THE PITCH
Outside the creation of his new ad agency, Banjo, John Singleton is fired up about two things right now.
The first is that the economic downturn will be harsher than many believe and will impact profoundly on corporate marketing departments because most, he says, are fundamentally useless and company boards are working that out as we speak.
The second is the split of media planning and buying out of creative agencies.
There is much debate about the latter and Singleton and his new partners in Banjo are right behind getting media back into bed with the creative side of the ad business.
One of Banjo's first moves after its director of strategy, Ben Little, arrives in a few weeks will be to appoint its own media director. More on that shortly.
But what doesn't get so much attention these days is the ineffectiveness of corporate marketing people, particularly in most media commentary. The default position is that "clients" have got their act together and marketing services companies are to blame for everything. Corporate marketing, however, is often as slow, conservative and bureaucratic as the best in public transport.
Singleton, somewhat theatrically, is predicting a dire future for that breed and it's probably one point his agency rivals, who love him as much as a recycled brick, will cheer loudly over.
Like the big agency groups that Singleton and his fellow Banjo twangers hold in disrepute, many marketing departments are full of people trained at university, loaded with correct theory but lacking any instinct, flair and effectiveness. It's this mob that could be in trouble.
"This is the worst recession we have had for a long, long time," Singleton says. "Forget the '60s, '70s and '80s. Marketing departments will get a knife through them. The good ones are not a problem but the ones that are just filling up desks - and there's f---ing loads of them - will be gone. The real bosses, the boards and CEOs, are saying they have to get better results from their marketing, and that's happening now.
"It's beautiful for us. It is purely by coincidence we have picked a time when the economy is in deep, deep trouble."
Self-serving and a salesman to the bone is John Singleton, but he's probably on the money. This week he also applied his spruiking blowtorch to media agencies and their break-off from creatives a decade ago.
"That is one of the terrible, terrible blunders of advertising in the last 20-odd years," he says. "We spend all this time on the ad and everyone leaves and then two kids or two sub-human species sit around and discuss the media. If you have no control of where the ad runs, what's the point of having a good ad? The whole set-up needs a bomb."
Publicly, media agency bosses say there is little chance of the two disciplines getting back together, although only last week the Commonwealth Bank's marketing chief, Mark Buckman, told the Herald it was the future model for the industry.
And, interestingly, Banjo's managing partner and the guy Singleton is bankrolling, Andrew Varasdi, says the conversations he is having with media agency bigwigs is contrary to their public posturing.
"In the last couple of months after leaving where I was [Singleton Ogilvy & Mather], the people that are most interested in what we're doing are the media directors," he says. "Every time I speak to a media director they say there has got be a better way of working. They want to get into a creative agency, to get back to ideas again. They are just crunching numbers and ticking boxes. That's pretty interesting."
Varasdi says Banjo will appoint its own media director shortly to operate at the same level as the creative director and planning director.
"We think getting those key minds around the table working out where we should be talking and how we should be talking is critical," he says. "Where the stories are being told is as important as the story itself. There are so many media layers now to a campaign, it is critical how every single layer is used."
