Mark McCraith is a Business Director and Head of Media at TrinityP3 Marketing Management Consultants. Here Mark talks about his experience both leading major media agencies and being a major advertiser as CMO of FCA. He reflects on the importance of building mutually respectful relationships, not just between the agency and the client or the agency and the media but also between the advertiser and the media and how this can pay dividends for all involved.
You can listen to the podcast here:
Follow Managing Marketing on Soundcloud or iTunes
Transcription:
Darren:
Welcome to Managing Marketing and today I’m sitting in the RACV club in Melbourne, in the billiards room, you can probably hear them playing in the background. And I get an opportunity to sit down and have a chat with the new Head of Media at TrinityP3 and a long-term friend of mine, Mark McCraith. Welcome, Mark.
Mark:
Thanks Darren, good to see you.
Darren:
Well look, you know, I grew up here and we’ve known each other for quite a few years but we’ve spent some time going around Melbourne having a chat to the media owners and certainly some of the advertisers and I’m really interested because in those conversations you bought to that a perspective from both a marketer’s perspective which you’ve been, and also an agency, media agency’s perspective. And I really wanted to focus on getting an understanding from you having been in that role, what is a great relationship to have with the media owners because it’s not transactional, is it?
Mark:
No, it’s beyond that. So the best relationships with the media owners are ones that are built on trust. You honour your word that you’re going to give them money, a transaction is going to occur and you innovate and you want to test them with ideas because media owners like being tested and like coming up with new innovations that they would on sell to other clients in future years. And the best relationships and dealings I’ve had with media owners are built on trust and built on innovation and you are trying to break new ground.
Darren:
Well that’s one of the things I really noticed was that first of all there was a really close relationship between you and the media owners and you know, we’re talking about senior people, CEOs and national sales directors and the like, right? There was a level of trust and understanding but what I really enjoyed was the excitement in their voice when they were talking about projects and ways that they really helped their clients and their clients being agencies and advertisers, achieve their results. They really got genuinely excited about their contribution to driving performance.
Mark:
Well it’s not about cost per thousand, cost per acquisition, it’s about innovation and I remember when I was at Jeep, we sponsored the London Olympics and that inspired the car dealer network to say Jeep is really serious. I couldn’t have done it without their help with Channel Nine at the time, that really inspired the dealer network, the CEO of Jeep to get all his dealers engaged to say, “You guys are going to make history for us as car dealers because we’re going to be seeing the Olympics”.
And I remember they were all so excited, the car dealers, when we told them about it. We’d bought the Olympics and I thought, “Oh, that’s good.” Now, it wasn’t purely based on costs, it was about building a brand and building a brand to the point where it was a leader in the market perceptually.
Darren:
So, as you said before, the media owners love the opportunity to innovate and do something new for their clients, right? I do notice in a lot of the conversations that from a media owner’s perspective, they preferred the relationships where they got more access or they worked directly with the advertisers than through an agency or even worse, not through an agency but the agency was acting almost like a wall between them and the clients.
And I remember one of them, I can’t remember which media owner said, you know, “Not you, Mark, you always brought your clients along to the party”. But what do you think drives that or do you think that’s right that the agency should be fostering a direct relationship with the client?
Mark:
Well I always took the view that a client and an agency are in a partnership together, as you are in partnership with the media owner and it’s best to bring everyone together. I’ve found that the client tells the media owner something different, a different story that sometimes they’ve put in a brief or their marketing manager has put in a brief .
And it’s really good to get the CEO of the client in front of the CEO of the media vendor so they can put a name to a face when something goes wrong, they can help when something is needed and I remember I took a number of my clients to Maxis to meet the media owners and they accelerated their spending with that person or that vendor because the media owner was ringing them up, “How’s sales going?” The media wants you or your client to succeed because it’s in their interest because you’re going to come back and repeat purchase.
Darren:
So what do you think drives a mindset amongst some agencies or even some people in agencies that somehow their job is to be the intermediary between the two and not the partner, not the facilitator of those relationships?
