BMP has always done things a little bit differently. Consider this:
when in the mid-80s the media independents began to challenge
full-service agencies, their battleground was price. One by one clients
bought the argument, and the likes of Zenith, TMD and CIA prospered as a
result. But so too did BMP.
’The media independents were perceived to be really hard buyers and, as
a consequence, all the mainstream agencies, ourselves included, were
initially seen as soft lads,’ BMP Optimum’s director, Tim McCloskey,
recalls.
’But what quickly became apparent is that although on the one hand we
were doing media planning very differently and investing in
bright-thinking guys such as Derek Morris and Andy Tilley, we also
offered a load of hardnut buyers. We wanted great thinking but
recognised that we needed to be good buyers as well, and that was
unique. And that’s why we won so many centralisation pitches.’
And now that the price performances of the top buying points have become
less of a point of difference, planning and the quality of thinking tend
to be the most important differentiators. As the more cerebral
planning/buying shops such as MGM and New PHD have prospered, so too has
BMP.
’Clients accept that the largest-billing companies are now likely to be
buying at very similar rates,’ says Paul Taylor, BMP Optimum’s managing
director.
’As a consequence, a lot of the pitches now focus on what the media
component can do to enhance value. And that’s where the BMP ethos - of
advertising understanding, modelling research and an insistence on
quality planning - has really come into its own.’
It’s an ethos that has stood the company in good stead from its earliest
days, back in 1985, when the agency won its very first piece of
media-only work.
BMP started out, of course, as the quintessential, traditional
full-service agency. The media department’s first media-only client was
St Ivel, a former full-service client of the agency that had moved its
business to Bartle Bogle Hegarty. At the time, BBH didn’t have its own
media department but used John Ayling & Associates instead. St Ivel,
however, opted to keep its media at BMP. ’It was the first time that a
client asked if we would we be prepared to stay on as its media company.
And it really all started from there,’ Taylor explains.
One typically prescient early innovation was the launch in 1987 of the
first media consultancy by the media director at the time, Tim Cox. BMP
Solutions in Media was designed as an early experiment in taking media
beyond the price issue and it proved especially popular with media
owners such as the Racing Post, Anglia TV and the TV Times, whose
planning demanded an almost labyrinthian complexity.
But it was really by taking on the media independents at their own game
that BMP’s media department prospered. ’By the late 80s and early 90s
many of our medium-sized clients had switched on to the buying-better
philosophy and we benefited from this enormously,’ McCloskey says. ’They
practically all elected to centralise their brands into one media
company.
Typically the pitch list they assembled would be comprised of TMD,
Zenith and at least one or two of the incumbents. We seemed to keep
picking up the big ones: CPC in 1991, British Gas the following year. We
got noticed because a number of our key clients were choosing us over
the other options.
It meant that we could offer buying at a better price but also media
thinking that was very much integrated into advertising.’
The next stage was for BMP to start impressing outside its existing core
client base. ’We won every centralisation in a row of existing clients.
That got us noticed by non-clients,’ Taylor remembers. ’But our first
real success on the open market was with Boots -still one of the largest
centralisations of recent years. We weren’t actively working with Boots
but we had been noticed by it and by its consultants. We held the
creative for some Crookes brands but the media was through Zenith.’
At a stroke the Boots win propelled BMP media into the top echelons of
media’s premier league. It wasn’t just the billings - although at around
pounds 70 million that was clearly important. It was the fact that BMP
had shown it could live with the toughest price negotiators and yet
still impress with the breadth of its lateral thinking.
Actually, this crucial Boots pitch was not won simply on price grounds
at all. ’We won by coming up with a strategy that involved servicing
each of the different divisions as individual companies,’ Taylor
remembers.
’They didn’t just want their billings to be aggregated, they wanted to
know that their individual brands were being well represented. Others
concentrated on the volume that the deal would bring and the leverage
they could expect as a result. We regarded it as six separate pitches to
the six different marketing directors involved in the group.’
After Boots, BMP attracted a consistent level of enquiries, pitches and
wins - to the order of pounds 50 million worth of billings a year. And
certainly that has been the trend in each of the past four years. And
because this growth has been so measured, it has allowed BMP to keep its
proposition constant. ’We still define ourselves exactly as we have done
since we first opened our doors,’ says Taylor. ’We are the media company
that can produce balanced solutions between well thought-out strategies,
which are well researched, well understood and which can be taken to the
market and well executed. And that is still the basis of our proposition
today.’
But growth has helped to change one fundamental aspect of the agency’s
character. Last year, media-only work became, for the first time, worth
more than half of total billings. The response was straightforward and
swift. It was to launch BMP Optimum in April 1997 as a truly stand-alone
media operation.
’We felt that was the turning point when we passed 50 per cent of
independent billings,’ says Taylor. ’ We just felt we needed the respect
factor so that clients coming in would know that we were there as a
media specialist but that we still chose to carry the BMP name. A lot of
media companies have run away from very weak mother brands in the past.
We had a fantastic brand to associate with and one that instantly told
people who we were.’
The choice of brand name also reflected a growing international
dimension, Optimum being the DDB international media brand. This all
started off with the international Gillette and Pepsi accounts, both of
which had previously been handled by BBDO within the Omnicom network.
Since then, others have followed on behind, including Duracell and
Braun.
But if the growing international business is one vision of the future,
the other is more safely rooted in BMP’s rigorous planning past. Mark
Palmer was recruited as a highly-regarded, cerebral media man from WCRS
to head the planning at the one agency in town that pre-eminently pays
more than lip service to the notion. It even has shelves of IPA awards
to prove it. For Palmer, the future lies in a more holistic media
approach, focusing on helping clients to solve their advertising
problems rather than merely concentrating on scheduling the right TV
spots.
’Clients nowadays want solutions that will cut through. That solution
could be selling that product, or managing that phone line, or taking
care of the call handling, or simply getting the trade force motivated.
It’s so diverse now that they need people who can think about the whole
advertising communication and not just about the media spot buying, and
that is what we are now trying to do. And what we now see as the biggest
challenge in the future.’
