The chairman of media communications agency Mediaedge:cia UK speaks candidly with Joseph about topics he’ll be covering in his keynote address next week at the iMedia Brand Summit.

Rob Norman is chairman of media communications agency Mediaedge:cia UK. Norman started his career at RSCG in 1985 before joining CIA Group in 1986. In 1994, he started CIA Interactive, Europe's first digital media specialist in the days of text-based Compuserve and before the first banner ad. During 1997 and 1998 Norman was EVP Interactive of Prisma Sports and Media. In 1998, he found Outrider, a full-service digital specialist, and as a Tempus Board member was closely involved in the company's acquisition by WPP in November 2001. Since the merger which created Mediaedge:cia, Norman has been responsible for global business development as well as the merger of Outrider and The Digital Edge. In April 2003, he was named UK Chairman and retains his global digital role.

In this open and thought-provoking conversation, Joseph Jaffe and Norman discuss playing nicely in the sandbox of integration, interactive’s role in the evolving communications process, TiVo’s future and consolidation.

Jaffe: Give us a sneak preview to your keynote at the brand summit in Tamaya – I think that the idea here is not to give too much away, but at least to provide an appetizer or set the scene for what people might expect.

Norman: My speech is about the imperative for clients to become the arch integrators of marketing services. The marketing services community, aided and abetted by its customers, has presided over a disaggregation of marketing services over the last 20 to 30 years. And the separation of thought and the constant battle for the high ground, and who should own the customer in terms of the advertiser and who should be the lead advisor in terms of marketing community, I think, is mitigated against advertisers and marketers receiving the best counsel on that.

And it’s about the redress of that situation in terms of the marketing community and the people who are the brand owners regaining control over that process – and what kind of integration and synergy can be achieved through doing that, and then, specifically for the iMedia audience, I’ll talk about how things interactive are actually going to act as a cipher for integration in the widest sense.

Jaffe: Sounds fascinating. If I heard you correctly, you’ve said that in your opinion, the role and responsibility is going to rest solely in the hands of the client – the brand managers so to speak. Does that mean, implicitly – or are you saying this responsibility is too great a responsibility or just not well served in the hands of the agencies?

Norman: No, not so much that, but the way the agency industry is structured, and the way the P&Ls of the agency sector are constructed, it’s kind of pre-inevitable. But if you go to a media services specialist with a business problem, you’re going to get a media services answer. If you go to a PR firm specifically with a business problem you’re going to get a PR-centric answer. And I think actually, the clients are the account men of our generation.

Jaffe: A recent poll in one of the trades interviewed an even amount of clients and agencies and asked, “Who in your opinion is leading the integration charge?” And I think something like 70% of agency executives said, “Agencies are,” and 70% of clients said, “Clients are.” And I think in there lies the problem …

Norman: Indeed. But I think it’s the proverbial no-brainer, isn’t it because the person who has the right to integrate is the person who controls the budget. And most agencies in their heyday may have perceived themselves as controllers of budgets, because it was an outsourced function almost, from marketing departments. The fact of the matter is that this aggregation of the agency services provision means that the only person that controls the budget, ultimately, is the client. And he who controls the budget is the account man.

Jaffe: Just going back to the client side for a moment, I think clearly, one of the concerns is that many clients – especially the large, global ones -- are just not structured and integrated, and they still consist of just a plethora of silos, where kind of in-fighting and political agendas seem to be the order of the day …

Norman: When the average life expectancy of a brand manager in an FMCG company is 14 months, or whatever it is, the notion of laying off the bet to 3rd parties to integrate services is pretty tempting.

Jaffe: In some of the Jaffe Juices I’ve written, I’ve expounded on a concept that David Aaker coined, which is “Internet as the integrator” – in order to expand the conceptual framework of how integration is viewed. Which is to say, it’s not just about look and feel, aesthetic or superficial, unified style sheets. It is about unifying thought, and unifying ultimately what most clients are desperately searching for – the big idea.

Norman: My perspective on that, for what it’s worth, is that business and businesses are driven by multiple ideas, and some are declinations of others, but it’s very rare that there’s a parent idea—a communication ideas -- that drives its way all through the business.

And I think what this is about, is having the breadth of vision to accommodate a range of ideas, and to arrange those ideas in a state of hierarchy and purpose that’s relevant.

