I will be attending the RADS (Recruitment Advertising Awards) on Thursday and am looking forward to catching up with friends and clients as well as seeing the creme de la creme of our industries work over the last year. The RADS sees itself as the Oscars of our industry it 'rewards the brightest people and the best recruitment marketing in the business.'
Whilst I am sure I will definitely see old friends, clients and as always, have a great night, I'm not so sure that I will definitely be viewing the best recruitment solutions our industry has to offer. Don't get me wrong, the winners will no doubt be benefactors of some very creative concepts and executions, that may deserve to be recognized and rewarded in some context. However, I have some doubts as to whether the actual winning entry will have been the best example of recruitment marketing our business has to offer and indeed the most effective in its category.
Why do I have these doubts? especially when there are 14 RAD judges who its safe to say whether from personal experience or simply reading their profiles definitely know a thing or two about recruitment and advertising.
Well, here's where I will get straight to the point. Creativity is fundamental to the success of an advertising campaign, that's obvious. However you can have an excellent creative concept and execution but if its not put in the places where your target audiences are, then it simply will not be an effective recruitment solution. Similarly in terms of effectiveness, there doesn't seem to be the importance given to this area that there should be and needs to be. You can have the best creative with the best media research and planning, (or so your planning tools and approach would lead you to believe) however, if the campaign simply does not result in the actual hires, enhancement of employer brand or whatever the specific objective may be, this is not the best example of recruitment marketing, why? because the solution has not worked. There is too much focus on the creative concept and execution of a traditional press ad and not enough credence given to the other areas such as media planning and media tracking and optimisation that go to ensuring our clients receive an effective recruitment marketing solution.
Broadband has killed Broadcasting but Brought us Accountability
When you think that the RADS was established seventeen years ago, why would media choice and effectiveness be part of the equation? Seventeen years ago the gambit of media choice was more limited. You placed your press ad in the recruitment sections of a newspaper or industry journal and hey presto! you would received a deluge of suitable/non suitable response, why? because thats were job seekers looked for a job. The media landscape was a much simpler place where consumers and candidates had a finite number of media channels to access and were subject to messages and advertising being pushed to them as they simply had no other choices. The advertiser was King and the more creative you could be, the more of an edge (if not one of the only edges ) over your competitors you would have.
Today we live in a digital age which has fragmented the media landscape and its audience beyond recognition. We have so many media sources to choose from and so many devices from which to receive it that we can consume our very own personalized media selection free from mainstream taste and opinion. It is much more difficult to broadcast our message to a very wide audience in the traditional sense e.g. through the most popular TV channel in a nation with four TV channels (or in the recruitment pages of a local or national newspaper). Instead with the niche opportunities and tastes that Digital TV and the Internet etc offers consumers, we as advertisers have the opportunity to be very targeted or shall we say we can much more easily 'narowcast'.
As one would expect the jobseeking audience has fragmented with recruitment pages in newspapers and journals not being able to guarantee the audience they once were been able to. Yet we still need to hire our people, raise employer brands.............. but here's the thing, the digital world whether it be through all the options of online advertising, web builds, mobile phones, IPods, Digital TV etc enables us unlike any time before, to be truly interactive and effective in our recruitment marketing solutions.
In 2007 we are faced with an challenging media landscape that requires us to be innovative and creative in how we engage and communicate with both active and passive jobseekers. How can we persuade our audience to 'pull' our message in a digital age where the candidate/consumer rules the roost and decides what they want to digest? We simply cannot rely on a really cool and incisive recruitment ad in a newspaper to deliver the goods. Media research and planning tools can give us insight as to where our audience actually are thus achieving the 'cut through' to candidates that is required to communicate our recruitment message. (creative concept and execution is just as critical online as offline).
To get to the point, excellence in media planning needs to be recognised and rewarded as more and more it is and will be critical to success.
In addition to making sure the media planning choices we make, engage with our audience, we should all be benefiting from one of the truly great attributes of the digital age – its accountability. For the past six years I've worked with clients and waxed lyrical about the accountability of the Internet, to the point where people took the p*ss out of me for using the word 'Accountability' so much when I spoke about online advertising (usually mimicking a bad Irish accent in the process).
Whilst there is so much room for improvement if not actual take up of online advertising tracking (another blog, another time) what we have found and will find even more so, is that the digital age is stimulating accountability in other media platforms as they realize that they need to compete with their digital counterparts to prove effectiveness.
Digital will and is actually perpetuating best practice in accountability in the wider recruitment media landscape. This can already be seen with the Intelligence and MI (Management Information) offerings of certain agencies. Clients have bought into the benefits of online advertising ROI and want to see what other media is and is not delivering for them. All media like never before is being held to account.
Perhaps the RADS can say, they are a creative awards ceremony and they have never pretended to be anything other than that. Perhaps they will say (quite rightly too) that 'media choice' and 'effectiveness' are two areas/criteria that need to be filled in in the actual entry form. However it is clear that creative is paramount, with the inclusion of these two areas being there to serve the purpose of showing a 'wider picture', padding out the story, proving that it actually appeared in a media at some stage.
To me, when you set out your stall as the Oscars of an industry you cannot limit the main criteria of success to one (albeit important) criteria. If you do you are not reflecting the work and true worth of an industry. We are currently working in the most exciting period that our industry has experienced. It is what all we interactive/digital bods hoped for and believed would happen, even in the years when people simply dismissed our work as a whimsical Internet fad.
To reflect this new age we need an industry awards ceremony that reflects the actual work that goes into making the best recruitment marketing solutions that this industry has to offer and has been offering over the past few years. We need an awards criteria that encourages clients to embrace best practice in media planning and accountability tools, we want criteria that reflects reality, stimulates change and provide aspirations and inspiration to our industry.
We require an 'Oscar' in all categories that rewards and reflects the pillars that underpin an effective recruitment solution; Media Research and Planning, Creativity, Accountability and the fuel of successful ongoing communication (whatever the 'Age') - Innovation.
Discuss.
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