Mark:
I think it’s cultures. Some agencies are different. Some think that they know it all and they can be the client’s best friend, the best knowledge and solution. I don’t know, I’m not that smart to know everything but clearly if you’ve got smart people in the room with the media owner, the client, ideas will start popping out and the client will say, “Yes, I can do that, or I can do that”.
So little things. I remember when I had the craft business years ago at J. Walter Thompson. He used to take movie tickets to the CEO, the CMO because she had young kids. And that was just appreciative. And the cinema company one day might have got a booking but not straight away but she appreciated that you know, Disney on Ice or things like that.
Darren:
Well there was also a way for the marketer to experience the medium because you know marketers, they, it’s a busy existence, you’ve got a busy life, you probably are not necessarily consuming as much media as the average person is because your work life balance is hopelessly out of balance.
Mark:
Well I remember with Jeep and Fiat and Alfa particularly; the dealers’ wives are part of the business.
Darren:
They’re certainly important decision makers.
Mark:
So when they are seeing your advertising all the time, they tell their husband or wives or whatever.
Darren:
Their partners.
Mark:
Partners, that they’re seeing the ads. “I saw another Jeep ad. I saw another Fiat ad”. So that reinforces what you’re doing as a media buyer, as the agency and as the client. And I had so many wives of dealers come and say, “Gee, I love your new ad”. I said, “Great, have you seen it?” “Oh, heaps!”.
It’s perception management and through, I remember I sponsored 60 Minutes and the dealers would say, “When should I look out?” “Just watch 60 Minutes on a Sunday and you’ll see it. You’ll see it there”. So it was like a landmark of the dealership on High Street, Strathfield Road, saying, “I’m here. Here’s my four-million-dollar complex”. This is the same strategy we used for TV sponsorships while we did that.
Darren:
Well I think you know, everyone gets a better understanding of what the client’s trying to achieve when you really get an opportunity to at least get under their skin, if not into their business. So I can only imagine for the media owners, their sales team, the agency team, the more you’re exposed to that, the better it is.
Mark:
Yeah totally. Like, your car dealer today, he’s got seven or eight franchises, he hasn’t got time to read all dealer bulletins so above the line communication is really important.
Darren:
Do you think it’s also a measure of the level of transparency or trust that an agency feels comfortable introducing their client to the media owners? Because I have heard some agencies say to me, “Oh, look if I take the client to meet the media owners, the sales team, they’re just going to go around me to the client and undermine me or they’re going to be pitching stuff to the client or hassling the client all the time”. But in actual fact, what they’re trying to do is control the relationship.
Mark:
Yes, I took the opposite view where I used to say to the client, “Come and meet such and such, we’re going to have a coffee, or a lunch or a beer after work”. And I’d pay, deliberately, so it wasn’t the media owner always having to and the media owners used to look at me strange like, “Why are you paying?” “‘Because I’m transparent”.
So one of the things is, it’s always good to build a relationship with a client and the media owner because sometimes they need a favour like recently in the U.K. they ran out of chicken so you can imagine what that phone call would have been, “Hey, I’ve run out of chicken, KFC need to get off TV or off print or whatever they were doing”.
Darren:
Okay so taking that example and extrapolating it forward, you know a lot of time is spent by procurement teams for instance, trying to get the lowest possible cost, driving CPMs down, trying to get the best deal possible. Is what you’re saying that you could actually get better value if you’re not just treating the relationship as a cost commodity relationship, that it is actually a partnership where there’s quid pro quos on both sides.
Mark:
Yes, I remember a famous cosmetics company, won’t name it, and it was known to drive the cost down. Now I’m a World War Two fan and I’m watching the History channel and a repeat on Channel 7 late at night and here was this beautiful ad with a woman putting her make-up and something about Hitler.
Darren:
In a World War Two show about Hitler, yeah.
Mark:
So the context…
Darren:
I’m sure that there were a lot of women watching that show or maybe they were targeting men that like to dress in drag.