Jaffe: You will be addressing an audience of predominantly interactive people, however, more and more so that audience is comprised of people with integrated responsibility. What role do you believe the Internet plays in the integrated picture?

Norman: One of the ways of creating integration is finding platforms on which you can integrate an idea. So when it comes to one architecture which incorporates response, customer reaction and analytics, logically the Web is potentially a very big deal.

I also think that the Web acts in a way as a kind of parallel universe in that there’s nothing you can do offline that you can’t create online. So you can stimulate the appetite online, you can sponsor online, you can sales-promote online, you can retail online, you can run supply chain online – etc., etc.

One of the challenges facing the interactive industry is that we are now starting to fall into the same silos as the marketing services industry. When in fact, what we operate on as a platform is transcendent.

Jaffe: And you’re saying “we” as an interactive community?

Norman: Right. And so what’s happening is, you’re having people doing interactive advertising, you’re having people doing interactive customer service, you’re having people doing interactive brand experience, you’re having people doing interactive PR, you’re having people doing interactive retailing and so forth. And so what we’re doing, we’re drifting, into broadly speaking, the same silos as our analog counterparts and we’re going to create the same degrees of separation and lack of integration, across discipline, across functions and therefore not leveraging where we want to take it.

Jaffe: That’s a really interesting point that you raise. It’s certainly a caution, or something that needs to be cautioned.

How, then, do you feel that we as an industry should be positioning ourselves ultimately, if not as a silo? Are we just another line-item on the flow chart?

Norman: All of us that are involved in this area – we had a go, didn’t we? And what happened was our own hubris was our downfall. What we did when we were involved in the companies that are part of history now, is we said, here’s this vision of this bright, new future – we are the arch integrators, we’re the masters of a parallel universe etc. – but we messed it all up.

But what happened was, we had a group of people that had the vision to see what its potential was, but without the depth of experience to execute that vision, and the depth of business relevant experience to execute that vision. And so we said we are the masters of a parallel universe, which we then screwed up, in terms of our delivery in that parallel universe, and as a result, have been sucked back into an old kind of model for doing things.

Jaffe: That was one of the most eloquent and articulate descriptions I’ve ever heard about the space. My perspective is that having, in a short period of time, spent time on the client and agency side, traditional and interactive, one of the things I very consciously did when I coined this term, “new marketing,” was to recognize that we have to evolve out of the new media kind of silo or the new media corner. We have to kind of fight our way out of the corner. And what I’m always trying to do is to be able to project to 30,000 feet, to be able to say, “What are clients asking for? What are their pains? What are their frustrations?” If I understand what keeps them up at night and gets them out of bed in the morning, I can then help create a solution that can be as strategic or tactical as it needs to be, that can be as traditional or interactive, or integrated as it needs to be. Hence the term, new marketing.

Strategic Planning was born in the UK and ultimately, if strategic planning has taught us anything, it’s to begin with the consumer in mind. How have consumers’ attitudes changed toward media in general?

Norman: The consumer attitude to media hasn’t changed. The consumer never had an aptitude to media and doesn’t now. The consumer is always trying to find a blend of information that surrounds him, that entertains or informs him. There have been multiple roles of media and those are among them.

The consumer evolves his information and choice evolves as well. What happens now is there is a decrease in the amount of default consumption of media – as in, “I do this because there is no alternative.” And, specifically with respect to PVRs – interestingly referenced in one of your previous pieces – what you start seeing is that people don’t consume more media, they don’t consume less media – but what they do is they make more active choices about the media they do consume.

Jaffe: I think what you’re saying is, the attitude doesn’t change; the behavior or the mix consumed ultimately shifts.

Norman: Except that with respect to new technologies like PVRs for example, people aren’t using them in order that they can consume advertising more efficiently. They are no more opting into advertising than ever they were.

Jaffe: If anything, they’ve become super efficient, in the sense that consumers have learned how to skip advertising entirely.

Norman: Yeah, the latest numbers – I was just reading the Jack Myers report the other day -- says there’s still only 11% penetration in U.S. homes for PVRs. Something like that.

Jaffe: Why do you think TiVo’s U.S. growth has been so slow, while in the UK it has pretty much failed?

