Why?

Why?

Anybody in the media industry who ever had me as their coach at an AMASA Workshop, would remember I always advocated that teams create a poster at the start of the weekend and stick it in a prominent position in their work-zone. A poster with only one word on it. The word that would inform all their subsequent strategic media decisions and enable their thought process to stay on track.

The word “WHY?”.

If you don’t know why you’re doing something, your media strategy will just end up doing what you did last year. Or worse still, doing what everyone else did last year. And of course, given the procurement imperative, you’ll be under pressure to do it cheaper.

Every media strategy is a specific response to a marketing communication challenge and a corresponding set of marketing objectives. Or at least it should be, because when it comes to media strategy, if you don’t know where you are going then any road will take you there.

Even the Cheshire Cat in Alice in Wonderland knew that.

Or perhaps even more important when it comes to optimizing media investment, if you don’t know where you’re going, you’ll never know when you’ve arrived.  Spending the media budget cost-efficiently can never be an outcome. Cost-efficiency is a process input that enables the strategist to balance the exposure dynamics of the campaign. To create more media-pressure.

But remember …

Media-pressure without results is called wastage.

There are only 3 possible outcomes to any advertising campaign. Only 3!

1. It worked.
2. It didn’t work.
3. I don’t know.

If you don’t know “why” you are engaging in a particular media activity, then you cannot possibly know whether it worked or not. It is truly staggering to discover how many advertisers have “I don’t know” as their default position.

The recently published WFA white paper on Creating a global culture of Marketing Effectiveness defines marketing effectiveness as a process of improving business performance from marketing activities which is made easier and more impactful by 4 contributing factors. People. Process. Data Tools and Measurement and Focus. Focus is defined as a clear vision, complete with a roadmap that communicates how each step will create business value and help create organisational alignment.

Complete with a roadmap. That’s the thing about a road. If you build it – they will come.

Interestingly though, the report concludes that marketers globally agree they are “better at delivering our plans than we are at understanding why we are doing the activity in the first place”. In other words, marketers are too focused on procurement parameters and the tactical delivery of activity, often at the bottom end of the funnel.

Media strategy has been eroded to the point where implementation and pricing, rather than in-market effectiveness, are the primary focus. And yet, when it comes to effective media strategy, the phrase in the Warc Future of Media Strategy 2022 report that resonated most with strategists globally is “going upstream to create a downstream solution”.

The recently published Warc Future of Media Strategy 2023 builds on that narrative. Over the next 12 months strategists (54%) continue to see “working on upstream business problems” as their single biggest opportunity for positive business growth. Up from 39% in 2021.  

Unfortunately, this same whitepaper reports that reduced compensation for strategic services, as a result of inflationary pressures, is the single biggest threat to strategists globally. Only 44% of strategists globally expect the size of their strategic team to increase in the coming 12 months (down from 65% in 2021).

More work for less pay is rarely an effective incentive for excellence.

Marketers and strategists agree. We have lost Focus. We need to go “upstream” to create clear roadmaps for marketing, advertising and media so that we can deliver on the vision, measure the outcomes and create value downstream.

But we can’t do that without investing in people. Advertisers and agency management alike.

Which brings us back to the issue of media industry training and mentoring. Transformation without skills-transfer and training is not empowerment. It’s abandonment.

When I gaze into the abyss of terminal inertia which has beset the various bodies traditionally dedicated to skills transfer and sustainable development for the media industry in Mzansi, the abyss stares back at me. And it has only one question.

Why?