Mark:
The context is just as important as the low cost. Now, media vendors, media owners will look after most people if you’re honest and straight with them. If you’re going to get low cost to drive them into the ground, you’ll be put anywhere that meets the low cost factor which means you can have a scatter gun approach which has defeated the whole purpose of what you’re trying to do.
Darren:
Or are you going to get all the inventory that they can’t sell to anyone else?
Mark:
Yes! Like late night TV or midnight to dawn.
Darren:
But in actual fact the real value, and especially in television, radio, print is the fact that they have content that they produce themselves that they can do things with.
Mark:
Oh yes.
Darren:
Right?
Mark:
Yes.
Darren:
That is money can’t buy as far as brand exposure, awareness and even customer engagement.
Mark:
I’ve been watching Married at First Sight lately so Peroni features heavily in that but they’re not a sponsor.
Darren:
Yeah.
Mark:
So it’s probably the front bar with the three guys having a beer.
Darren:
Good examples of product placement even built in to the sets.
Mark:
Yes, and it’s not about the cost you pay for that, it’s about the impact you have. And the impact is far greater.
Darren:
Well it’s not a transactional thing, is it?
Mark:
No.
Darren:
Because you could only do that by building relationships.
Mark:
Yes.
Darren:
And really working out the contribution that adds to the viewer or the, the consumers’ experience?
Mark:
Yeah.
Darren:
But also adds value for both the producer, the brand and the media.
Mark:
Yes. Well, if you look at what Bunnings to do with their magazine, ‘Better Homes and Gardens’, what a natural…
Darren:
Fit, yeah.
Mark:
The show, the show is about homes, gardening, Friday nights. When do you go shopping? Saturday, Sunday? Perfect example.
Darren:
Yeah, and that’s not something you can put on the media plan and work out a cost per thousand on, is it?
Mark:
Well you can work out the cost but you’ve got to evaluate what is the overall impact of that coming to the business. Now I’m sure that if you ask someone at 7 or Bunnings, they’d say, it’s delivering.
Darren:
Yeah. Well, clearly, they’ve been doing it for quite a few years.
Mark:
Yes, they have.
Darren:
So I can’t imagine a switched on organisation like Bunnings continue to support something that’s not putting money in the till.
Mark:
Yes, exactly!
Darren:
So the other area is, and I touched on it there before, media these days, or media providers, really fit into two categories, don’t they? There are those that actually produce content, and I mentioned radio, television, print. Or whether it’s digital print or traditional print. And then there’s the media aggregators who really just take everyone else’s content and are selling advertising in that space.
In that we’re talking the Amazons, the Facebooks, the Googles. The relationship must be quite different between the media providers that own and produce content and those that are really just aggregating everyone else’s content, is it? Or is it the same?
Mark:
It’s different because the owners are curators, trusted environments, like before we were having coffee reading the Herald Sun, are we going to go online and believe the Daily Mail is the same as the Herald Sun? The aggregators are made for the cost minimisation target market.
Darren:
Yes.
Mark:
The primary media channel source of it is curating the content that you want to watch.
Darren:
There’s a big cost involved in curating.
Mark:
Exactly. Exactly. So you know, everyone’s saying Married at First Sight or the Age or the Sydney Morning Herald, the Daily Telegraph or The Australian are brilliant sources of information for their desired audiences and they cost. They have to employ it, print it, make it, whatever, and here’s someone who’s picking it up and just putting a different word on it and changing it and trying to sell off that he is that primary media target.
Darren:
It’s quite bizarre isn’t it, because the aggregators are not actually paying for the content, they’re literally lifting it and I think the example I shared with you, Paul McIntire said to me, “It’d be like the ABC Four Corners show which runs for 45 minutes. Imagine if a commercial station lifted that, sold 15 minutes of advertising, ran the same Four Corners show with 15 minutes of ads sprinkled through it and kept all the money themselves. That’s pretty much what Facebook and Google are doing, isn’t it?”
