By: Ekrem Dupanović
Advertising budgets are shrinking left and right. They are slashed by clients, they are slashed by agencies, only the media have nothing to slash, because they have been slashed long ago. I’m reading the article we published today about the Fearless Girl statue, installed on the Wall Street in New York, and the results that this campaign has achieved. For a “miserable” budget spent only on the making of the statue of a little girl, and without a single dollar of media spend, the McCann NY agency generated $7.5 million worth of earned media space, nearly five billion impressions on Twitter, and more than 215,000 posts on Instagram in 12 weeks.
Agencies are lamenting over reduced client budgets and revenue drops. Lamenting is futile, you need to begin to appreciate yourself and your work. Creative ideas and creative work need to be charged properly, and the rest should be left to the client. I’m utterly interested when will the agencies organize a conference that would discuss creative ideas and their values, and agree on the rules that all will adhere to? Just as I’m wondering when will the big media players sit at the same table and agree on the upper threshold of media discounts, and not damp prices even by staggering 75% – and will it ever happen. Agencies and the media must once and for all put an end to the greed of the clients. As one of our readers said today in his comment on Facebook, advertising has turned into elite prostitution.
If you can’t charge an idea in a fixed amount for a specific campaign, the agencies should at least muster the courage to work for free, but to share with the client the profit from the campaign. If you believe in your idea, then take the risk. For a client in New York, it would have certainly paid off to pay McCann at least a million $ for the idea, if they received $7.5 million worth of free media space, and on top of that huge popularity on social networks. A million dollars is not peanuts even for a New York agency. On the contrary!
We will not publish a single word more about the Sarajevo Brewery and Gotiva on the portal, unless one of them sends their comments. We are not used to having our portal “crash” due to visits. We want to go back to normal. Three – four thousand visitors a day, that’s enough for us (these days there were over 20,000 visitors). We don’t sell clicks to our advertisers. We prefer the visits of real professionals in the industry rather than sensation hunters. We’re not the medium for that.
11 September 2017
