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There’s one thing guaranteed to make your rivals in the media industry go apoplectic: claim to have done something first.

Successfully claiming a media first is a bit like a lad scoring with a gorgeous girl in a nightclub and having none of his mates around as witnesses to back him up – nobody’s going to believe him and, if they do, they will all claim to have been there before him.

Which is why it’s a little ironic that IPC Ignite!, Capital and Viacom have stirred up such a hornet’s nest with their new cross-media proposition when they are not even claiming to have broken any virgin ground.

Last week, the heavyweight trio announced an alliance to enter into the cross-media jungle with the launch of RSVP.

Unrivalled potential

By offering agencies access to creative solutions across brands as powerful as Loaded, MTV and Capital radio, the partnership says it will provide “unrivalled” potential for advertisers to reach the lucrative youth and entertainment market.

The move will see the three giants go up against Emap, which has established a reputation as the pioneer in the field. On hearing the news, Dave King, head of Emap Advertising, cast doubt on the newcomers’ ability to stay the course in crossmedia, claiming Emap, unlike RSVP, had “complete sovereignty” over every aspect of its offering, which was translating into £20m a year in billings.

Provoked by those comments, other media owners, one by one, have since claimed to have got there first. Guardian Newspapers, Scottish Media Group and Classic FM were among those who told Media Week they had been selling crossmedia deals when the rest of us were in nappies. Well, not quite, but the message was clear – don’t claim credit for what we’ve been doing for ages.

And there is a serious question here: if media owners have been doing such a grand job in generating cross-media deals, why does the area still attract such scepticism – and why is it a buzz-phrase guaranteed to get people’s backs up? Perhaps the main reason for all the doubt is that even those already making millions (for their companies at least) by doing it as their day job are not entirely convinced how far they will be able to go with it.

Jane Kesley, cross-media manager for Emap, admits that nobody still quite knows what its potential is. “We don’t know if we’ll get much more business from it or if it’s at its optimum now.”

Perhaps this explains why, at least for now, IPC, Capital and Viacom have decided not to go down the road of Emap and create a dedicated cross-media solutions team.

In fact, it would be hard to find too many areas in media where such uncertainty exists which has managed to attract involvement from virtually all of the big players.

“I personally don’t see, in the near future at least, cross-media deals becoming an everyday thing for agencies,” says Karl Marsden, group ad director of IPC Ignite!, a comment which raises the question of why the UK’s biggest magazine publisher would bother to be part of a launch of a cross-media proposition in the first place?

Causing a stir

King’s “sovereignty” comment, which essentially asserts that Emap’s cross-media solution – which pulls together the company’s television, magazine and radio offerings – has far more legs than a coalition of companies, was always guaranteed to cause a stir with the likes of IPC.

But Emap has long been the subject of allegations from rivals that claim it has been blazing a PR trail rather than a commercially successful one in its cross-media offering.

Capital’s brand sales director, Mike Hope-Milne, last week took issue with King claiming Emap’s cross-media proposition is led by media neutrality “when all you’re doing is selling Emap brands”.

“It’s the King who would be king,” said Marsden. “Emap have built themselves up on this big, high horse and they’re building themselves up for a big fall.”

The torrent of attacks on Emap continues. “Emap has done a tremendously good job at PR,” says Simon Dalglish, sales director at GWR’s Classic FM, one of those companies claiming to have been doing cross-media deals while King was still at Carat, if not in nappies.

He adds: “In reality, very few people have made a good stab at it and established real commercial and consumer benefits.”

So, if Emap has been doing such a bad job and it’s the pioneer, why are all the big guns getting involved? Quite apart from the £20m in sales, around 15% of its total, which Emap is bringing in, the reality is that cross-media deals, if done well, can take a media owners’ role in the advertising business on to a whole new level.

They bring them far closer to a brand and enable companies to establish long-term relationships with advertisers that would be impossible in straightforward TV breaks, page ads or radio spots.

A cross-media deal, if done well, can work miracles, as evidenced at Emap magazine FHM, where the invention of the Foster’s Pit Girls, blonde women featured in print and online,made men weak at the knees and weak Australian lager seem glamorous.

The girls’ creators may not have won any awards for their political correctness, but research shows that, because of them, 65% of FHM readers were aware of the brand’s sponsorship of Formula 1, compared to 36% of non-readers. More than a third of FHM readers thought Fosters was a glamorous beer, compared to only one in 10 non-readers.

Coca-Cola’s senior brand manager, Fiona Hope, claims that a cross-media promotion carried out with Emap, which used the simple device of consumers registering by text from instructions printed on 200 million cans for a chance to win VIP tickets to pop gigs, was “the most successful music promotion we’ve done to date”.

Emap was able to use the likes of the Kerrang!, Q, Smash Hits! and FHM brands across TV, print and radio, to back the promotion, which Hope describes as “hugely effective”.