Mark:
Well, when you told me that story, I thought that gee they would like to do that.
Darren:
The commercial stations or Foxtel?
Mark:
Or someone would like to do that and…
Darren:
But could you imagine the outcry?
Mark:
The cost would be negligible to run the ads!
Darren:
Of course. No, it would be all profit.
Mark:
It would be all profit. So this is why I still can’t believe that Facebook comes out and says, “Sorry we’ve got all these fraud users”, and their share price went up.
Darren:
Yeah. It’s almost a billion people were fake users. Fake accounts.
Mark:
So I think it’s got to come around to people investing in trusted news worthy environments primarily.
Darren:
But you said a minute ago, those aggregators offer a very low cost per thousand, low cost per thousand eyeball environment. You can literally buy a thousand impressions much cheaper on Facebook or Google or YouTube, than you can with any of the traditional media.
Mark:
But you’d lose control. You’d lose control over where you are in the ecosystem so you look at YouTube and everyone’s saying, “I’m pulling off YouTube because it’s got this or that”, or whatever reason why they don’t want it. Why are they still on it? Because it’s cheap but they’re pulling off every now and again because they’re frightened about what’s going to be uncovered.
Darren:
Yeah.
Mark:
I think Sky News ran Andrew Bolt’s show the other night when George Pell was sentenced ad free because they were worried about backlash from the advertisers appearing in the show. That’s commercial sense.
Darren:
Yeah.
Mark:
To do that. So aggregated is a) a necessary evil for agencies because they help them deliver their promises but at detriment….
Darren:
Well it’s certainly a way of filling in the gaps, isn’t it?
Mark:
Yes.
Darren:
But what about when we move to a whirl because I read the other day that digital display or digital advertising in the U.S. has outstripped traditional media channels. So it’s not about filling in the gaps anymore, it is the main game, you know?
Mark:
Yeah, it is.
Darren:
Where does that leave traditional media who have the role of paying for the content, building an audience, building a community that trust them and engage with their media?
Mark:
I think it’s quite interesting, I saw a similar chart where the big, the fame group, the Facebook, Amazon,…
Darren:
Google.
Mark:
Google, are spending more money on TV traditional advertising for their business. So traditional media has its place and like you can work out all the comparisons concerning if you spent 5 million dollars on digital versus 5 million on a Super Bowl ad, which is going to have the biggest impact? I think the Super Bowl ad might.
Darren:
Well after that Cambridge analytica it was ironic that Facebook basically did advertising out of home and print.
Mark:
Yes.
Darren:
The two media that everyone says are dying, well, and not out of home but print. Out of home is booming. I mean, out of home’s unbelievable and the technology innovations with digital serving, digital displays are unbelievable.
Mark:
But you look at the KFC example when I was in London last year, this time, when KFC ran out of chicken, they apologised with a print ad.
Darren:
Yeah.
Mark:
Facebook apologised with a print ad. So you’ve got to have the starting of the stimulus to then play off into the digital channel.
Darren:
There’s an integrity about doing something in print.
Mark:
It’s like a letter versus an email.
Darren:
Yeah.
Mark:
A hard copy. You’ve written it, your letter too. So it’s that same tactile experience that you need one stage or another. I always remember when I started at JWT and television has sight, sound, emotion and a motion. Now not many media have four things.
Darren:
Yes.
Mark:
So it still holds true to me and I’ve been accused of loving TV but I know it works. I know it works from when I worked at Fiat Chrysler.
Darren:
That’s the point though, and sorry, you just picked up when you were working at Fiat Chrysler. You weren’t just investing in television because it was television, you were actually measuring the performance of that investment in changing behaviour to get people to either go to the website or do something off the back of it.
Mark:
We had a very sophisticated model. It’s all very well having a dashboard but what insights do you get out of a dashboard? So we could work out, for every hundred UVs, we’d sell 1.2 Jeeps.
Darren:
Yeah.
