I am living a rather unique experience these days.
One recent client win is moving spadefuls of money from all kinds of traditional marketing tactics into social-empowered digital. Which suits me fine, that’s the area we won.
However, I am finding myself dragged more and more into pure marketing discussions and projects – just recently I spent a couple of hourse discussing distributors incentive schemes and retail loyalty.
I sense the discomfort of some of my colleagues: they are successful communications professionals, they deal with messages and awareness, they understand content and the nuances of influencing the opinion-forming mechanism. Not sure they want or like to discuss distributors’ incentives.
And while I was driving back for this meeting it dawned on me with the clarity of a long day: we have no fucking choice! None!!
We either become the kind of consultant which can cover from awareness to incentives, or someone else will.
That does NOT mean becoming a sort of Jack of All Trades, but perhaps it means to start paying attention to things I normally would not care much about: on the same client, our first campaign performed way beyond all expectations (whew !) but the advertising bit did not: I am finding myself recommending the selection of another, more performing media buying agency to handle the SEM part of the next project, does it mean I have learned to optimize a media budget? Not at all, but perhaps it means I know a media buying agency I trust professionally.
Ralf or Iain would have a thing or two to add to this I think…
