Lisa Seward had been media director at Minneapolis-based advertising agency Fallon for 10 years when she left in January to start her own media strategy consultancy, Mod. The name is a fashionable tag, she says, meant to connote a modern way of melding the advertising disciplines of “creative” and “media”—that is, the practice of developing the creative work and the traditionally separate practice of determining where in the media that creative work should be placed in order to influence the right people. Seward wants to take the wall between those two departments down.
{Q} In what way is a more ‘modern’ approach to media practices needed now?
{A} The reason that I’m now getting into media strategy is the incredible explosion of options in the media arena—options for consumers, I mean. Now you don’t just need to watch three TV channels and read a couple magazines. You can engage with information or entertainment at your whim. You’re in control now. It’s a very different time than when advertisers and large media companies were in control.
What that means is the understanding of consumers’ media preferences, habits, choices is so much more fundamental now to the development of the message. Now, you—you being the marketer or the person who’s creating advertising—need to understand media strategy before you even think about what the message could be. So, ‘Let’s look at who we’re trying to target and their habits, and let’s put that knowledge inside the development of what we’re going to say.’
{Q} You posted a blog entry on Media Daily News saying ‘It’s possible that media and creative have become the same thing.’
{A} Yes, which was intentionally provocative, but it derives from experience that I had in my last year at Fallon, where we took on, for the first time, a large account [NBC-Universal], the scope of which was solely media planning and placement. Fallon is an agency that is known for its creative product—the actual messages, the ads—and for the first time, the media group at Fallon, which I was then in charge of, brought in a large piece of business that Fallon would never do the ads for.
And working on that, we began to see that we tread awfully close to being the creatives. We might say for instance, ‘Instead of the typical tune-in ad approach, let’s do this kind of a contest, or let’s build a Web site that does such and such.’ And we would be coming up with the core ideas.
Now, we weren’t executing them, which is why I can’t say that we became the creatives. But we would brief the people who would ultimately execute the ideas, and they would go off and execute them; the idea generation was at times emanating from the media group. I really believe that the most creative of media people can go toe to toe today with the most creative of creative people. It’s a really freeing kind of realization, and it allowed me the confidence to get into this business.
{Q} You’ve talked about ‘today’s media realities’ and ‘more channels’ for reaching consumers. The Internet is the first thing that comes to mind, but that’s already starting to seem like an old reality, so I wonder if you mean something else.
{A} I think that we as marketers need to be prepared for the future sooner than consumers, and we have not been in that position for the last five years or so. I think consumers are ahead. Consumers found YouTube before marketers found YouTube, for instance. YouTube is a phenomenon that’s a year old, 15 months old? We can almost not remember a time that it didn’t exist. Consumers discovered it, consumers populated it with content. At the time that it took off, YouTube wasn’t equipped to sell advertising, so even if a marketer were smart enough to want to jump on, the infrastructure didn’t exist to get in there and do something with it.
MySpace is another example of a phenomenon that consumers led, in that case typically younger consumers. Marketers jumped on fairly quickly, but their way of jumping on would today be judged fairly awkward, in that brands just started creating pages as if they were people or personalities. But the real users of MySpace found that in many cases disingenuous, interruptive, and said, ‘What are you doing with my MySpace?’ Which ultimately led to people coming up with better solutions.
Those are both examples of developments, but when I’m talking about today’s media realities, I guess I might have meant tomorrow’s, and what the Internet is going to bring us. When truly searchable video is available on the Internet, and when your computer and your Internet interface are occurring on your television, with your remote control in your hand, it’s all going to converge. And the reality will be that consumers can engage with what they want when they want, in the way they want to bring it in, with or without ads. They’ll have all the control.
So you better have an original idea that someone chooses to let into their life, because they will be doing all the choosing.
