The Connected Consumer Awards 2015 - Winning Entry Category: Connected Agency of the Year Entrant CompanyMediaCom: The content and connections agency Entry 1 – Description Twelve months ago, from the outside you might have thought that MediaCom were on a massive high, having won pitches for both The Coca Cola Company and the mobile and consumer electronics divisions of Sony. In reality, we were collectively exhausted. We were unable to celebrate these account wins, as we had also just completed a gruelling (but successful) re-pitch process for Direct Line Group, one of our biggest clients. We were waiting anxiously for the result, knowing that all of our hard work on Coke and Sony could be negated by this re-pitch not going our way. We needed to hit the ground running with Coke and Sony, clients with extremely high expectations, whilst maintaining strong relationships with around 200 other clients, with a team that were exhausted, ‘pitched-out’ and running on mere fumes. All of this against a backdrop of continued economic stagnation, meaning little organic growth from existing clients. We had already restructured our media teams to future-proof our staff and deliver a better service to our clients. The Connect (implementational planning specialists) and Marketplace (execution and trading specialists) functions were bearing fruit and this new structure was a big reason we were seeing these wins in the first place. So what next? We knew we needed to keep evolving and had a vision that, in a connected landscape, success for MediaCom would be about “Better Connections”. This vision was for campaigns that made the most of connected media in delivering better outcomes for our clients, but also better relationships with media owners and with each other. We needed to extend the success we had witnessed with Connect and Marketplace and land this across the whole agency, turning it into a way of working that would have a positive impact on our work, clients, and business performance. 2 – Projects/Initiatives Our plan encompassed three areas of focus. 1) People First The first thing to do was to give our people a lift and keep them motivated. The whole agency went to the O2 for our first away day for three years, where each team collaborated on their own “better connections” plan for clients. We also created ‘The Hub’ – a space in the agency where clients and staff can play with new technology such as 3D Printers, Smartwatches and 3D TVs. 2) Collaboration We know that content has the ability to span all platforms, therefore partnerships with content producers are key to delivering the new connected vision. Whilst our structure worked for clients we weren’t developing enough partnerships. To increase capabilities we: 1. Ran a set of “Better Connections” workshops with media owners, collaborating on partnership ideas. 2. Used econometrics to prove the value of a range of partnerships at driving sales, and used these examples in collaboration with ITV to run their first ever client conference with an agency to promote partnerships 3. Created a new ‘Head of Partnerships’ role as a first-point of contact for media owners and to promote partnerships internally A couple of examples of the partnerships we are most proud of include Sony’s sponsorship of ITV’s World Cup coverage, encouraging fans to tweet in their ’goal face’ and working with DFS and the Telegraph on their Winter Sale campaign. (Appendix 1 Supporting images). 3) A Product Refresh MediaCom’s planning product, Real World Communications, was developed in the late 1990s and served us well, but it was time for a refresh. We launched ‘2020 Connections’ – a process and set of new tools, based on a philosophy that every client has an interconnected “system” of communications and platforms to work within. Whilst the industry has traditionally planned channels as silos, optimising within them, we believe the future of planning is about optimising the overall system. As a result we have removed silos from our teams; we have no mobile specialist team – all digital planners and buyers are upskilled in mobile, we have AV (not TV) and Audio (not Radio) teams. In addition, our Print teams plan and buy print brands (including digital, across all devices). We also rebuilt our tools accordingly. For example, our Second Screen Planner tool (Appendix 2) fuses BARB and twitter data to understand programmes that drive the most social buzz, so we can synchronise TV and social for maximum impact. Our Connections Simulator tool demonstrates the impact of the connected system of communication on a clients’ desired outcomes (Skoda system Appendix 3). We believe that content fuels high-performing systems due to its versatility across devices; its flexibility during the consumer journey creates multiple touch-points which ultimately leads to sales. 3 – Evaluation A successful year under difficult circumstances Our new approach is already paying off. We used 2020 Connections to underpin a number of successful pitches, including eBay and Hillary’s Blinds (returning to the agency after four years). Moreover, eBay specifically called out our ‘connected system’ approach, and our collaboration with other WPP agencies, as reasons for our appointment. We’ve used our new planning approach to create great work for clients including a world first live ad break featuring Sam Smith. Where the new pop sensation appeared onscreen live and direct from his concert at the Roundhouse, taking over an entire break of the Alan Carr show to sing his new single – the first ever live music performance in an ad break. Viewing figures for this ad break were 100,000 higher than the programme and we won Gold at Media Week (Best Small Campaign). (Appendix 4). We believe that empowering our teams to determine their contribution to the MediaCom whole is an important factor that led to our churn rate reducing in the last 12 months, below to the IPA’s industry average of 27%.