Mudra Mumbai is a full-service agency again. It recently brought media buyers and planners back into its fold. Media planners have teamed up with strategic planners to offer clients the synergies of integrated brand planning and a more holistic way of looking at brand communications, according to the agency. Mudra’s media specialist brand OMS doesn’t exist any more, and a separate umbrella brand takes its place—Mudra MAX.
Globally, however, most specialists knock the old rebundled agency model and espouse new open architecture models based on collaboration across creative and media disciplines in a fluid project-based manner. Their view: Full service doesn’t help media specialization. Also, media decisions will be affected since media planners work closely with account planners, who prefer traditional media (print, TV, radio) solutions with less accent on non-traditional (direct, PR, events, digital etc.). Four ad and media experts debate the pros and cons of rebundling, or going back to the full-service agency model.
Meenakshi Madhvani
Managing partner, Spatial Access Media Solution Pvt. Ltd.
Yes
Meenakshi Madhvani
The hurry to launch media independents was triggered off in India when I set up Carat way back in 1997. By 1998 every agency had realised that there was a business opportunity in setting up media independents and all the media departments of agencies were spun off into media specialists.
The intervening decade has packed in close to 25 years of action and it’s time to change the model again. The media landscape has changed so radically it is scary. The market has become more competitive and consumers more demanding and less forgiving. Media fragmentation has accelerated to the point where inflation has to be examined every 6 months despite the fact that channel rates are going down every fortnight!
A marketer needs to be able to pivot on a penny and take decisions knowing that the only certainty is change. In such a scenario, it gives the brand a huge advantage if the media, market and consumer insights are all locate under one roof. It empowers the partners responsible for the health of the brand by ensuring they share knowledge of each specialist domain with each other. It gives the brand an edge when it comes to prioritising concepts and implementation to build synergy for the brand.
For agencies too the interaction across different disciplines stimulates ideas and concepts. More than anything else it will force creative teams to think beyond the myopia of 30 secs! Something that is sorely lacking today.