THE MEDIA MANIFESTO Your five-part manifesto for managing the optimum media agency relationship.

ID COMMS BEST

PRACTICE GUIDES Prepared by Tom Denford (ver. 8/6)

About these guides The ID Comms Best Practice Guides series is designed to help marketing and procurement leaders unlock greater productivity from investments in media.

They have been written by ID Comms consultants based on many years experience working with some of the world’s most demanding brands and their agencies.

Please use and share these guides freely, we ask that you reference us in any direct quotations.

Finally, we value feedback on everything we do. Please get in touch and share your thoughts. Thanks.

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About ID Comms

ID Comms Ltd is a media consulting company with strategy and innovation at its heart. Based in Shoreditch, London, we are leading providers of media solutions to companies that need access to first-class media expertise in flexible and cost-effective ways.

ID Comms provides high-quality media resources – from specialist talent to innovative processes and tools – that increase value, optimize performance and improve accountability for international brands.

The company was founded in 2009 by Tom Denford and David Indo, you can find out more about us here:

http://www.idcomms.com

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Context points for this guide 1.  The media business is a people business (you know this already). 2.  The media value chain is therefore largely reliant on the people and

the working relationships involved. 3.  Relationships between agency and client have a significant bearing

on the overall value delivered from a company’s investment in media.

4.  Clients are equally responsible for the quality of this relationship. 5.  Some clients, with good relationships with their agencies, get access

to significant sources of incremental value delivery. Some of these are hard benefits (better costs, better terms of business) and some are softer benefits (attracting the top talent, getting added value delivery).

6.  Dysfunctions in these relationships can cause massive losses in the media value chain and need to be addressed quickly.

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1. We aspire to create a relationship of trust with our agency where both sides are working towards aligned goals. These goals will sit within the language of the client organization and be part of the company’s marketing KPI’s.

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2. We want to inspire our agency to perform at their best abilities, to stretch themselves into new territories on our behalf and grow their own business alongside ours.

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3. We commit to pay our agency fairly and transparently for the value they add to our company as a partner.

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4. We will listen to our agency and help them, where we as a client can be better, to do their job in the most effective way possible

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5. We will define the agency’s remit but we are flexible enough to allow them to innovate because we acknowledge that the media market is always changing and so should our company, our marketing and our marketing agency partners.

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5. We will define the agency’s remit but we are flexible enough to allow them to innovate because we acknowledge that the media market is always changing and so should our company, our marketing and our marketing agency partners.

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Five-part manifesto for managing the optimum media agency relationship.

1. We aspire to create a relationship of trust with our agency where both sides are working towards aligned goals. These goals will sit within the language of the client organization and be part of the company’s marketing KPI’s.

2. We want to inspire our agency to perform at their best abilities, to stretch themselves into new territories on our behalf and grow their own business alongside ours.

3. We commit to pay our agency fairly and transparently for the value they add to our company as a partner.

4. We will listen to our agency and help them, where we as a client can be better, to do their job in the most effective way possible

About the author Tom Denford is a Founding Partner of ID Comms

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A multi-award winning communications strategist, Tom has 15 years of valuable experience in the communications business having worked for a number of the world’s largest global media and creative agency networks and some of the world’s biggest brands such as adidas, HP, Diageo, Nokia, Novartis and Sony in recent years. Most recently Tom was Global Head of Communications Planning at Carat and before that worked as Director of Comms Planning at JWT in New York. Tom is very driven to innovate the productivity of the client / agency relationship, most notably how media resource is organised, how agencies can work better together and how resources should be paid for. Tom is an Associate Lecturer for the Marketing Communications MA at the University of Greenwich and a regular on media panels, award juries and trade press.

http://uk.linkedin.com/in/tomdenford

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All the words are our own, or credited where quoted. Images are found and have been credited where known / possible.

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