In a divided industry, a shared understanding has never been more needed

By Elliott Millard, Chief Strategy and Planning Officer

We know that we live in an era of polarisation and division – Brexit, Trump, the tofu-eating wokerati. But we don’t often stop to reflect on just how rife this polarisation is in our industry itself.

As marketers, we are also divided by opposing beliefs: advocates of Byron Sharp won’t allow that any niche segmentation is right; Gary Vee fans refuse to believe anything other than social works; we argue about the balance between brand versus performance media.

The reality, as with so many things, is that there is value in all these arguments – none of them is universally true but none of them is universally false. And if we let them distract and divide us, we’ll never get to the kind of strategic thinking that really delivers growth for our clients.

At Wavemaker, recognising that truth was one of the things that influenced us to recently create a completely free “Media Essentials” training course; 12 modules over 12 weeks, covering everything from addressability and commerce to AV and partnerships.

We realised that if we could create a shared language with our clients and a shared grounding of media understanding, then we could lift the work we do above binary decisions and make informed, strategic choices about how we show up in media and how we solve our clients’ challenges.

We also believe that giving our clients access to our specialists outside of a response to brief (and the constraints that has) will improve how we work together – allowing us to start with a consistent baseline understanding of how media works and what each channel is best at.

The course kicked off on 26 April and the response has been overwhelming. When we set out to plan the lesson content, we collectively agreed that if at least 30 clients enrolled, it’d be worth the time and effort to write and teach it. We totalled out at 407 registrations.

It’s an impressive number and testament to our industry at its best – a desire to learn, a desire to improve and a desire to go beyond the confines of binary thinking to create amazing work. But it’s also testament to a real need for change.

What does this say then about the current state of our industry?

It tells us that clients are crying out for simplicity in a landscape that is becoming more complex daily. The industry talks in code. Do you want SVoD, AVoD or BVoD? Apparently DMPs are out but CDPs are in?

Solving for this kind of complexity doesn’t just need a common language, it requires true collaboration and trust between client and agency. But how can our clients trust us with their budgets if they don’t understand what we do with them? A shared understanding of the media landscape that we operate in is the only way to build trust in our specialism.

It also tells us that as specialists, we have forgotten that for most marketers, media is only a fraction of what they do. That it is unrealistic for clients to have the depth of media knowledge that agencies do and that we are paid for just that, our specialism. It’s our job to simplify the complex on their behalf.

As a client recently quipped to me in a panel discussion about story-telling, when it comes to pitching a strategy, a succinct six-slide story is infinitely more useful than 120 slides of data that prove why it’s the right thing to do.

And lastly, it tells us that we all need to be more human and less jargon-y. By showcasing each channel’s superpower in human and relatable terms, we’re making it much easier for our clients to give us the right briefs for their business, shortcutting those painful hours of back and forth over whether or not GenZ do anything other than social or whether £1,000 will really deliver a 120% growth in penetration.

So my call to arms to the industry is this. The world is divided enough. Let’s stop arguing over what divides us and focus instead on building a shared understanding of what brilliant media planning looks like: trust in our specialism, simplifying the complex and focusing on the human.

The results will speak for themselves.

Article originally published in Campaign Magazine UK.