The unveiling of the COI's latest communications planning roster last month cemented the discipline's status as a sector in its own right.
By expanding the line-up from seven to 14 agencies, the government's marketing arm, which is the UK's third-biggest advertiser, signalled its desire to put planning at the heart of its creative process.
Communications planning has been the 'buzz' sector in the media agency world for several years. Small, independent shops, often headed by former executives from the big buying agencies, have proliferated, as clients have sought planning beyond the confines of traditional channels. Most have billed themselves as consumer-focused advisers on the best way to juggle the growing number of communications options.
The COI is at the forefront of these developments. It argues that, since many of its audiences are niche or difficult to reach, it requires different ways of thinking to communicate effectively with them. Consequently, it tries to pair communications planners with creative agencies from the start of the brief, resulting in some innovative ideas. This week, for example, a campaign planned by Naked to promote the Directgov information portal, tied up with Tesco and Sainsbury's by running ads on the supermarkets' milk cartons.
Questions remain about who is best placed to handle this type of planning.
The COI's roster underlines that the sector is no longer the preserve of small independents. Of the agencies added to the government's line-up, three - Booth Lockett Makin, Experience and Rise - fall into this category. The others are big traditional media agencies: Carat, MediaCom, MindShare and Universal McCann. The top five buyers in the country, according to Nielsen Media Research, are now on the roster.
Size differential
There are other signs that the big media shops are starting to encroach.
Last year ZenithOptimedia won Campbell's £11m media planning business from Naked, taking brands such as Batchelors Super Noodles and OXO. Elsewhere, BMW shifted its £25m planning account from Element, a joint venture between Naked and WCRS, and into PHD. 'The big agencies are catching up,' says COI deputy chief executive Peter Buchanan. 'The smaller ones are going to have to raise the bar again through new thinking and new ways of working.'
The debate is therefore not only about how far the sector can grow, but also about which business models are most likely to succeed.
Graham Bednash, managing partner of the UK's original standalone planning agency, Michaelides & Bednash, which worked on an innovative launch strategy for Channel 4's More4 digital channel last year, points out that this is the first time communications planning has been more than a hotchpotch of small businesses.
'We are seeing the market reaching maturity; it is becoming a sector,' he says. 'It is no coincidence that this has happened as media fragment. Clients need to work with agencies that understand how to reach people in interesting ways.'
The independents have had some high-profile successes. Naked handles planning for 118 118, which has used ambient activity to complement its main media campaign. Alex Lewis, marketing director at The Number, believes the planning was vital. 'I have a small marketing team, and it cannot keep up with all the options out there,' she says. 'Naked gives us a perspective on the wider media options.'
One point in favour of independent shops is their ability to attract top talent from big agencies. Last week Pete Edwards, former managing director of Starcom Motive, launched his own planning agency, Edwards Groom Saunders, with two colleagues from Starcom. He argues that the independent planning sector will benefit from marketers' concerns about the activities of media buyers and the way agencies make money.
Questions have been raised recently by Interpublic Group's multimillion-pound refunds to Tesco and Weetabix for discounts that were not passed on. And last month Northern & Shell was involved in a legal wrangle with WPP, having accused the company of breaking an agreement to run 15 pages of its advertising every week in the US version of OK!
The claims have been strenuously denied, but the mere fact that they were made without attracting derision in the media community suggests such deals are not unheard of, in turn raising questions over the impartiality of agency advice.
Media neutrality
For Edwards, independent planners have the benefit of being one step removed from buying, meaning there is less pressure to advocate the use of particular media. Since so much of the big agencies' revenue derives from buying certain media, there is, arguably, an in-built bias toward recommending them. 'There can be a conflict of interest for the big agencies,' he says. 'It is more difficult to be independent-minded if your business is structured around making money in a certain way.'
This is a claim most buyers vehemently deny. But Mark Holden, executive planning director at PHD, admits that, when it comes to providing high-quality thinking, the big agencies may be losing out to the independents.
He points out that while the smaller shops have relatively few staff, the quality is consistently high throughout the business. Bigger agencies may have similar standards at the top of their organisation, but that has to be spread across a far greater number of clients, and further down, the quality of staff may not be as high.
However, Holden argues that there is more to communications planning than media-neutral thinking. One advantage bigger agencies tend to have is that they can compare the hard effectiveness data of various communications channels, leaving less uncertainty for clients using non-traditional media elements. 'The independents struggle to do the numbers side,' he says.
'They don't tend to have the tools. It requires data analysts and systems; without those, there is only so much they can do.'
Edwards agrees that the sector must head in this direction. 'Communications planning has been about creativity,' he says. 'The next step is to be commercially creative. Just because something is a funky idea that has never been done before does not mean it is effective commercially.'
A focus on sophisticated strategies among independents is pointless if they do not have the means to implement them - something media buyers are better placed to do, according to Matt Andrews, joint managing director at Vizeum and a former executive at Michaelides & Bednash. He argues that the opportunity for planning lies in stronger relationships with media owners. 'They are the ones who create and own the content and they understand the digital space better,' he says.
Mark Craze, managing partner of Media Planning Group, has taken this thinking one step further with the creation this year of a unit called Collaboration. Its purpose is to allow Media Planning Group's senior executives to work closely with media owners to develop media-neutral solutions, a relationship that Craze believes had previously been lacking and which was frustrating media owners in their efforts to be more innovative with their advertising solutions.
