Getting more bang for your (advertising) buck – time to decouple?

Squeezing every ounce of impact out of a yearly marketing budget is normal practice for most marketers. We are all under pressure to cut costs and achieve the best results with the lowest expenses possible, efficiency is the name of the game – both for ships and marketing.??

However, while maintaining the maximised impact of any spend, the need to continuously deliver engaging and effective content and the advertising of products and services to target consumers, through the proper channels at the right times is wildly important.?

Advertising is a marketing practice utilised to a great extent in maritime marketing strategies worldwide. For decades we have highly valued the power of print advertising in the trade media, and in more recent years, we have started to transition into reaping the benefits from digital advertising, paralleled with the increasing digitalisation of the trade media.?

If you think of advertising as a three-step process; The creative agency, the production part, and the media buying and delivery part. The traditional approach has been to work with a “one-stop shop” full-service advertising agency that handles the entire advertising process from start to finish.?

However, while this approach has worked fine for many years, it isn’t the most efficient use of the marketing budget. Though a chosen agency may be creative experts, production and media buying in specific industries or sectors of an industry may not be their forte. It may be that unnecessary expense is incurred to use expensive creative minds to undertake the production and media buying tasks, or the agency uses a third party company for the production or media buying process, again with an expensive price tag and less control for the client.?

It is for these aforementioned reasons that more and more companies in other industries are turning to utilise separate agencies for the creative process and the production and distribution process. Companies unbundle their creative and strategy development from asset creation to improve speed and quality and lower production costs when executing advertising campaigns. This is called decoupled production.

At Wake Media – we have encountered the issues associated with using one-stop shop agencies for the entire advertising process first hand through our media buying services, for which we are well known in our industry. In the years since Wake Media was founded, we have expanded our offerings to providing PR and communications support and, in more recent years, our role as a maritime marketing expert has been solidified in the industry. As part of reinforcing that role, we have invested heavily in ensuring that we can support our clients’ marketing endeavours by being one step ahead of the curve when it comes to marketing approaches and trends. Often these transpire in other industries before maritime. This is the case with decoupled production, and we believe by offering our clients the ability to work with maritime experts that can act as a production house and highly-reputed media buyers, we can save them significant time and money. Putting it simply, we believe facilitating the uptake of decoupled production in the maritime industry will allow our clients to get more bang for their buck by allowing them to move away from traditional ways of advertising implementation to more lean approaches.?

But what exactly is decoupled production? I hear some of you cry…. let’s take a deeper look.

Decoupled production – what the?!?

At the start of January, we ran a poll on our LinkedIn page – the question to our followers was: “Have you heard about decoupled production for advertising campaigns before?”

33% of respondents said: “Yes, I understand it fully”

17% of respondents said: “Yes, but I don’t understand it”

50% of respondents said: “No, what is it?”

This feedback isn’t surprising given that in the maritime sector, the practice of production decoupling is a relatively new concept that isn’t widely adopted yet. No wonder 50% of you who participated in that poll don’t know what it is.?

To put it simply, it’s vaguely similar to when Gwyneth Paltrow and Chris Martin (the frontman of the band Coldplay) coined the phrase “conscious uncoupling” in March 2014. It’s the conscious uncoupling of your initial advertising creative process with the subsequent artwork design and media buying process. In short, production decoupling occurs when a client communicates directly with a production house instead of allowing their creative agency to produce in-house or use their supplier.

Apologies for this, but we have another analogy. Think of decoupled production like this:

Gardens grow ideas, whereas factories manufacture them. In this regard, gardens are the creative advertising agencies, and they are costly because they house creative minds who come up with concepts. They are planting the seeds and growing them.?

On the other hand, the factory is where the produce goes to be processed. This is where the food grown in the garden is prepared to be ready for sale, the lorries then come to pick it up to deliver it to the supermarket. This represents the production and media buying processes in this analogy.

This is where there is an opportunity to introduce cost efficiencies, optimise the process, and gain greater control over the deliverables. In saving money in the advertising process, our clients would have more marketing budget to spend on increased placements, programmatic advertising services (we also offer that) and even choose to utilise their budget in other areas such as sponsored editorial content.?

A new era (in maritime advertising)

To make a general, sweeping comment (if I may) full-service advertising agencies are not set up to create multiple assets, nor do they specialise in one sector. They are absolutely fantastic at creating a visionary idea for an advertising campaign, but then in an ideal world, the production process would then be handled by a selected production house and PR agency to manage the source files and the placement of advertisements in that sector or industry.?

This is where our bright idea comes in. Well, less of a bright idea and more of a natural progression. Since Wake Media is well known for our media buying and PR representation services, installing an in-house production team within the company was a no-brainer. We coupled this with investing in the capacity to store our client’s assets on a large scale.?

Production decoupling allows a client’s creative agency to do what they do best: strategy, ideation and creation of master assets for global campaigns. Then, we take over the production work, including distributing assets across channels, delivery to publishers, etc.?

The benefits are clear (we think)

For us, decoupling provides better efficiency and cost reductions and allows us to react quickly to anything happening in the target markets, make changes and adapt artwork as required, while maintaining the brand, style and tone of voice within the original advertising campaign concept provided by the creative agency.?

There are several other benefits which we have put into a handy summary:?

• ?Specialisation:?Production specialists have the expertise to build better platforms and to be more robust and innovative in their distribution strategies
• Faster to market:?Production houses are well-versed in best practices and their efficient processes allow for quicker execution in bringing campaigns to markets on global or local levels
• Transparency and control:?Production decoupling approaches can avoid utilising third parties for production work once effective procedures, visibility and tracking, communications channels and KPIs are properly implemented
• Creative freedom:?Once the production work is left to specialist production houses, creative agencies can spend time developing creative concepts
• Sharing assets:?Sharing assets is more efficient through the use of an asset library for storing all finalised assets from all markets that are serviced
• Competitive pricing:?Consolidating all production work under one roof comes with the benefit of consolidated cost
• Consistency:?Employing a centralised production house for all production work can offer enhanced visibility and consistency when delivering assets and also during distribution

You can also view this blog and our latest news here:?www.wake-media.co.uk/news-hub

To find out more, contact us by email at?info@wake-media.co.uk? or call?+44(0) 208 686 1728?or visit?www.wake-media.co.uk