Bringing efficiency into focus

The signs are clear. This year’s New Year text messages set the tone for 2010. The SMS focused less on wishing us a happy 2010 and more on ‘glad to see the last of 2009’!

2010 for many will be a zero base year, the start of a new decade; looking optimistically ahead rather than comparatively what we left behind. The industry, one hopes, will not set benchmarks basis bettering 2009, but set a new objective, a new standard and a maybe even a new metric.

Despite the disappointments that some faced, 2009 was very much a defining year for the industry. The year eased the way for a metric beyond cost efficiency. It’s easy to talk about moving media metrics from contacts to engagement in a year when all is well, but quite another when we did so in an uneasy year. The industry’s key stakeholders stood firm and consolidated to not allow the economic environment dictate all our decisions. And while the business numbers may not have reflected it, we entered 2010 with a promise of performance beyond the numbers and evaluation beyond the savings.

2009 defined for us directions we will take into 2010 and beyond:

1. CPE, or cost per engagement as opposed to cost per contact. Had the industry’s key stakeholders relented to an uneasy year, we would be exactly where we were a decade ago (post the 1998 recession) – a single medium focus (TV), driven by default cost discounting rather than efficacy. It was, therefore, most heartening for us to emerge from 2009 with a wide spread of media options, impacted by cost, but surviving despite it. The signs were clear when despite the year, HT went ahead with its re-vamp plans, and successfully so. And HT did just that… ensured their content and product engages with today’s youth. What 2009 taught us… that if the medium will engage our consumers, it will remain in the media plan… bringing ‘efficiency’ in ‘cost efficiency’ into focus.

2. Co-creative partnering, a single and key factor that heightened and defined our approach to media selection in 2009. In a manner of speaking, necessity became the mother of creation. I have not seen so much creative and strategic support from media vendors before. That’s why I reiterate, that all key stakeholders held firm – media vendors could have battled it out on just discounts, but they chose to add value to their offer through some much focused, classy thinking and executions. Once again, bringing ‘efficiency’ centre-stage in ‘cost efficiency’

3. Regionalisation, not a new trend, but driven in recent times by TV, both at a network level as well as in content, to attract local level viewers. A win-win strategy for all – helps channels develop specific markets as well as offers marketers local level addressability. Regionalisation is bridging the demand-supply gap for planners and buyers effectively; moving focus from combined cost efficiency to local level reach efficiency

4. Addressability, largely the domain of less mass medium is a future watch-out on even as mass a medium as television… as digital television gains critical mass. And when addressability enters a mainstay medium, the debate between cost and efficiency will keep us occupied for the rest for the decade

5. Raison d'être, as we look beyond the year and toward the decade. The topic warrants a separate discussion, not a couple of lines here… but the final test will not be the relevance of the medium in the plan basis price or performance, but will be based on the strengthened or weakened relevance of the medium in the consumer’s world. Because in this decade the new and emerging media will be old and emerged!

And as we develop media plans based on the above, we may move away the traditional fixing of a ‘media mix’ to an eventual aggregation of media opportunities to engage with our audiences. We are already experiencing it in the less conventional sectors, where each subsequent quarter or initiative reflects a non-uniform media mix with a different dominant medium… sometimes TV, sometimes newspapers, sometimes digital.

That said, here’s looking forward to a perfect 10 – the year and the decade!

(Jasmin Sohrabji is Managing Director, OMD India.)