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Media essays

Managing change in a media planning and buying organization (2006)
By Sarah Goodwin

“Nineteen ninety five was the year when the in-house media department finally rolled over and died” said Claire Beale (1996). What is meant by this statement is that by nineteen ninety five most of the large advertising agencies in the US and UK had moved from the one stop shop model where an agency came up with a campaign strategy, the creative execution, the media strategy and negotiated the placement of the advertising in the selected media vehicles. By the beginning of the nineteen nineties “the challenges of a fragmenting, segmenting and exploding media environment” (Beale,1996) led the bosses of the large global advertising organizations to rethink the way they were doing things in regards to the media planning and buying area of the advertising business.  Inefficiencies were identified in the old system of “each agency mak[ing] separate deals for each of its clients to buy space” (Hill,1996) in each particular media vehicle. To economize the process the big players in the industry, parent companies that owned multiple advertising agencies, merged the media departments of their agencies together into “large media buying consortiums to be able to match the negotiating muscle of the big media proprietors” (Shoebridge, 1997) and through their size were thus able to get cheaper advertising rates for their clients. This was seen to be the way forward for the industry and so all around the world advertising agencies and media planning and buying agencies became separate entities and continue to be so today. A media planner interviewed for this essay who was a manager of a team of planner buyers for an advertising agency in Melbourne at the time these changes were shaking up the industry recalls getting her team through this difficult period as one of the biggest challenges she ever faced as a manager. Along with the physical move away from the agency’s offices and the christening of the media planning arm of the business under a new name, there were significant changes in the day to day work of the team that she as a manager had to guide them through. With the luxury of hindsight we can apply some of the theories of change management to the situation faced by the interviewed media planner and many other managers at media planning and buying organizations at this time to see what was done well and what could have been done better to manage a team of planner-buyers through a period of organizational upheaval.

            In his classic text ‘Managing Transitions’ William Bridges proposes that there are three stages a manager must guide their team through in order to successfully cope with organizational change. The first stage is letting go of the way things were because as Bridges points out “before you can begin something new, you have to end what used to be” (Bridges, 1991, p 19), and it is this loss of something familiar that people can be more uncomfortable with than the new things the change is bringing in. In the case of the media planning and buying industry what they were losing was their relationship with the creative department of the advertising agency (Anonymous, 2006) and the feeling that working together produced a “seamless join between creative strategy and media execution” (Anonymous, 1996). The task of helping a team cope with such a loss falls to the manager and in the case of the media planner at her Melbourne advertising and media agencies there was no management training offered at all, let alone training in change management techniques, so the transition proved to be more difficult than it would have been had a change management framework been put in place. Bridges suggests that a manager should explain the expected changes as fully and honestly as they can to their team try to think of all the implications the change will have on the everyday work lives of the members of the teams and on the organization as a whole as knowing what to expect will help ease the anxiety of the team and help them to be prepared for the changes being brought in (Bridges, 1991). Clearly such careful planning in introducing a change will have a positive impact on how a change is received by team members, and similar preparation for change may have helped to prevent some of the resignations that occurred in the media planning and buying industry (Anonymous, 2006) at the onset of the unbundling trend.

            Stage two of change management according to Bridges is navigating the “neutral zone” (Bridges, 1991, p 34) between the old and the new way of doing things. During this stage of the change process good management is essential in ensuring that “the organization comes through the change intact and that those necessary changes actually work” (Bridges, 1991, p 36) because without effective management during this ambiguous period the anxiety and confusion of team members who are half way between two systems can sabotage the change effort. An example of this from the period of change in the media planning and buying industry is the case of a car account that was unbundled, with separate agencies handling the creative and media aspects of the communication strategy (Shoebridge, 1997). After three months the account was rebundled and given to a full service agency “because of delays and communication breakdowns” (Shoebridge, 1997) that had occurred because obviously no one was managing the team in a way that ensured that the job got done despite the upheaval. Bridges proposes that despite its challenges a good manager can use the neutral zone as an opportune time to encourage creativity and innovation because the team is no longer limited by an established way of doing things (Bridges, 1991). This idea could have been used to great effect in the case of the media planning and buying industry because one result of the change to the industry was budget cuts (Anonymous, 2006), so a period of innovative thinking and creative freedom may have encouraged planner-buyers to come up with strategic solutions to problems to overcome the budget shortages.  

            The third of Bridges’ stages of change management is “launching a new beginning” (Bridges, 1991, p 50), the final step in the transition process. For many team members a new beginning can be scary as it can bring up feelings of loss that weren’t properly dealt with back at stage one, there can be fear that the change wont succeed and the organization won’t survive or that an individual won’t cope and won’t survive in the organization and there can be resistance against the end of the freedom of the neutral period (Bridges, 1991). In order to ease the minds and improve the performances of their teams at the onset of this new chapter in their lives and the life of the organization a good manager first needs to have helped their team successfully navigate the issues of stage one and two. Then the team members need to be given a purpose behind the new way of doing things so they don’t slip back into old habits (Bridges, 1991). Then they need to be given a picture of what the outcome will be if they successfully make the changes in order to inspire them (Bridges, 1991). Next the manager must give the team a plan for the steps in the transition to be made and when they will receive the training and assistance they will need to successfully make the transition (Bridges, 1991). Finally team members must be given a part to play in carrying out the above mentioned plan so that they have a vested interest in its success (Bridges, 1991). Such clear guidelines at this stage may again have helped many of the people in the media planning and buying industry navigate the industry changes more easily and may have stopped some talented people from leaving the industry.