Don’t get it wrong

Get something like that wrong, however, and the client, instead of providing you with a glowing reference to boost morale within your cross-media planning hub, will run for cover and not return.

“If you screw up something creative, then it screws up your entire campaign for an advertiser and they’re not going to come back,” says Kesley. “The crossmedia stuff might only be a little bit of their overall campaign.

They might be doing loads on TV, for example. But if the crossmedia side doesn’t work, the advertiser won’t return.”

Kesley admits that crossmedia campaigns can be “a nightmare to execute”.

And that’s just within one company. IPC Ignite!, Viacom and Capital propose doing it across three different ones.

RSVP, they claim, will hold extra credibility for the very reason that it is three independent groups and the parties also stress that they will go outside to use other partners where applicable, including the national newspapers.

“We’ve had huge feedback from clients and agencies,” says Victoria King, cross-media solutions manager, IPC Ignite!.

“More and more people will start to use cross-media,” she predicts confidently. “Initially, I think it’ll be for clients with a big budget, but it doesn’t have to be.

It could be a one-off promotion.

We want clients to tell us what’s their dream. What’s their ideal? “We’ve got access from all three companies to talents which agencies wouldn’t normally get.”

That sounds great in theory, but some believe that, in practice, trying to offer cross-media deals across three separate sales forces will prove a major headache.

“People are territorial about their areas within one company, let alone within three,” says James Carter, editorial director of FHM.

“If FHM isn’t getting a share of a deal in Emap that it wants, it fights for it and ultimately, for the greater good, it will bow and accept certain things if it comes to it,” he adds. “Within three companies those battles are going to be much bigger.”

He goes on: “This sort of thing demands much more resource than straightforward advertising.

For the Fosters Pit Girls to succeed, for example, it was massively importantly that FHM was under the skin of the delivery. That’s much more difficult to pull off with three different companies.”

Finding the connection

GWR’s Dalglish says: “If you’re a consumer, what’s the connection between Loaded, for example, and Capital?” He claims a quarter of Classic FM’s revenue comes from crossmedia deals, mainly because Classic FM and its digital TV station have such an easily defined target audience.

“If you get media owners trying to get disparate companies to form an alliance, that’s where if falls apart,” Dalglish notes.

Others agree. “It’s not just about how many platforms you’ve got,” says Kathryn Jacob, managing director of SMG’s cross-media operation, SMG Access, which offers cross-media deals across brands such as Virgin, Scottish TV, Grampian TV and Pearl & Dean, its cinema advertising arm.

SMG reckons it makes 2% additional revenue on the back of the operation, but Jacob believes this to be the tip of the iceberg.

“The reason some clients are sceptical is there’s a huge amount of over-promise and a level of under-delivery. Keeping your promises is incredibly important,” she explains.

“Some people have had really good experiences in cross-media and some really bad, but people have been through a very bad advertising recession,” Jacob adds. “They haven’t got a lot of money to spend and they’re saying ‘tell us a different way of doing something’ and agencies are doing the same.”

Just how big this “different way” becomes will depend on the likes of IPC, Capital and Viacom showing that, like Emap, they are in cross-media for the long term.

Then the crucial argument will move away from who got there first to who is doing it best.

Cross-media deals: the leading players

Emap

Seen as the pioneer, although others claim to have got there first. Emap’s cross-media solutions team, headed up by Jane Kesley, brings in 15% of the company’s billings and has attracted major advertisers including CocaCola, Fosters and Alliance & Leicester. Seen by the company as a big part of its advertising future.

RSVP – IPC Ignite!, Viacom Brand Solutions, Capital

Newcomers to the crossmedia jungle, these are, nevertheless, all media giants with powerful brands to offer advertisers. The partners, including Viacom – which has already been one of the leaders in cross-media – will begin by offering cross-media deals across brands such as Loaded, MTV and Capital FM, but have pledge to bring in outside parties, including the national press and outdoor media, if a client desires. Yet to be seen if they are all in it together for the long haul.

Scottish Media Group – SMG Access

Under Kathryn Jacob’s leadership, Access is already credited with boosting SMG’s ad revenue by 2% but believes that figure to be the tip of the iceberg with brands such as Virgin, Pearl & Dean and Primesight working together. Still relatively new, as it was formed only last September, but says it is in it for the long term.

GWR – Classic FM

Classic is the jewel in GWR’s cross-media crown, attracting 25% of its revenue from cross-media deals with its highly targeted audience on radio and digital TV. Has used its presenters, such as Henry Kelly, to promote brands including Kenco coffee, which have a close fit with an audience sitting back and putting their feet up to relax to Mozart.

Guardian Newspapers

One of the first companies to use cross-media deals in its advertising offering, including regular tie-ups with Channel 4, the audience of which has a similar demographic. Recent tie-ups include a deal with Carlton Screen Advertising and Sony Erickson around the Bond film Die Another Day.