Investment needed
One common denominator among all agencies is the need for investment to enable their communications planning offer to continue evolving. It is far from certain that this will be available, with some arguing that the scope for communications planning to grow as an independent discipline is limited. Christine Walker, chairman of Walker Media, contends that it remains a sideshow, with the big budgets staying within the major networks.
As a result, the independent sector may have only limited potential in terms of revenue.
'A lot of marketing business is determined globally,' she says. 'This means local marketing directors do not have much power; they can't decide on the main providers of marketing services, and the budgets they can commission are small. Small planning shops have provided these people with the opportunity to commission somebody and give a campaign a bit of fizz, but they will never drive the main business.'
Another issue is the context in which communications planning is used.
At the moment, agencies tend to be commissioned for certain types of project.
'Communications planning is typically used by brands that are moving into a new category, re-evaluating their communications, or building on a period of success,' admits Simon Mathews, partner at Rise, which worked on the roll-out of low-fat ice cream brand Skinny Cow.
Profits warning
The danger is that agencies are forced to work on a project basis, which presents a threat to profitability because of the costs attached to constantly having to win business. The challenge, therefore, is to convince clients that non-traditional planning can be used in everyday marketing activity.
Money remains an issue for big agencies, too. Derek Morris, vice-chairman of ZenithOptimedia, says these companies must overhaul their structures to deliver effective planning that can take in the breadth of the modern media spectrum. 'The problem is that we have agencies that train in silos, but an industry that is increasingly asking us to be polymaths,' he says.
He claims media agencies are being held back because not every client will invest in communications planning. 'For all the talk of 360-degree planning, they won't commit more money to looking into it,' he says.
Communications planning has received so much attention as it offers a path through a fragmenting media landscape. The high-profile success of the independents has forced big agencies to adapt to protect their business.
The debate now is about the pace of change, nurturing talent and developing the right tools and business models to deliver effective planning. Above all, however, it is about convincing marketers to pay for it.
TOP MEDIA AGENCIES 1-50 Rank Agency 2005 2004 % 2005 2004 billings (pounds) chng 1 1 MediaCom 862,355,978 724,889,991 18.96 2 5 MindShare 761,585,782 577,174,112 31.95 3 4 Carat 676,932,476 584,842,550 15.75 4 2 Starcom 662,439,520 678,020,472 -2.30 5 3 ZenithOptimedia 550,530,547 625,947,932 -12.05 6 7 OMD UK* 472,762,524 476,919,712 -0.87 7 6 Initiative 400,870,300 517,309,447 -22.51 8 8 Universal McCann London 342,318,677 341,294,849 0.30 9 9 Manning Gottlieb OMD* 252,090,727 274,769,992 -8.25 10 10 PHD 226,446,023 212,631,545 6.50 11 11 Walker Media 207,742,809 197,513,262 5.18 12 13 Mediaedge:cia 181,501,678 161,731,947 12.22 13 12 Vizeum UK 154,229,405 177,823,842 -13.27 14 14 MediaVest Manchester 114,619,298 111,892,761 2.44 15 15 Brilliant Media 99,622,178 88,423,502 12.66 16 16 Media Planning Group 82,920,756 85,282,114 -2.77 17 19 BrandConnection 68,281,496 69,423,279 -1.64 18 22 Mediaedge:cia Manchester 67,269,464 58,622,129 14.75 19 17 Booth Lockett Makin 62,517,120 77,994,346 -19.84 20 18 Feather Brooksbank 54,457,130 75,209,358 -27.59 21 20 John Ayling & Associates 54,116,802 62,947,423 -14.03 22 21 BJK&E 53,003,502 62,663,284 -15.42 23 30 MediaCom Scotland 50,611,638 35,187,018 43.84 24 25 MediaCom North 49,827,372 52,005,292 -4.19 25 26 Universal McCann Manchester 49,034,071 46,384,121 5.71 26 23 The Allmond Partnership 44,971,047 57,563,921 -21.88 27 27 Media ±±¾©Èü³µpk10 44,158,138 39,770,209 11.03 28 24 All Response Media 38,869,584 52,565,468 -26.05 29 31 AMS Media Group 37,881,710 34,038,861 11.29 30 32 Equinox Communications 33,167,415 32,684,928 1.48 31 38 PHD Compass 31,635,983 22,244,099 42.22 32 36 WWAV Rapp Collins 30,225,902 27,358,565 10.48 33 33 Total Media 29,210,369 30,388,426 -3.88 34 34 Media Insight 28,782,050 29,193,972 -1.41 35 28 Zed Media 27,976,934 39,329,226 -28.86 36 35 Kinetic 24,850,667 27,611,717 -10.00 37 29 Media Vision Manchester 23,707,122 35,707,641 -33.61 38 53 Team UK Media 21,818,079 36,706,593 40.09 39 40 Bygraves Bushell Valladares & Sheldon 21,270,047 19,529,187 8.91 40 51 Ekay 20,824,385 10,027,242 107.68 41 42 Bray Leino 19,940,999 18,355,434 8.64 42 37 Attinger Jack 19,437,840 25,693,412 -24.35 43 41 Target Media 18,552,393 19,252,518 -3.64 44 39 Matters Media 18,011,517 21,379,920 -15.75 45 44 TCS Media 15,558,869 14,159,880 9.88 46 49 Burkitt DDB 15,468,212 12,015,409 28.74 47 47 Robson Brown 15,300,739 13,346,629 14.64 48 46 Media Vision 14,555,756 13,686,691 6.35 49 50 Lavery Rowe Advertising 14,471,814 11,630,816 24.43 50 52 Posterscope 14,249,505 9,083,636 56.87 Source: Nielsen Media Research
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