Digital Media Planning Version 1.0

What defines digital media, how much of digital media strategy is just fluff and does having digital and traditional media agencies in the same network competing for the same budgets pose any business dilemma? Debbie Cai quizzes the experts.

Media Contacts, the global interactive media network of Havas Media, launched here in late November 2005 and Marketing met with its worldwide CEO Don Epperson and chief strategy officer Anthony Rhind who were recently in town.

"If the functionality requires technical expertise, generally it only gets picked up by a small percentage of a population. Until it doesn't require deep explanation then it won't make that next step," Rhind says, encapsulating a concern marketers have when adopting digital marketing channels. He illustrates the point with the example of mobile phones, where applications are bountiful but there are many who still do not know how to set up their voice mailboxes. He says it is also a significant challenge in advertising because "you're selling a product benefit which may be hard to realise because of consumer familiarity or they just don't understand it because you try to put it into a visual and limited text ad format".

Epperson and Rhind agree that agencies and marketers alike are constantly grappling with how to successfully leverage digital media but at this early stage, no thanks to the lack of robust measurement systems, the best they can do is make informed assumptions.

"How much of the channel allocation process is driven by research and how much of it is just having to come up with a strategy and make an assumption based on that strategy? We all would love a black box that tells us accurately where to put every dollar - that's very challenging. You can do insight work but the problem is people will tell you what they think you want to hear or what they want others to believe about them. Likewise with observation, the question is, is it done in a natural setting? We try to improve the chances that our solutions are the correct ones," Rhind says.

We then tackled the issue of big agency networks owning both traditional and non-traditional media buying agencies which, because they have separate bottom lines to watch, may not be keeping an eye on the best solution for the client.

Rhind feels marketers used to be able to reach 8% of a population with a relatively finite number of TV spots, which is a strategy that has broken down due to fragmentation, and which was already pushing people beyond TV. With digital media, because marketers can attribute back to an individual action the causality of media aspects leading up to it, "you may not know whether it was the ad on Google or Yahoo that was the most important but you know both occurred before a sale and you saw a sales increase of XYZ", he says. The medium then stops being a marketing one but a sales driver which is valued differently.

"What's good for Havas, is instead of just getting 15 million, we suddenly get money from other areas that would maybe be invested in property or sales people because it's direct selling. Instead of getting one million out of the budget, MC now gets three million on top of that," Rhind says. "It improves our operating income and grows our clients' business."

Says Epperson, the challenges are not country but client specific - some clients in Santiago are more advanced than those in Paris, since the rules in the emerging markets are not as defined, thus more innovative marketing techniques can be used.