Mark:
We started with Fiat, we sold for every hundred, 0.4 of a Fiat. Now, I know they’re small but half a car is not a full car. We got up to 0.8 and that’s where we thought the ceiling was. We got it to one and it was good but we had a benchmark where Jeep was overachieving and we lifted the high tide with the other two. So from that, navigated through just simple Google analytics. All our leakages we followed up on leads with our dealers to get them following up on leads so someone answered a request. We lowered the cost per unit sold.
Darren:
But look, Mark, the reason I bring it up is a lot of consumer packaged goods marketers say to me, “Oh well, you know, we spend this money on advertising and then it’s sold through retailers and we really have no idea what the direct impact is”. But it’s a bit of a cop out isn’t it? Because if you think it through, there’s ways of knowing what your impact and your investments should be doing.
Mark:
Oh look, I’ve had some indirect dealings with people like packaged goods people.
Darren:
Yeah.
Mark:
Through Chemist Warehouse. Now, I get it. If I go to Chemist Warehouse and I give you a hundred and twenty grand, my product will be sold in the store in the two weeks, I’ll get mentioned in their advertising, great, happy days! Where I can guarantee this sale and exposure and they take the risks in buying it? Mind you, if it doesn’t sell, I’ve got a problem next time, so I have to continuing reinvesting in my brand, make sure it’s top of mind. So I’ve seen it both ways, it works from retail from push and pull.
Darren:
Yes. Absolutely. Now another interesting thing from the conversations we’ve had in the last few days is that the media owners do feel the pain of the media agencies, don’t they? There is quite a close relationship there, it’s not total buyer/seller, is it?
Mark:
No. The media owners feel the pain because they’re struggling to meet their budgets every year and they incentivise the agencies to spend more money with them.
Darren:
Right. So they know that the agencies are struggling.
Mark:
Yes.
Darren:
Except that the agencies, the general trend is to move more and more advertising budget into digital channels which is why we’re seeing digital channels increase all the time.
Mark:
Yes, because probably there is more incentive to do it for the agencies.
Darren:
So this is all hidden, a non-disclosed arrangement that is happening in the background.
Mark:
Yes, yes. But it happens with all media.
Darren:
Right. But the scale and ….
Mark:
The scale is bigger with digital now.
Darren:
Yeah and that’s also because going back to what we were talking about before is that also the margins on digital are much more flexible.
Mark:
Yes, they are. So if you look at all the tech fees, compliance fees, ad serving fees, this a whole lot of mystery about the real cost of those fees and I think there’s a new fee invented every year or terminology that someone comes up with.
Darren:
Which is just another take.
Mark:
Fee.
Darren:
Yeah, fee to take some more out of it.
Mark:
You can ask for non-disclosure deals, most agencies do offer them.
Darren:
Beause what is the number? Out of every dollar about thirty cents gets to the publisher or twenty percent?
Mark:
Yeah, thirty cents gets seen.
Darren:
Yeah.
Mark:
That’s the information I read.
Darren:
But traditional media is not like that at all because it’s basically going to the person that provides the….
Mark:
Ninety cents.
Darren:
Yeah.
Mark:
It’s ten percent commission and if they choose to incentivise an agency group, they might do that out of the ninety, not the thirty.
Darren:
Yeah. So it might be that eighty percent gets to them.
Mark:
Yes. But the client of traditional media versus digital media eroding them, their pool is getting smaller. So traditional media has to fight back in some way.
Darren:
Having said that, when we talk about traditional media, they’re all also doing digital media because every TV network has now got Catch Up TV or download or streaming TV. Every print publisher has got a digital version. Even radio has digital radio that you can do catch up or play on demand and things like that so that distinction of just pure play traditional and pure play digital doesn’t exist, does it?
Mark:
No. And that’s where what I’ll call traditional media have been clever because they’ve had to scale up in that area to maximise their capabilities to fight back against digital media and become part of the ecosystem.
Darren:
Now, you’ve also had some regional roles I think it was at your time at Mindshare with Ford.
Mark:
Yes.
Darren:
You worked across the region.
Mark:
Yes.
