These days you really gotta work at managing your non-working media. If you plan on squeezing your non-productive spend be sure that it doesn’t render your working media useless or worse, make it work negatively. The money spent on exposing brands to communities and consumers is far more impactful than the money spent on creating the content exposed… Or is it?
Let’s say you are working. You get up early, take a shower, get dressed, have some tea and some toast. You travel to the office. Now that you have arrived at work and are working, ask yourself… “was all that stuff I did prior to my arrival meaningful in anyway as it pertains to my actual time at work?”. Could you have been working without not working first? If a tree falls in the woods and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?
And so a new ratio of working media to non-working media is inevitable thanks to digital and the rise in consumer generated content that has grown the pool of content providers. With more content providers, downward pressure is applied which limits the non-working spend on creative, research, strategy and production as more resources are devoted to working media. The lower the ratio the better….that is, IF Brands can convert those savings into active marketing investment dollars.
Now you may be asking, what if my Ad stinks? What if CGC is unsophisticated garbage of the lowest order? Should Agency’s risk throwing off a clients’ non-working media ratio? It all depends on whether or not you believe that production is something that creates value in the first place. Success and virtue are not necessarily linked.
A broader efficiency drive that includes eliminating duplicate work and unnecessary costs but not non-working media may actually be helpful to a Brands messaging campaign. Yes! Some folks actually think that the quality and creativity of the Ad is just as important as airing it and encourage against holding back non-working spending, believing that, it in fact works.
“Which came first, the chicken or the egg?”, sums up the conundrum faced by modern day CMOs that are faced with a baffling paradox. In an age of social media, millions of impressions can be generated for free but might not be shared in the first place (work) if not for an initial investment in the non-working spend. Social might not work without non-working media working first. But since organic reach has no cost associated with it, can it even be considered as ‘working’? Is it non-working? Certainly if the non-working portion works, then it must work. These are questions only the greatest philosophers of our time dare tackle. I think therefore I am.
Now, the focus on non-working media is only part of the issue, for ratios of content development to Paid media will vary over time and by category. What of popular custom content…aka Owned media? If done properly it may prevent non-working media from squeezing out working outlays. Of course, all costs need to be looked at in order to fully realize what drawbacks to the non-working ratio are really harming a Brand. This opens up yet another paradox; Does Paid media fuel Owned and Earned or will Owned, if done right, help prop up Paid and encourage Earned? If the goal is to get people to participate in the Brand, you have to invest and turn the non-working vs. working notion on its head once and for all! Research has shown that among Paid, Owned and Earned media, Earned media consistently drives the most purchase, followed by Owned, THEN by Paid. But the error in translating this research into a referendum on Paid is too widespread. It doesn’t mean that Earned and Owned can work without Paid. Although not the only thing – Paid is still extremely important in the mix and it just so happens that the reason behind working media not working so hard on its own anymore is because budgets aren’t adequately expanded to encompass additional work, i.e. non-working media.
Taking the initial analogy a step further, let’s say you work part time at a grocery store but hang on to a second job as a night time watchman at a Lobster Farm. Even though you are only working part time, the accumulation of hours between two jobs has you exhausted. When you are not working, you’re so exhausted that all you want to do in your non-working hours is lay around. You get fat and depressed. To compound the issue you are stealing groceries and lobsters because it’s hard to make ends meet otherwise. Completely eliminating non-working has created an environment where work has a net negative impact on both you and your employers. It is in this hypothetical scenario where one begins to see the vital impact of increasing non-working portions.
Or maybe, non-working Media just makes everything else work (?)
