360_d communication. And the case of the missing line.

It’s the usual. Every year, marketers (read advertisers, aka clients) pull out interesting phrases and jargons to be the USP of their vision for the circa. Some of them evolve to be industry terms, yet others become a figure of speech. And a few, remain what they are - an inconclusive string of English words

Thus where-i-am-coming-from, bottoms-up, information-download became infamous briefing insights, while user-friendly, go-green and customer-insight became industry standards. And somewhere between the two, we had words like above-the-line, below-the-line, through-the-line etc. all becoming great demands on client briefs, and lovely phrases that left a lot to imagination and interpretation. So, we had clients rearranging their dhobi list depending upon where they drew the line. What, where and who drew the line is a question nobody is asking, leave alone answering! Let's keep that for the time being

A client in a small-spend organisation brought the line down as low as possible to ensure 'his agency' could deliver more and give him fewer kicks-on-the-butt from an entrepreneurial boss. His counterpart in the large enterprise, however, was smarter. The best way to keep 'his agency(ies) on their feet was to ensure he deprived them of that bit more, to keep them yearning (don’t forget, there's a Y there) for more. As one more job moved from his agency to a vendor, it went below the line....

So, ATL agencies did strategies, creative, production and all the gyan. And anything and everything else was BTL. Slowly leaflets and brochures, manuals and evens moved to BTL. "After all, they were the guys doing the activity", came the reasoning. And almost invisibly but knowingly more activities started moving out to specialist agencies. So much, that today BTL is threatening to become a larger pie, a lot more than ATL. Industry statistics peg the value at gargantuan heights... and experts know that the figures are closer to reality than not.

So, what do you say dude, that ATL will be outsized by BTL?

Let's then, understand where this line is, before we know where the dough will be placed.

Interestingly, agencies fragmented and specialised a decade or more ago, honing their skills in creative, strategy, media PR and so on. BTL was never in the radar. BTL agencies sprang up on their own, more of a demand-meet-supply scenario. And now, we are coming a full cycle. Clients want integrated services. 360 degree communication ideas. Strategy to delivery to accountability. And, of course, economies of scale (may be I should have put that first!).

So, after siphoning off 90 degrees to media specialists, a few degrees to designers, printers and 'other vendors', yet another 90 left with the client to decide (on whether it was ATL or BTL or TTL), mainlines agencies retained (on) 90. So clear was the focus and so clean the delivery system, that clients just couldn’t bear the hygiene. So, then came the demands for integration and accountability. And we are back pulling out a few degrees from here and a few from there - so the 90-degree solution is edging closer to the 360 mark. Sounds like the UPA government looking for 'allies', ahem?

Now, where will the circle come full and meet to deliver 360? Will it happen at all? In fact, should it? Wouldn’t it be better to clearly define the degrees of work, draw the lines and let specialists specialise further – after all if BTL is growing faster, isn’t it a need of the hour to bring it to heel now, before it touches the mind-boggling heights we know it will?