Media agencies have a better opportunity than “anyone else in the industry” to reinvent the future for clients, according to Starcom MediaVest Group (SMG) APAC president Mike Amour.
Amour was chatting to M&M Global editor Alex Brownsell at Cannes Lions, when SMG’s EMEA president Iain Jacob also took time out to talk to us about the global media and marketing landscape.
Jacob expressed a degree of relief at the fact that conversations between agencies, tech partners and clients had evolved over the past 12 months.
“I think the whole data and tech thing a year ago was just in the wrong place,” said Jacob. “It was very functional, the conversation was always about programmatic from the point of view of trading, rather than using data and real human insights to drive interesting brand ideas that are going to change behaviours.
“We’re now seeing the emergence of that proper conversation coming into play. We’re starting to see some maturity and we’ll start to get much stronger work as a result of it.”
See the full Jacob interview here:
Amour’s career has seen him work in disciplines spanning creative, experiential and media – a progression that he felt mirrors the development of the media and marketing industry.
“From my perspective coming to the media side was a natural progression, for my own career but frankly, more importantly, for where the industry is going,” he said. “From a brand management perspective, media is where all the action is.
“The media agencies have got a better opportunity than probably anyone else in the industry to reinvent the future for our clients.
“And if you talk to the clients, they are really looking to media agencies now to help them navigate an increasingly complex world where content and data come together and where they need strong consulting guidance and value-add propositions in order to make sense of that,” said Amour.
See the full Amour interview here:
Jacob is insistent that the time for agencies to merely talk about new tech, data and its myriad virtues is over, they must match their words with action.
“[In a year’s time] I’d like the debate to be less about whether creative or media are going to intersect and on what basis they’ll do that, and more about showing examples of how they’ve done that,” he said.
“We do want to put the message out that we are investing behind getting to the future first. That’s key to us, it’s key to the Publicis group and for SMG as a lead brand within the Publicis group, it’s absolutely critical to us.
“The sort of things I mean about that, is that we are the first media company to invest and buy a DMP/DSP business in Run. That’s really investing in the future, rather than just talking about it. So we’re taking action.”
For Amour, Starcom’s investment into the future is “giving clients a sense of reassurance”.
He added: “Most of the clients I speak to are looking for media agencies not just to be media agencies, but to be agencies of the future, they’re looking for us to help integrate the various different types of publishing companies, content and data, to make sense of a world that is increasingly complex for them.
“So I think if we can help simplify the complex we will have achieved our job.”
