited a specialist in

data visualisation, for example – purely to better

communicate to clients, and each other.

So, how about a bit of that for Communications Planning?

Or game design, maybe, or project management?

Test ideas.

Properly.

There’s no doubting the rigour agencies apply to the early

stages of the communications planning process. But

rigour applied to creativity is arguably more difficult than

it is applied to data and insight. Here there are lessons to

be learned from the advertising and digital agencies,

which have learned how to thoroughly think through an

idea before it goes before a client.

This brings us back full circle to the idea of making stuff. If

you recommend a game, design and build the game – or

at least demonstrate the process that will be required.

The time that communications planning ideas could rely

on powerpoint and a line on a plan is gone.

Agencies need to realise that and adapt – before clients

themselves notice the shortfall.

In summary

The world is changing.

But people are still largely the same – and

understanding the context of people’s

decisions remains central to the

Communications Planning opportunity.

Agencies can help clients to finally fulfil the

potential of marketing, and provide real utility

for their consumers. The paradigm shift in

media technology is the trigger for advertisers

themselves to change.

To achieve this, Communications Planning

agencies require greater influence with

clients, and will need to overhaul the way they

engage with clients.

This will require some innovative thinking

around structure, servicing, and skills – to lead

their clients by example, not rhetoric.

Thank you for reading.

The author

James Caig

Communications Planner at MEC, London.

Email: james.caig@mecglobal.com

caigjames@googlemail.com

Blog: See What Happens, at jimcaig.wordpress.com