The Complete Consultant

There are two sides to every story: pro and con, heads and tails, ying and yang and so on and so forth. In the media consulting business there are two sides as well. There’s the side that saves clients money and the one that makes them more money. The complete consulting package delivers both.

Both sides now

For years many practitioners concentrated on saving clients’ money. It is a more concrete endeavor. You can count the results (read savings). This approach has a lot of fans. It appeals to a marketer’s financial group as well as the marketing team. The kind of work in this category includes…

-Evaluating the agency’s fee structure for savings
-Renegotiating the agency contract
-Improving the flow of work and streamlining staff
-Finding money in an independent evaluation of a media buy

These are all worthy enterprises that save huge sums of money, especially for large advertisers where the stakes are very high.

The consulting field has always supported its share of professionals who are basically strategists that try to help a client make more money. This endeavor is more difficult to quantify. Market shares and brand sales increase for many reasons that are not so easily attributable to one or two changes in strategy. This approach has fewer fans and is more difficult to buy into. However, the rewards can be huge. As a consultant, you can charge a fee and justify it against real money you have saved a client, however it is more difficult to justify the same fee against increased sales (although it shouldn’t be).

In this category of consulting work we have…
-Brand and media repositioning
-Competitive analysis and strategic repositioning
-Research and information audits
-Retargeting and retiming issues
-Media workshops to improve a client’s expertise.

In many ways these enterprises are about media planning, while the former are predominantly about media buying. Save money by improving the tactics. Make money by improving strategy.

Fuzzy math

A penny saved in this case is less than a penny earned. As a marketer, making money gains you more than saving it. Think about it. The typical advertising to sales ratio in the US is a little over 5%. So sales are on average roughly twenty times advertising. Then savings accrued by improving buying tactics are important, but drawn from a smaller pool of money. In the strategic arena the pool of money at stake is roughly twenty times larger. Improvements in this area yield larger sums of money because the base is larger. The math is conceptually simple but in practice complicated to prove.

Here’s a real example: If strategic changes in a brand with a 20% share of market were responsible for moving it to a 21% share, to match that dollar value one would have to save all of the media money spent or twenty times the agency fee. Neither is likely to happen. So while each endeavor is important and deserving of full attention, much more is at stake in the strategic area.

During the last Presidential campaign this would have been called fuzzy math. That’s only because we are still unable to definitely attribute increased sales to strategic changes. There are, of course, a few very professional research firms with a large list of blue chip clients who do measure exactly this and would take issue. Many consultants believe that you have to carve out a niche to be successful. That is not conducive to offering a broad range of services to a client or at the very least having the ability to interpret niche results in a broad context.

The whole package

So there you have it, the ying and the yang. Maybe the approach is to listen closely to the client’s question like “How can I be sure that I’m getting full value for my money?” and not assume that this just requires a media audit of a television buy or workflow study. Perhaps it raises strategic questions as well and requires a comparison with the best practices within the industry and demands that a few new ones need to be invented.

Media Directors Inc.: Cover Story

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