This will be a quick one, relating why I think Media only Advertising Agencies don't always work so well...
My Most Dumbest Media Placement Ever
As a Media Planning professional I take pride in my ability to evaluate, negotiate and properly place ads in a variety of media vehicles. For years I ran the Print Planning/Buying at a "Full Service Agency" and took great pride in the work we did. But all good things come to an end someday right?
That someday came for me after a series of corporate decisions split my division off to be it's very own independent organization which would nevermore speak to anyone else in our old company (even though we were all still in the same building and worked on the same business).
We began our new life as an independent organization by telling our ex-coworkers all the things we would no longer be doing for them (in retrospect that may have been a bad way to start), no longer would we do co-op billing, no longer would we listen to them tell us why we should place ads were we didn't think it would work and no longer would we allow them to be our conduit to the client!! Funny how you draw lines in the proverbial sand only to realize your side of the sandbox isn't all it's cracked up to be...
With our new working relationship set up we proceeded to move on to the real work of evaluation and negotiations. We were now working effectively blind to the creative product, so all we had seen of the ads was a written "Creative Brief" with a load of Marketing jargon from the Client. Thanks to our new working non-relationship with our creative team we sure as hell hadn't seen the ad concepts!
For a lot of reasons I won't go into detail on we made the decision to run in a Sports Magazine with our ad... color me surprised when I opened up the magazine a few weeks later to look at my very well negotiated very premium positioned ad to find a lovely shot of a Bride with cake all over her face and a headline that read something to the affect of "on your special day"!
It only got worse, as is typical in my industry, another magazine at the time had a section the called "found porn" ... yup, they had thoughtfully run our ad gratis, with the headline changed to "Here Cums the Groom"!
oops... Guess the cake was on my face!
