360⁰ MEDIA GUIDE

Continued from page M5

content. It’s very much more from a consumer perspective than from a media perspective.

RICHARD BEAVEN: I’m not sure it’s simply about surrounding the consumer. That suggests that it’s very much the brand pushing down or surrounding the consumer. It’s really about finding something that’s relevant to the consumer that they’re going to actually invite in.

MR. SWINAND: Before, it was brand talking to consumer. Now, it’s a much more interactive, collaborative, optimized experience where consumers are constantly engaging in the dialogue with the brands and communicators are forced to adjust accordingly. So the 360° aspect refers to that as well. MR. ADELMAN: For us, the problem of integrating communications is you really have to start with the consumer, and the strategy and the message, and how do we develop brand story arcs that extend across all of these channels in a meaningful way.

AA: You’re talking about the impact that 360° media is having on creative?

MR. ADELMAN: Yes. The big challenge is strategic and creative. The media people have been ready to solve these problems for years. What we’re working really hard on at Johnson & Johnson is finding new ways to tell stories in this environment.

AA: We hear a lot about breaking down silos these days. What are you learning from the process of breaking down silos in your organizations?

MR. SWINAND: Media agencies have typically been structured around the points of distribution, with a broadcast investment group, a cable team, a print team, a digital team. The optimized approach was around how can I most efficiently buy and execute. The biggest change is that the media agencies are restructuring how they go to market and how they interact with vendors and clients.

Initiative and Starcom have created this activation role. It acknowledges the fact that we need to think more holistically about stories and about consumer engagement, and we need individuals who can work across contact points and work across channels to activate these ideas.

MR. BEAVEN: It’s becoming extremely difficult to draw a line between what you might term planning and buying. So it becomes less about how different individual areas work together and more about how do we put together the start and finish of this whole thing.

AA: How do you do that? Put people in a room together? MR. ADELMAN: That’s what we do. We put in a lot of time and effort with our agencies and with the leadership of our brands to essentially reintegrate. This industry has allowed creative and media to drift way too far apart since unbundling started 10 years ago. And the emergence of digital has forced us all to come back to the table together.

So at Johnson & Johnson we’ve put together a formal process that brings all of the stakeholders together early on and gets alignment strategically and creatively about what our brands are about. The idea of doing consumer-centric communications planning and that leading to creative production sounds painfully obvious, but I think as an industry a lot of people are still producing creative first and writing media plans second.

MR. SWINAND: I think it goes beyond just getting people in a room. In the past, we’d have everyone in the room and they’d present the TV spot and the discussion was how to distribute it.

The real significant shift is, both from a media and a creative standpoint, taking a much more consumer-centric view to defining what is the story, what is the approach and what is the source of engagement. And to the earlier point of getting everyone in a room, my experience is that a lot of the creative agencies don’t like to begin from that point.

MR. BEAVEN: You’ve got to recognize that the ideas now can come from anywhere—junior, senior, whichever discipline is in the room. You’ve got to see that whatever process you have, that process is essentially a means to an end. In a lot of places it’s

M48

merely an end in itself, and so people are going through the motions.We also have to recognize that things are moving at a faster and faster pace. So there’s a lot more agility built into it, a lot more evolution and thinking on the fly. To do that, you have to have things centered around more of a strategic thought. MR. ADELMAN: At Johnson & Johnson, we have a lot of different agencies and a lot of different models in place. As we’ve shifted our thinking toward consumer-centered integrated communications, we get to see which models work better.

It’s very difficult to re-engage the dialogue between creative and media at that level that the guys were just describing. It’s very different for the traditional creative agencies to make a full strategic seat at the table for the digital agencies.

AA: So what structures have worked the best? MR. ADELMAN: There are different solutions for different businesses. We’ve had some success with agencies that do a little bit more in-house that have solved the silo problem internally. In other cases, we’ve put digital agencies together with creative and media planning agencies and said you have to find a new way of working.

AA: Which silos do you most want to break down next? MR. SWINAND: One of the first is on the vendor side. A lot of vendors really define their product narrowly or linearly, based on what the distribution is. Before, online was its own bucket. I had my online agency, and online was unique and different. But now that all media are digital … we need to reintegrate it. MR. BEAVEN: For me it’s a talent issue. The silos I want to break down are the mental models that people have about existing forms of media and existing communication habits. We need to get people to re-evaluate what’s the best way to connect with a consumer. Unless we develop the talent in the right way, then no amount of organization from a physical point of view will change anything.

