Media Buying Briefing: Overheard at the Media Buying Summit

By Michael Bürgi

Media agencies are facing any number of challenges, from difficult clients to increasingly complex media investment choices and a multitude of measurement and data issues. But they also face challenges within their own shops, some of which have arisen during the pandemic, which threw almost all standard operating procedures out the window.

At last week’s Media Buying Summit, held April 5-7 in Palm Springs, Calif., Digiday held two town hall sessions open just to media agency folk under Chatham House Rules (in which anonymity is granted in pursuit of honest and frank conversation). During the first session, it became immediately clear that such internal issues as lack of flexibility, compensation, diversity of talent, training and work-from-home vs. in-office are causing strain among the rank-and-file while management strives to address them. The second Town Hall aimed to surface some solutions to the challenges discussed the day before.

The following represents some of the insights during both Town Halls.

The Challenges

On agility

“I think one of the biggest challenges right now for everyone is agility. And we’ve all had to pivot on a dime for so many different reasons in the past couple of years, so it’s being able to keep up with that pace.”

“All of my clients have turnover too. So I have a new team at the clients that I have to train. I have to bring them back to square one on why we’re doing what we’re doing. It’s like triple what the job needs to be.”

On the gig economy

“I wonder if we’re at an inflection point where we need to really start embracing the gig economy. And not necessarily just looking to staff with full-time resources, but embrace more of the part-time consulting – short term work to fill gaps and plug holes, given just the crazy nature with how projects change constantly.”

“I think there’s an interesting potential reverse implication when I’m looking at talent. If they’ve done a bunch of gig jobs, I question it. It makes me wonder, is it because they can’t keep a job?”

On remote vs in-office

“One of the good things that came out of working at home was that we were able to start recruiting across the entire country, and we now have people in Colorado, Texas, North Carolina. Working at a small integrated company, we’re responsible for knowing every single media platform, as well as looking for people who have strategy, comms design, planning, execution and analytics backgrounds. So it’s really opened the door to find people across the country who have that kind of background. So that’s been one of the benefits that I’ve seen.”

“The larger markets are coming in and offering remote work for our talent and giving them bigger salaries for our people. They’re stealing our talent — it’s a real thing.”

“The flipside of that is, hiring remotely has been great, but now there’s this whole return to office push where people are trying to figure out, ‘What do we do? Do we go in one …read more

Source:: Digiday