            Daly, Teague and Kitchen (2003) are also theorists on organizational change and their work on the role of communication during organizational change fits well with what our media planner had to say about the changes that happened in media planning and buying in the mid nineteen nineties. In their paper ‘Exploring the role of internal communication during organizational change’ Daly, Teague and Kitchen say that “up to 70 per cent of change programs fail… and poor internal communication is seen as the principal reason for such failure” (Daly, Teague and Kitchen, 2003). The reason they give for this is that employee perception of an organization is important because “they will communicate positive or negative messages to other important publics who could impact on organizational performance” (Daly, Teague and Kitchen, 2003) and if the internal communication within an organization is not giving the employees the perception that the organization knows what they are doing, then the message that employees give the public will be a negative one. In their paper Daly, Teague and Kitchen reference a study by Schweiger and De Nisi in 1991 and this study showed that open and honest communication from managers to employees, even of bad news, meant that “the short-term pre and post merger negativity brought about by the perception of uncertainty eventually translated into lower levels of absenteeism, staff turnover and higher levels of productivity” (Daly, Teague and Kitchen, 2003). The media planner interviewed concurred with this view point saying that she found open and honest communication to be her best tool as a manager during the time her organization was changing (Anonymous, 06). She said that uncertainty was what caused her team the most concern, and that even if she didn’t have all the answers telling her team as much as she knew helped allay their fear and contributed to better productivity during the period of upheaval. Although Daly, Teague and Kitchen’s study only deals with good communication during organizational change, open and honest communication is something good managers should strive to implement constantly.

            During a time of organizational change it is common for staff to want to leave an organization all together if they aren’t feeling happy with their new workload, and it is the manager’s job to try and make them stay by offering some sort of incentive and doing things to reinforce their bond with the team. Mark Dominiak (2006) has written a paper specifically on the subject of what media planning and buying agencies can do to retain their staff given the stressful work environment of the industry and a lot of what he has to say concurs with what the interviewed media planner said she did in trying to retain and bond together her team members during the period of organizational change that she managed through. Extra monetary remuneration was not an option in the case of the media planner interviewed and her organization because as previously mentioned the organizational change brought with it budget cuts (Anonymous, 2006) so other forms of remuneration for hard work had to be thought of. One tactic suggested by Dominiak and also used by our media planner was giving a day off after someone had performed particularly well and spent long hours on a difficult task (Anonymous, 2006), but Dominiak warns that this reward must only be used sparingly or employees may come to expect days off too frequently and productivity can be harmed (Dominiak, 2006). Another tactic suggested by Dominiak and used by our media planner was having a weekly drinks night (Dominiak, 2006) and in her organization it was taken a step further by the creation of an area in the office where the Friday night drinks were held and where coffee breaks were taken during the week (Anonymous, 2006). The media planner interviewed said that she found this a good spot to go to hear the concerns of her team members in a more informal setting that tended to encourage more candid conversation and thus helped get to the underlying issues that were affecting them (Anonymous, 2006). These small measures can go a long way to letting a team know that they are appreciated and giving them a chance to air their concerns so that they can be worked out, and valued staff members continue to stay with and contribute to the organization after the difficult transition period has passed.

            It is now a decade after the unbundling trend swept through the media planning and buying industry and caused a wave of organizational change in almost every agency. Whether it was handled competantly or not all the agencies are well and truly through the transition period and hopefully those staff members who went through the turbulent period learned something about how or how not to implement organizational change. The media planner who was interviewed for this essay has made it her mission to help managers in media planning and buying organizations by becoming a consultant and giving them the much needed management training that wasn’t available to her. Her services may soon be required by organizations wanting to rebundle their creative and media planning and buying as there have recently been calls from within the industry to do this. Some people high up in the media planning and buying industry in the UK are calling for rebundling creative and media as a means to achieve greater integration of campaigns (Billings, 2006). If they do decide to go ahead and reverse the changes of a decade ago lets hope that they have learned from the experience and do a better job than many agencies did then by putting into place a coordinated change management plan.

References:

Anonymous. 1996. Is it the End of In-House Media Departments? Media Week. February 2nd, 1996.

 Beale, C. 1996. Death and the Media Department. Campaign, Vol. 41. Retrieved April 20th, 2006.

Billings, C. 2006. For One and for All. Campaign. January 27, 2006. Retrieved April 25th, 2006.

Bridges, W. 1991. Managing Transitions: Making the Most of Change. Addison-Wesley Publishing, USA.

Daly, F. Teague, P. and Kitchen, P. Exploring the Role of Internal Communication During Organizational Change. Corporate Communications, Vol. 8, Iss. 3. Retrieved April 25th, 2006.

Dominiak, M. 2006. Use Creative Tactics to Retain Staff. Television Week, Vol. 25, Iss. 3. Retrieved April 18th, 2006.

Hill, D. 1996. Publishers Quail as the Big Three Launch Super Buying Agency. The National Business Review, October 18th, 1996. Retrieved April 22nd, 2006.

Anonymous. 2006. Interviewed April 14th, 2006.

Shoebridge, N. 1997. To Bundle or not to Bundle. Business Review Weekly,Vol. 184. Retrieved April 20th 2006.

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