Nice one Jon. It is interesting that there is no consistent or aligned definition. Mark Ritson told me he uses the AMA definition. He says that "Anything Keller does is the word!" It is number one in the list or you can read it here. https://www.ama.org/AboutAMA/Pages/Definition-of-...

Jon, do you think the reason that people are confused about the role of marketing is because as there has been an increase in the number of points of interaction with the consumer / customer there has been a corresponding rise in the specialists in each of these areas created the illusion that marketing is fragmented and multi-disciplined? I have personally seen marketing in organisations where is limited to comms / advertising and is largely a promotions department. In others where it is responsible for all three areas you define "Product, mental availability, physical availability". And again where the brand and business only exist online in a digital world of e-commerce and social media selling. All are called marketing.

Hi Jon, I think that all this 'Internet Thing" has done is added further complexity and a pile of buzz words and TLA to a category already adept at creating them. Having just spoken for two hours on Marketing last weekend at the Sydney Business School EMBA course I think the problem is that no-one can even define marketing and its role within some organisations so no wonder marketers are concerned about relevance, ROI and alignment to strategy.

Hi Nick, I do not see how this is a logical conclusion. You can still have a village of specialists but reward them for results and not simply the number of hours they work. We have very successfully created remuneration models that effectively reward agencies for not doing something if it means delivering results. So to say it is logical appears illogical to me. Get a group of specialist strategists and collectively reward them for thinking that leads to delivering results and not reward them for simply recommending and selling their specialist services. Now that is logical.

Dear John

Hard to have a meaningful conversation with you when you insist on hiding behind the anonymity. Perhaps in future it would be better you lurk back at Campaign Brief and Mumbrella with the other industry trolls as in future I will not indulge you any further if you refuse to provide a real name and email address.

Good bye.

I am sorry it did not work out for you.

Darren

That is great Claus that you are finding agencies willing to participate in sales related performance metrics and incentives. I am assuming they are mainly media agencies? The reason I say this is that we find media agencies more likely to participate than non-media agencies. But generally it is in the minority. Most of the procurement people I spoke with at the ANA conference in the USA in April said that the agencies preferred a mix of soft, medium and hard metrics to reduce the risk. But none had in place an incentive compensation model only based on sales metrics. (excluding direct response of course)

Don't be too hard on yourself Andy, your new business effort was written up here and shared with the world. And thank you for the compliments. But some asked me what other pitch consultants did you send it to and did you use the same wording?

Hi John? Is it John? Or is it Mr No Name? In which case can I direct you to the Campaign Brief blog or the Mumbrella blog as they accept people without names or at least people creative enough to come up with funny names. But as you raised a very important issue I think it is worth publishing it and responding.

First, perhaps from a production point of view, or even a crew point of view, you are right. We have heard the stories about crew wages being cut and crew being expected to be multi-skilled or multitasking, which can not only compromise the quality of the production it can also be dangerous. God forbid we have some of the losses of life that have been witnessed in shoot overseas due to corner and cost cutting.

Second, from an advertisers point of view the costs of production have not dropped. There is still a full complement of crew at full day rates in the quotes. Perhaps the issue here is that either the agency or the producer are not passing these approved fees onto the crew and suppliers they subcontract for the task. Because from our perspective, that is reviewing the proposed costs in the quotes presented by the advertising agency to the advertiser for approval the cost reduction opportunity due to technology improvements are not being passed on. So perhaps someone in the middle is making an unfair profit at the expense of the subcontractors like yourself. The fact is we will never know because the standard production contracts produced by SPAA and the Communications Council preclude the advertiser from undertaking an audit of the production house after the production has been completed, so who knows who is pocketing the profits?

I will also point out that we do not review costs of low cost productions. In most cases the production budget is between $USD 200,000 and more than $USD 1million to the advertiser. And yes these still occur. Perhaps you are not in the league to get these types of productions? But I agree with you on the fact that cost reduction at the expense of quality is a waste of everyones time. Just for the record, we do not get paid based on savings, so there is no financial incentive to find savings at the expense of quality. That is why our clients engage us to find value and not just savings. Thanks for raising this issue and I hope you career in the Australian production industry improves.

Thanks David. Again, the trouble is too often we are so busy speaking different languages that perhaps if we just all took the time to sit down and speak the one language (business) then a lot of these issues would be resolved. After all, digital and data, marketing and sales, customer experience management and customer relationship management are, in this context, all just disciplines applied to achieve a commercial outcome.

Hi Martyn, I think this is the main point. Digital technology is not like the introduction of the radio or the television where it was simply a new channel of communication or more importantly broadcast. Digital is driving a major transformation in the way we live, communicate and interact that is impacting all aspects of marketing. It requires a major rethink and a major change in strategy, structure and process, which many organisations are not embracing. Or if they are just not fast enough.