AA: What do those mental silos get in the way of? MR. BEAVEN: People have to think differently. Be open-minded. Have a broad perspective on what’s happening in culture, and what’s happening from a consumer standpoint and what’s happening in the development of digital. MR. ADELMAN: The talent issue is critically important because the problem with integration is that you need people leading these processes who are really capable of thinking very broadly and outside the boundaries of their traditional disciplines. It seems as if there is a shortage of those people.

AA: Where do they come from?

MR. BEAVEN: I don’t think it’s about experience or age. It’s about diversity in all its forms, whether ethnic diversity, geographical diversity, being in a different business or a different agency type or a different discipline in an agency. MR. ADELMAN: It’s all about diversity of thought. People have always thought digital is the most integrated or innovative, but some of the digital people are actually some of the most narrow-minded in terms of “not invented here” or ownership. MR. BEAVEN: I’ll give you a huge challenge: We’re bringing people into our business and the industry in general. These people bring with them very fresh perspectives. Many of them are the so-called digital natives. The challenge for any of us is how do we make sure that we unlock the potential, that we tap into the ideas and experiences and forward-thinking of some of these people we’re bringing in.

AA: Is the industry’s heavy focus on ROI and the bottom line affecting its ability to attract talent?

MR. ADELMAN: I can’t say that it’s not. But I don’t think it’s an either-or proposition. One of the things we talk a lot about is we need to expand our definition beyond ROI and talk about “ROO,” or return on objectives. When we talk about a linear approach, to say everything is based on ROI and ROI is king really leads you to a direct model. And I don’t think that’s how marketing/advertising

communications work.

There is a danger in that you follow ROI out the window and you are so focused on the mathematics of it that you forget the need for ideas and understanding.

MR. BEAVEN: One thing we need to do is move quickly away from a world where, certainly from a media point of view, the time frame is seen as the 12-month plan. There are lots of moves away from that, but we’ve got to continue that and accelerate it. When we focus on a period of time, we get focused on the wrong thing in terms of results.

MR. ADELMAN: Speaking from the client’s perspective, I don’t think a focus on ROI is exclusive to creativity and talent. And agencies that bring new ideas are going to have no problem being profitable.

MR. SWINAND: I’m curious about that. One thing we’ve seen is that as you look to cut and reduce staffing, if you look at procurement and savings, you cut out a lot of the senior talent and start driving toward efficiency and execution. It leads you down a path that is kind of counter to 360. I’d love your perspective on that. MR. ADELMAN: I don’t know that you’ve described a scenario that fits the way we treat our agencies. I can tell you we work very closely with our agencies as partners to make sure we achieve our objectives.

AA: If the CMO has a life expectancy of 18 months, how can he or she attract bright people? That’s part of the problem, isn’t it? MR. SWINAND: That’s not every client. I do think that recently the increased emphasis on procurement and ROI has led to more turnover and more pressure to produce shorter-term results. I think the media agencies were partially to blame in that they were pitching an efficiency story. In some respect, it trained clients to focus on efficiency. And clients have reaped the benefits of those efficiencies, but are coming back and challenging agencies to come together and deliver bigger ideas.

AA: Andrew [Swinand] mentioned vendors. Which ones are doing a particularly good job with digital?

MR. BEAVEN: I don’t want to single any out, but the best ones are going back to their core product and how that relates to consumers. And they understand that what they have to offer is content. They’re inventing and combining platforms and trying to leverage that and working with us to get that done.

MR. ADELMAN: I think big media have made a lot of changes recently that are very refreshing. They’re bringing a lot of great ideas and products to the consumer right now and also to advertisers. Video downloads, webisodes, mobisodes, streaming online for program sampling. Deep-background content online. Going back to what the real strength is: telling stories and serving audiences.

When you take those capabilities as well as the ability to efficiently produce content across multiple platforms, I think they’re going to end up leading advertisers in many ways into new places. MR. BEAVEN: The key for me is that media companies understand what their brand relationship is with consumers. It’s much more of a brand-marketing approach. To say that my business is not magazines, it’s helping new mothers better care for their children—that’s a huge paradigm shift for a lot of content companies.

AA: What is the most significant challenge you will face next year?

MR. SWINAND: Balancing the near term with the long term. In our industry the pace of change is so rapid that we need to invest in tomorrow; but the volume of work and execution we need to deliver today is significant. As a business, this is something that is probably pretty standard for vendors as well.

MR. BEAVEN: I agree with that. We continually ask ourselves: Are we changing fast enough and in the right places? MR. ADELMAN: Keeping up with the pace of change is the challenge. What we’ve done is put in place structures to incen-tivize marketers to take those risks and bring back that learning to the corporation. o

NOVEMBER 6, 2006