Norman: Well how about, we’ve got a better technology for doing the same thing. And the technology we’ve got for doing the same thing, broadly speaking, is Sky’s integrated PVR product.

When you buy a Sky subscription now, it’s a relatively cheap upgrade to buy Sky-plus which has a built-in PVR. And not only that, because it’s configured to work seamlessly with the whole Sky digital platform, they actually added a better functionality, because a few pieces of software know what they’re talking to because they were built that way.

Jaffe: Good news for the cable operators. Also, it comes down to quite simply, what I would refer to as box overload. There are just so many boxes that can ultimately balance precariously on top of the TV set.

Norman: The box of Sky-plus is a single combined box, which is your television receiver, your digital receiver, and your PVR.

Jaffe: In February, Carat North America’s CEO, David Verklin spoke about the critical importance of scale. Really, it was just a kind of endorsement of economies of scale – size matters, bigger is better and this ever-consolidating era, he said if there’s one thing I’m going to leave you with today and one thing that you should remember, it’s the 1M to 50K; it’s the billings to kind of revenue ratio.

Now I’m not a big fan of consolidation; I’m not a big fan of the big holding companies getting ever larger. But I wanted to get your comments on where you see everything kind of netting out. Will we end up with one very lonely Goliath, just sitting at the top of some mountain, with no one to talk to until one day, something hits him, and like the big bang, is blasted into millions of different pieces? Or will these monoliths just keep on growing, and if so, is there room for the independent interactive agencies and/or more specialized agencies?

One thing I’ve noticed right now is that there are companies like Mother in the UK, setting up shop in the United States and a couple of Cliff Freeman execs have kind of defected to form their own boutique agency called Amalgamated.

So I’m wondering whether now is not the best time to be beginning an agency and really bucking the trend of bigger is better, to form these specialized units? And of course, the question from that is, is that where interactive will end up? As a specialized discipline or will it be rolled up into one of many services provided by these larger companies?

Norman: It’s a great question. A great beast never survives without parasites. There are birds, oyster catchers, who sit on the back of hippopotamus and pick flies and ticks off their backs. Something like that, I can’t remember. But there’s a symbiotic relationship between big stuff and small stuff that goes on in the world. Mother’s a great example. I mean it’s done a super job, and well-done to them.

Interestingly, the way they’ve done it is by eliminating the account man from the equation – by the way – going back to a very early point in this conversation. They’ve put the real sharp end of the business, as in creativity, right up close and personal with the client. So they’ve become a bullshit-free zone in terms of the clients – or they might bullshit them, but there’s no kind of buffer of the account man between the client and the creative product. So that’s kind of interesting.

On the other hand, if you’re a global business, and you wanted to do big stuff, in lots of places, all at once, and make it happen in 37 markets from Columbia to Taiwan, then, you should do a lot worse than come talk to WPP, Omnicom or IPG for that matter.

And so there’s a place for everything. Some of the perception of these smaller companies, some of the perception of them about how good they are, or how good they’re not, is actually driven by the fact they’re small, rather than by what they do. Because, do we all think, sitting here, that JWT, Y&R, Ogilvy – I’m just talking about the WPP ones here, but add to that, BBDO and TBWA etc. – do we think those companies are no longer capable of producing great advertising? Or great customer communications? I don’t think we think that do we?

Jaffe: Rob, throw down the gauntlet, as it were, and what is one thing that we, as an industry, absolutely must do or must not do to integrate ourselves back into the greater community or to evolve ourselves; move forward in the process?

Norman: Okay. My mantra is “remember whose money it is.” It’s either the clients themselves or their shareholders. And remember what our job is, because we are a service industry and let’s not get above ourselves, our job is to derive the greatest value for that dollar that we can.

Now the interesting thing about that is what that enables to individual specialists – because we are a bunch of individual specialists after all -- is that we should pitch our thinking and our discipline as hard and as competitively as we can. We should look to our clients to be the arch integrators and the inter-disciplinary decision-makers, largely. And then once the inter-discipline decision has been made, what we’ve then got to do is pursue absolute integration and seamless cooperation with people we work with. And get on with it.

Jaffe: Sounds kind of like the last political elections in the United States! Final question, if Jaffe Juice were a drink, what would it be and why?

Norman: I'm thinking raspberry smoothie – it gets you talking and has a bit of spice.