Darren:
One of the things we often get, especially from procurement people overseas that come and run a media tender in Australia is they can’t understand why media is so expensive in the Australian market compared to say the U.S. or even Europe. They talk about cost per thousand being ridiculously high here and do you have any insight into that or some clarity?
Mark:
Well to quote Paul Keating, “You can be queen of the screen or prince of prints” so we’ve had a closed environment for a long time. We haven’t had the competition open up. So, until recently with the digital expansion, I’ve had people say to me, “Why is it?” And I said, “Well land is expensive in Australia, you know capital cities”.
Darren:
Our cost of living. Living in Sydney is in the top ten in the world.
Mark:
It’s just relative that media is going to be expensive.
Darren:
Okay. So part of it is cost of living, the other part is a little bit of fragmentation. You know, we do have quite fragmented populations.
Mark:
Yes.
Darren:
We’ve got the Eastern Sea Board.
Mark:
But we’re the most urbanised country on the planet.
Darren:
Okay.
Mark:
It’s only three or four percent who are actually living on the land, rural, making money on the land.
Darren:
But the density of those, because you try to compare say L.A. with a Sydney or a London with a Melbourne, you know, the density, the number of people in a particular area covered either by newspapers or radio or whatever to get your cumulative reach across the whole country would be. It would take quite a lot, wouldn’t it?
Mark:
Yes. It’s fragmented because of geographies but also limited because the number of media channels. And to set up media in Australia is quite expensive.
Darren:
The other thing unique or maybe not unique thing to Australia is regional media as well.
Mark:
Oh yes, yes.
Darren:
Right. And it’s been a complaint that a lot of clients have mentioned to me that they find it really difficult to get a media agency that gets regional media. What’s the challenge?
Mark:
Well the first challenge is that it’s not people sucking on straws and sitting on bar stools.
Darren:
Hay seeds!
Mark:
Yes, they’re in Canberra, Newcastle, Bendigo, Ballarat, Wollongong, the big five cities in Queensland, they are big mini cities. All within you know, ten K of driving into work in the city, living disposable income is high. I saw Grant Blackley talk about this and he’s so right because everyone forgets to allocate regional as part of their media plan. And these people have more money to spend than most Australians.
Darren:
Ah okay, well that’s interesting because a lot of marketers think of regional as being you know, sort of the poor cousins of the city.
Mark:
No! Darwin and Canberra are the two highest disposable incomes in the country. Some of the other bigger regional towns are on par with Sydney and Melbourne’s disposable income and the media is cheaper on a cost per thousand basis. So you can buy it and reach thirty-five, forty percent of the population, cheaper than you can buy metro.
And I think it’s a fascination that I saw in the 90s and the 2000s with clients getting under budget pressures and they’d say, “Oh well, let’s just do an Eastern Seaboard buy.” What? Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane? What about the rest of the country? Regional New South Wales is the third biggest population centre in Australia after Melbourne and Sydney. So you’ve got to look at that. Queensland is huge. I think forty-eight percent of people in Queensland live in Brisbane.
Darren:
Yeah. Right down in that south east corner of this enormous state.
Mark:
Perth and Adelaide are different because of vastness of the state. You’ve got to look at it differently and say, “Hang on”, like the Herald Sun in Melbourne is the number one read paper in the country, in Victoria! It’s not far to send trucks out.
Darren:
Victoria’s a relatively small state.
Mark:
That’s it, but you’ve got to look at it and you’ve got to invest in regional. I think Coles and Woolworths; they spend money in regional. I spend money with car dealers in regional.
Darren:
But does regional media itself make it difficult to plan and buy in regional or is it really just a lack of understanding of the regional markets that means that marketers struggle to find agencies that really get regional media?
Mark:
I think it’s the latter. Regional has made themselves easier to buy than ever.
Darren:
Okay.
