Media and marketing are broken. Let’s fix them, Twogether.

Eh?! Okay, allow me to explain.

The disparate media and marketing industry model we’ve grown up with over the last 20-30 years is indeed broken. It no longer works.

Why? Because business audiences and how they choose to engage with brands have changed. Forever. Because where the brand used to own the engagement process, the customer now does. That’s a challenge, but it is also presents brands with a massive opportunity – to interact with audiences as they never have before.

It has also led, as a direct consequence, to the creation of Twogether media, Twogether’s brand-new integrated media and marketing organisation. Let me explain that as well.

Audiences don’t think about what marketing ‘channel’ they’re using. They just want to interact with their chosen brands however they see fit, whenever they see fit. And if one brand won’t engage with them via their preferred method or device, they’ll rapidly find one that will.

All this means that how brands engage with their audiences has to change too.

Recognition is beginning to dawn. That there is no longer a single, definitive go-to marketing channel. That they all count. That they are all one in fact. And moreover, that yesterday’s single ‘big’ campaign has therefore become all but defunct. It is simply no longer agile enough.

All this in turn has led to the industry coming full circle – to media and marketing being brought back together after years apart.

And therein lie the origins of Twogether media.

More and more brands are asking us about paid media services. For help with audience insight, international media planning and buying, campaign activation, management, and measurement, lead nurture, that kind of thing.

But why should such requests suddenly start becoming so much more regular, we wondered? And why now?

Evidently because brands, perhaps in recognition of the need for change, now want a single door to walk through for both media and marketing.

This makes a lot of sense.

Dealing with multiple agencies across multiple disciplines is not only a major drain on time and resources, it leads to just the kind of fragmentation mentioned above and which brands must now avoid.

Also, with more and more audiences, generating more and more data, marketers need to be able to set-up and maximize this opportunity from the outset; to bring a range of disparate strands – technology, media, data, creative, content, data –together to form a cohesive, agile whole.

Channels must share a common purpose. But this is impossible under the existing model, in which different messages are delivered via different channels at different times via different agencies with different goals and metrics. Inefficiencies and message latency are inevitable.

Accordingly, the opposite now has to happen. A single, seamless, integrated view of the customer. A single path via which to reach, contact, and engage with them, whatever the brand, whatever the message.

At least 70% of the decision-making process now takes place before any contact is made with a potential vendor (and with GDPR and other major market disruptors on the horizon, this percentage will almost certainly rise). Brands must therefore start infiltrating, influencing and tangibly impacting the customer buying process much earlier. They must reinvent themselves as publishers; blur the lines between media, data, content and creative.

This, in a nutshell, is precisely what Twogether media is all about. One vision delivered not just via one network of marketing businesses, but under one roof. One agency that understands and can navigate the entire journey.

The truth is clear. You can no longer talk about media without talking about content. Or content without talking about creative. Or creative without talking about the engagement channels across which it has to work. And you can no longer talk about any of these things without talking about data and digitisation.

It’s all one. And that’s great news. If you – and your agency – are prepared.

How ready is your brand for media and marketing 2.0? Get in touch with us below.