Headspace Feels Like the Answer To Rethinking the Media Agency
This article was originally published on LinkedIn.
This month we reached a bit of a milestone with the agency and given the ambition when we began, it made us take a look at whether we’ve really done things differently after all.
Starting Media by Mother was a positive kick in the backside. Beginning from scratch, with no clients, no infrastructure, and no tools, forces you to get into the weeds and makes you a little humble about what you thought you knew.
The point of starting again was to create the space to deliver on the things which feel like the value exchange clients are looking for; better strategy, analytics, insights, content development, and creativity. But we also wanted to be buying media so that what we planned to do, gets done.
Our view was that the media agency product is limited by the business model from which it was born. No one is paying more for a media agency today but if we could mess with the model a little, there’s a better chance to just be better.
Three things created space. They are not exactly revelations that nobody else has uncovered. But their impact on the ability to change has been significant.
They are also not going to work for everyone. Do these things as an agency, and you will actually make less money, not more.
But if the real assets of an agency are the smart people within it and the work they do, maybe in the longer term, this model will pay off. We are betting that it will.
Eliminating Trading Income
Media agencies were built on the benefits that come from cash flow. It started with the interest gained from clients paying their media bills at 30 days but then the agency not paying the media until 60 days. It expanded with preferential deals between networks and agencies and more recently, non-disclosed data and inventory deals.
This line of profit allowed agencies to cut fees to silly levels for a while because you could still make money regardless of what clients paid. You just needed enough billings flowing through the business.
But that is a supply economy upside and media today is a demand economy. That makes trading income profit less predictable. If profitability declines and trading income is the cause, that limits an agency’s ability to invest in people and resources; the bit the client’s fees are paying for.
If you are not careful, you can quickly get to a point where time spent on creating income from trading activities is worth more than time spent on clients.
From day 1 we wanted Media by Mother to be in the business of media buying. But we designed our infrastructure to eliminate the ability to manipulate how money and inventory interact. That takes a huge line of revenue away and seems limiting. But it has been the opposite. By making media a utility and a 100% transparent pass-through cost, we put positive pressure on accountability and being able to create work that works.
That lens has determined how we have invested in the people within the agency. If we want to be something more akin to consultants who can also land the plane, that means an agency full of folks who can deliver, and importantly, are happy to be held accountable for that. Not everyone is down with that as a job description.
Media Buying
This term in itself is a misnomer today.
Thousands upon thousands of line items constitute a media ‘buy’. We lazily rant about fraud and blame digital for waste, but the buying task is often handed to relatively inexperienced people. And we don’t give anyone involved in the process, the space to think. Instead, we let a piece of code take responsibility for how money moves around the internet.
Get buried in how the internet works, and it’s soon clear that the rigor behind data entry is as critical as great creativity. It determines whether marketing is an investment or you are just setting money on fire.
As we built out a buying practice, we were clear that it would be run by Analysts, not Buyers. You can’t separate analytics and activation today. Analysts determine how strategic audiences are built accurately across all platforms and keep a daily eye on how the campaign is delivering. They monitor what is real and what is not. They set the rules for how and what gets optimized and feed outputs back into planning.
This structure gives everyone involved in the buying process the confidence to focus on each part of activation and get it right. They can trust the inputs and know the expectations for outputs. Solving for a lack of headspace and burnout in activation also avoids expensive mistakes.
Education
It’s irresponsible to leave everyone’s advancement in knowledge to lunch and learns.
If you drop the rigor in what your people know, you move from being in the professional services business to just services.
Our goal has been the development of better horizontal knowledge for everyone. It doesn’t mean everyone becomes a generalist but it does mean they have better context for how the thing they do, works with everything else.
When we started we created an educational curriculum of around 10 parts that are included in everyone’s employment agreement, regardless of their role. For each part of the curriculum that people complete, their base salary increases by $1,000.
Some are books and you need to write a short thesis about what the topic covers and its implications for media today.
Some are platform certifications (Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc.). These are both so you know how the internet works but also because these companies are the biggest research organizations in the world. But that information is only useful if you know how to find it.
There’s also a bible on creativity — Hey Whipple, Squeeze This. you read it and then spend time with a Creative Director to understand how those principles are applied to idea development.
I made sure I did all of these when we set Media by Mother up. If I have no idea of their application, then it’s a little rich to ask everyone else to do them. And as we have had new people join, they are now helping to add to that list with their ideas of things we need to learn.
But probably the most meaningful educational technology we have the benefit of as a start-up is the table. Proximity has had a huge impact on everyday learning. Just mixing folks up rather than sitting them in silos creates an always-on learning environment that no course or book can emulate.
So have we really done things differently? We have created a media agency and we do what clients expect a media agency to do. But if these three areas create the focus for a culture of learning and development, if people have the time to expand and apply what they know, the space to do work that works, and be proud of what they achieve, then maybe we have.
If you have been thinking that there must be a way to do media differently, get in touch with us at hello@mediabymother.com
