“The New Model Agencies are much more strategically focused”

MARIAM ALI BAIG: The focus of your presentation was on the age of engagement. What is engagement?
JULIAN SAUNDERS: Engagement is a broad philosophy of communications which says that to be effective we have to change our language; that the way to cope with the media explosion and the clutter is to take an approach to marketing that is more human. We have to stop talking about target audiences and start thinking about people. In a situation where consumers have become immune to all the clutter going on, the question is how do you get through it? The answer is to get personal. Instead of advertising and promoting, you invite people, you interact, you amplify. The idea behind this is that good reputation comes from giving people a good experience, which in turn will increase the likelihood of the people who have had that experience recommending your brand.

MAB: What is the new thinking in terms of how to market during a recessionary period?
JS: There’s plenty of evidence from the 1990-92 recession that the companies that continued to advertise were able to buy market share more cheaply. But that was then and I don’t think it necessarily follows that you must keep on advertising in today’s world; this is a new media scene and there might be different solutions for this recession; for example, cutting back on traditional advertising but investing on delivering it on the web. I was speaking to someone from HBL (Habib Bank Limited) and they have launched an innovative financial product whereby you don’t have to buy your car; you can rent it for three years and then give it back to the company. That is an interesting innovation. So it is not just a question of advertising through a recession, it is about coming up with innovations that respond to the pressure on people’s purses. Smart thinking through a recession is better than just throwing money at it. A good example of smart thinking is not to spend all your money on a 40-second commercial; the role of advertising would not be to explain the product, but rather to get people so interested in the product that they will go to your website to find out more. Today websites don’t cost that much to set up and once you have one, you own that media and you can use it to communicate with your customers in any way you want. We are in a situation with the web where a great many of the things are free; there’s a bunch of marketing tools which are free or a whole lot cheaper.

MAB: Why do you say that the distinction between ATL and BTL is meaningless?
JS: There is a quote from one of our great sages in the UK, Jeremy Bullmore, who wrote in From Behind the Scenes in Advertising that “we build an image (of a brand) as birds build nests, from the scraps and straws we chance upon.” What he means is that a brand is essentially a collection of associations, memories and experiences that take place in the minds of people; it is not a set of stimuli that marketers put into the marketplace in the form of ads. It entirely happens inside the mind of a person; therefore everything you do has an effect on your brand. Don’t think about the brand in terms of doing a bunch of marketing activities, think about the brand as a person and ask about the ways in which this person would behave when it meets and touches its consumer. By asking that question, rather than what promotion you should do this year, you get to a completely different answer. This also partly explains why I called my company, The Joined Up Company, because it is about a philosophy which says successful brands adopt a joined up approach to their marketing communications. They think of everything as an opportunity to build their brand.

MAB: How different is a joined up approach to a 360-degree one?
JS: We hear people say that we need to be integrated or more 360 or something like that. But you have to be careful that ‘360 degrees’ is not misinterpreted as in “let’s use lots and lots of channels.” That is a tactic; an expression of a solution. The question is not, can we have more 360; that may be an outcome. The question is, what will influence my brand? One of the things that stands in the way of companies doing this effectively is that they often work in silos. They have an advertising person responsible for advertising, someone for design, customer service, trade relations, in-store marketing, etc. The right approach is to take a consumer’s eye view of all the different things that could influence the consumer to choose a brand. Looked at that way, the marketing teams will come back with different answers about what levers to pull.

MAB: Do you see a return to the full service agency?
JS: In the growth phase there was enough money for all these specialists to feed off and argue that to be great at sales promotions, brand activation, digital, PR, advertising or media, you had to concentrate on that area, and that’s true. But the big theoretical problem with that is the fact that the consumer doesn’t experience those specialisations; the consumer only experiences a bunch of different touch points that have to be coherent and add up. The new start ups in the UK have all come to market saying they are not an advertising agency; they are positioning themselves as solving business problems with creativity or as being media neutral. Whatever the language, it is saying the same thing.

MAB: So they are not saying full service agency?
JS: They are saying full service thinking. The new generation is going up a level and the new model agencies are much more strategically focused.

MAB: In this scenario what happens to the Ogilvys of this world?
JS: They will keep evolving. They have a more organic approach towards their clients’ business. WPP and Ogilvy have an almost menu-like approach to this. Ogilvy at their best will listen very carefully to what their clients want and then put together a team that works for them. Specialisation has taught us that quality comes from people being brilliant at what they do. The trick is to get all these people that are brilliant at marketing, PR, advertising and direct marketing to work together. You now have different solutions present in the marketplace. It’s a constantly evolving picture; the market will segment offering different solutions for different clients.

This interview was first published in the July-August 2009 issue of Aurora.