The Key Messages from mediaPro 2010

Despite the best efforts of London Underground, this year’s mediaPro 2010 at London’s Olympia was a great success. The two day exhibition included a talk from our very own MD Mike Colling on how integrated planning helped the RSPCA quadruple response, double ROI and recruit new donors. However, the main aim for the mc&c team in attendance was to seek out new ideas and innovations. Our objective - to help give our clients the cutting edge for the year to come and continue mc&c’s approach of placing innovation and new thinking at the heart of our business.

Indeed, as ever in media, new ideas and thinking were not in short supply during the two days. The challenge in fact was to cut through the noise and find the key messages that really will stand the test of time to ensure our media approach is business effective not just a pretty PowerPoint slide.

So, here are the team’s two day highlights:-

Day 1: Tim Brooks MD of Guardian News & Media put it bluntly when he predicted that print media will most likely not exist post 2025. Lovers of the press fear not. As Brooks stated, the biggest growth area for the Guardian is mobile readers, despite their small share of total audience at present. The trends all point upwards for in this technology, with a world of smart phone dominance and mobile online interaction surely not that far off. The challenge for advertisers is to recognise how audience engagement changes with this medium and how best to make advertising effective on this platform.

The sense of being in the middle of a paradigm shift in business thinking, as the reality of an online world comes to fruition, was further brought home by Peter Fenton, investor and board member of Twitter. Fenton provided a tour de force narrative of the growth of the ‘global village’ represented by the growth in social media and most importantly, the emergence of what he see as the new consumer. This consumer is connected (online), empowered (with numerous social network connections) and impatient when it comes to an online response. While crucially the challenge is to reach out to those who have the greatest influence in this environment and engage them with a comprehensive engagement strategy. The challenge for brands, therefore, is to recognise this new communication environment, where listening to consumers is the key to really engaging them and old top down models are a thing of the past.

Day 2: Surely one of the highlights of the key note speeches, and music to our ears, was Roy Sutherland’s speech on behavioural economics. mc&c has been championing the insight behavioural economics can offer our clients for some time now and we are already converted! The challenge we face is to take this rather abstract thinking and ensure it’s made concrete as a media strategy, put into action and delivers results.

The middle of the day saw the enthusiastic advocacy of content led marketing strategy by Paul Troy of Barclaycard, following the success of the ‘waterslide’ campaign. For Troy this is the future, where consumers come to engage you instead of you constantly reaching out to them – driven by a content idea that naturally lends itself to cross platform delivery.

However, Troy’s questioning of the push advertising model, although compelling and certainly a key development of the last few years, suffers from one key question. What’s the nature of your business? Not all businesses have the budget or the natural flexibility to offer great content. Indeed, these questions were powerfully brought home by Nick Emmel of Dare, who questioned the need by advertisers to always chase the new idea or technology for their campaigns. As Emmel made clear, yes, these innovations can be great and the choice over whelming, but don’t be suckered into thinking that because they exist you have to use them. The key is to look at the media problem and answer the question ‘what’s the best solution?’ This could be the latest online development or it may be using press ads and TV. Choice doesn’t mean choose everything, it means selecting the best channels for your campaign driven by knowledge of what delivers, an insight that mc&c have long held to with our emphasis on data led media strategies that test, analyse and deliver.


And the key message we took away from our two days?

This is an industry built on shifting social trends, technological change and ever changing commercial pressures, where new ideas and innovation are the keys to ensuring our clients get the best use and value out of their media activity. In this sense we work in an industry shaped by change.

However, we are also shaped by continuity. The recent attempts at social revolt in Iran may have been aided by new the new social media of Twitter, but the 1979 revolution was fuelled by speeches recorded on cassette. As Billy Joel sang, “we didn’t start the fire”. Media innovation and change is constant throughout societies across the globe.

Nevertheless, it’s also a commercial environment where you need to be careful not to lose your head. Despite the huge changes over the last 30 years, key values still remain vital for success:

 Understand your business
 Understand your audience and
 Understand what you want to achieve

Innovation and good old fashioned media commonsense are the real skills we as an agency can offer our clients. The world keeps on turning …



Jamie Cregan
Media Planner Buyer