20 years ago, the advertising and media industries were very different to how they are today. Agencies were categorised into ‘Above-The-Line’ or ‘Below-The-Line’ and anything in between became known as ‘Through-The-Line.’ Then came the Internet which disrupted the nicely organised structure and our comprehension of what companies actually did, for whom they did it and how they did it.
With the arrival of the Internet, brands realised the potential of digital technology and being able to maximise ROI on campaigns, obtain greater audience reach and improve targeting through the use of real time data. Digital advertising was on the rise, but until round 2000 was mainly focused on display ads and keywords.
When the dotcom explosion occurred campaign budgets suddenly ran into millions and all kinds of agencies began to fight for a piece of the same pie. To complement display offerings, and try and attract campaign budgets, publishers started offering PPC, CPA CPL and emailing campaigns, (emailings which also completely disrupted the traditional direct marketing industry between 2000 and 2004). And to complicate things further Google capitalised on the rise of the blogs by debuting its Adwords offering.
Doubleclick’s ad platform was the main ad management platform used by both media buying agencies and the ad networks. Then came the rise of independent advertising tech companies that we categorise today as ‘adtech’ with the aim of facilitating the buying and selling process between agencies and publishers by offering automated platforms. The adtech platforms did succeed in facilitating the process but also created a complex and fragmented landscape that we are still trying to comprehend today.
Media buying agencies created specialised agencies and networks to manage digital and emailing campaigns and then came SMS text and image campaigns and to top it all off an additional layer with the arrival of social media.
So who should brands work with?
And where has this left the advertising and media industry in the past 20 years? Arguably in a state of flux. Brands are confused with which agency to work with, who does what and which adtech platform to use. And the advertising and media industries have now been facing the challenge of moving away from their existing traditional models and becoming more integrated. For example, the global advertising group Ogilvy had announced a restructuring of all its sub-brands to be unified under one brand, Ogilvy. And also the creation of a new agency, Ogilvy Delivery which will focus on Ogilvy’s customer delivery, and function as a type of new modern delivery capability. This sounds to me like a first move in becoming fully integrated and building a specialised ‘integrated unit’ within the group.
So how has all this change affected the PR industry? I think that PR is at a turning point and that agencies need to think well beyond the media relations programmes which originally built their businesses.
While PR agencies are trying to work out how to become integrated, so too are the big ad/media players, who are investing heavily in creating integrated agencies or departments with the aim of providing a unified skill set all under one roof.
PR agencies are adopting a similar approach, but in PR once you have hired all these different talents - have you really created an integrated agency? I am not totally convinced. The division still remains with traditional PR teams on one side and the digital marketers, data analysts, developers, tech teams on the other and no one to really sit in between with enough in depth knowledge and understanding of how all this disciplines can actually function together and their limitations.
And that’s where I think our PR industry currently sits, a race to hire the best PR talents, digital/tech experts, social media managers, data analyst, web designers, video and app developers to be able to say ‘we create integrated campaigns, we are a fully PR integrated agency’ - and realising along the way they actually forgot one crucial element in making it all work : “hybrids”.
And by the time PR agencies figure that out and hire these “hybrids’ to help them make that connecting link between disciplines, change their existing model and adopt a new structure that works, we would have already moved on to the next skills set that the PR industry will need in the next 10 years. I think it's fairly clear to see the industry is transforming and slowly redefining itself and moving towards actually becoming increasingly similar to fully integrated marketing and communication agencies.
Nim Haas is Head of Marketing at Global Processing Services. She has worked within the digital & tech space since 1997 and has has spent the last 4 years working in Tech PR managing the communication and brand development for fintech companies such as Fidor Bank, Fidor Solutions, Backbase, Covercy, Open Ocean, Cytora and Kurtosys, and this across the UK and internationally. Recently, Nim was recognised as Holmes Report Top 25 Innovators 2018 for EMEA region for marketing and communication professionals and recognised as one of the Standout 35 in Innovate Finance’s prestigious Women In Fintech Powerlist 2018. She was also one of the initial co-founders of the first e-loan aggregator platform launched in France in 1998, ‘Credit-On-line’ that today generates an average of 30,000 loan requests per month and is one of the largest eloan partner of Cofidis, Credit Mutuel.
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