Mark:
So when I first started in media, I had to buy thirty-five reachable TV channels. Individual channels. Now it’s all aggregated, it’s easier, you look at today’s network, it’s got today, Triple M around the country. So it’s easier from that point of view. You don’t have to remember call signs and radio stations anymore. It took a while, 3 Wide B or something like that. So you’ve got media making it absolutely easier, there’s no excuse not to buy regional. They’re trying to help you.
Darren:
Okay. So there’s been a criticism leveled at media agencies that in the rationalisation for having fewer senior people and more junior people, that perhaps they’re either advising on or planning and buying media that they’re familiar with and avoiding the media that they’re unfamiliar with.
And that has two impacts; one would be, unless you’ve grown up in a country or regional town, you don’t really understand it. If you’ve grown up in the city, you’ll only know the city. Right? And the second is; that if you’re born in the sort of later part of the twentieth century and the twenty-first century you would definitely be more inclined to want to buy digital channels than you would traditional because you’ve grown up in an internet world.
Mark:
It’s like I think I’ve seen these charts and it says, “What the advertising agency listens to, what they buy and what the real population is doing”.
Darren:
Yes, I’ve seen those too.
Mark:
It always over indexes on metro, Spotify, digital, lower TV, Netflix is high, it’s always like, how they view the world, not what the client and the real population is. I think they have to get out and see the world or study a map. Go and buy, go and look on Wikipedia on regional New South Wales, look up a town, and that’s what is real.
See the agencies are so under the pump now with people and time, they don’t have time to educate. So you learn a lot off the reps. But that wasn’t any different in my day. There’s a radio rep and I won’t mention his name because he’ll get embarrassed but he used to come and educate us on the radio survey. Every time. And he was good. And he taught the whole picture.
Darren:
He didn’t use it just as a sales exercise, he used it to actually inform you so you could make….
Mark:
Yeah but when you had a problem with radio you rang him and nine times out of ten you got a booking. So it was quid pro quo. He educated you about the radio reach. So they need to get more into that, the agencies need to invite the various industries in to teach them. Because it’s still not that education process going on. They say they’re doing it but it’s not really realtime.
Darren:
Look it’s great to have you as part of the TrinityP3 gang. I’m just wondering, do you have something that you really want to achieve while you’re working with us?
Mark:
I think I want to, you know, impart some of my knowledge that I’ve learnt over to your clients and prospects on how you can do things better. And it’s about the process. It’s not about the end transaction. There’s things I’ve learnt, things I’ve done wrong, you learn from your mistakes and so I want to impart that knowledge onto the clients.
Darren:
I have to tell you, in the conversations that we’ve been a part of, one of the things that I’ve noticed is that you bring to those conversations a multi-faceted view of the media world. It’s not just from an agency perspective, it’s not just from a media owner or media sales perspective, or even a marketing perspective, but you’re looking for the ways to really unearth the value that sits within media.
Mark:
Well I like to call myself an advertising person, I’ve been a marketer, I’m proud of that. I think you’ve just got to find out what do people want. Like we were in a meeting with a client, you’re going to have to tell us what you want, what’s your brief? You’re going to find out that from the media owner, your own agency, what do you want to do?
What do you want to do as a client? And once you’ve worked that out, you can say, “Okay, I can go there because he needs that and he’ll do that for me, and that’s right for the client and that’s what they need”. You can start to triangulate everything for success.
Darren:
So do you feel like a poacher turned game keeper?
Mark:
Not at all. Some of my friends have rung me and said, “Oh you’re going to get stuck in the agencies”. Like, not all agencies are bad. Some people, not all clients were good either.
Darren:
Yep.
Mark:
So it’s just about clarity and making sure everyone understands each other.
Darren:
Alright. Well look, you know, we’ve run out of time but thanks for sitting down, I think they’ve almost finished playing billiards in the background. Just one last question, because I know Virginia Highland recently had a joke with me about a brown paper bag full of money. So have you ever had a brown paper bag full of money put on your desk?
Ideal for marketers, advertisers, media and commercial communications professionals, Managing Marketing is a podcast hosted by Darren Woolley. Find all the episodes here