In film credits the ampersand has a job. When a screenplay is “written by Jane Smith & John Brown”, the ampersand means they worked together, as a team. When it says “Jane Smith and John Brown”, the word means something else: they worked separately, usually one after the other, sometimes without ever meeting.
Most brands buy their marketing the second way. One company has the idea. Another company, often a different holding group, decides where it runs and buys the space. They meet in a presentation, and sometimes not even then.
How it split
It wasn’t always like this. Until the 1990s most agencies had their own media departments. Then media was spun off into separate companies, mostly for good commercial reasons: scale, buying power, specialists. What got lost was the conversation. The people deciding what the work should say stopped sitting next to the people deciding where people would see it.
Where something runs changes what it should be.
A poster on a station platform is read in eleven seconds by someone who is bored. A pre-roll is watched for five seconds by someone who wants it to end. A search ad is read by someone who already has the question. Those are three different briefs, and they can’t be written well by someone who doesn’t know which one they’re writing.
What we do instead
At Okafor & Quist the strategist, the writer, the designer and the media planner are in the room from the first day. The media plan is part of the idea, not a schedule for it. When Halden made checkout time sunset, the ads ran at sunset. When Oda launched a quiet speaker, the ads ran after ten at night. Neither of those ideas works if the media is decided by someone else, a month later.
It also changes how the work is judged. If the same people make the idea and buy the media, they can’t blame each other when it doesn’t work. We like it that way.