But our friends at what rather wonderfully used to be 1 Hacker Drive (now 1 Meta Way) are again making headlines. They have been fined US$18 billion, an amount I rather naively thought was a lot. It isn’t, as we shall see. META’s share price promptly went up.

The Facebook (as it used to be known) had started so promisingly, assuming we can get past the rather creepy idea of frat boys ranking girls. The notion of connecting people through common interests as opposed to geography, is a strong and enduring one.

Like everyone else I thought it a grand idea. I wrote any number of what I see from a distance are cringingly embarrassing posts containing my thoughts on plays I had seen, sports events in which I had an interest, and news of my children and grandchildren.

I no longer post except to thank everyone for any kind birthday wishes they may choose to send me. I sense I am not alone. I’m sure META doesn’t miss me.

Those of us who spend far too much of our time monitoring these things noticed something was awry 9 years ago. ‘The Guardian’ journalist Carole Cadwalladr unearthed the Cambridge Analytica scandal in 2017 / 2018, the first time many became aware that using personal data without permission could have serious and unforeseen consequences.

Things didn’t improve – Sarah Wynne Williams’ peerless book, ‘Careless People’ diarises the various trip-ups along a journey leading from ‘good guys connect people and improve society’ to ‘nerds use data to harm children’.

From our industry’s perspective there is a dichotomy. META is around 97% funded by advertising. META doesn’t give a fig for what advertisers think.

In 2020, concerned with the way the business was going, a number of big name brands boycotted Facebook. It had zero effect. Every so often someone (notably P&G) pops up to say they will only advertise on channels with independently verified measurement systems, regulated content, control over ad placement and so on.

Facebook shrugs, they know that at any given moment META has about 10 million advertisers. No-one advertiser or group of advertisers can possibly pressure them into doing anything they don’t want to do.

If advertisers can’t do anything, the public can. META has been up in court in the US, in a case which could in theory have had serious implications for their operations. Fines in the trillions of $ were being discussed (META turnover is about US$200 billion, their market cap is about US$1.4 trillion).

META settled for a measly ‘up to’ US$18 billion. To remind us all:

• According to Reuters META makes about US$18 billion from fraudulent ads (META disputes this, suggesting the real figure is about US$5 – US$7 billion. So that’s alright then).
• The changes META has committed to making are only in the US.
• They only get to pay the full amount if their competitors make changes to their products too. META becoming a regulator of others’ actions is a weird idea, even in an age of weird ideas.
• They have 10 years to pay.

Whilst a great deal of money to those bringing META to court, this is small change to META. I guess the question is: is this about helping those affected, or forcing change at META?

If you’re a complainant, you would surely settle for such a sum. If you were META, knowing how long this could take, how much worse your CEO testifying could make it, and how damaging a huge fine could be, you would settle too.

Whatever the implications of this trial (there will no doubt be other trials), META has lost the town hall. They’re seen as the bad guys. Even those who like their products abhor their corporate behaviour. This stuff trickles down. It may take a while but trickle down it does.

META and Zuckerberg may not care what advertisers think of their behaviour, but that doesn’t stop them lecturing the advertising business on how it should conduct itself.

A summary would go: give us the budget, we’ll do the ads, test the ads, improve the ads, write the plan, place the buys, measure the effect. We’ll do it all and save you a fortune in fees.

Watching META handle their own corporate communications, launch their own products (‘Pervert Glasses’ didn’t take long to catch on, did it?), and manage their own PR suggests they’re the last people to entrust with your money.

Meantime there’s a ‘last days of the Roman Empire’ vibe about all this. As Jonathan Freedland writing in The Guardian said considering the US$18billion settlement: “META has swerved judgement day. But that day must come.”

According to the Star Treck fan website, Warp Factor Treck, Spock ‘defines logic as the absolute rejection of emotion in decision-making, using cold reason, empirical data, and probability’.

Advertisers have a choice where to place their ads, even if in some instances they have little control over where they eventually end up.

Take broadcast or linear TV as an example. Historically the marketers’ choice (remember those ‘as seen on TV’ stickers?) TV as defined delivers memorable moments, is safe (content, including ads, needs to be deemed acceptable by regulators), and is by and large enjoyed by those exposed to it. The ads appear in a separate space, with a limited number of other advertisers in breaks within the content. The advertiser decides where.

It works too; there are volumes of studies and papers to show what others have done and the benefits they’ve accrued. One reason for the documenting of its success is that TV’s audience and delivery is measured via systems created by and for the industry.

Compare and contrast with social media, a channel enjoyed, or suffered by an audience of billions every month. Advertisers are free to say whatever they like – even if that involves inventing and selling non-existent products. Regulations allegedly exist, but where they do they’re internal and are not subject to any real scrutiny or external influence.

Ads appear where the channel decides, including on a network of like-minded partner sites (you can opt-out, always assuming you know how).

SM advertising works; we know that because the sites say so. They measure and define audiences in their own way. They are it seems all for verification and validation, as long as it’s them doing the validating and the verifying.

Some say social media causes harm, even that platforms are designed to ensnare and entrap audiences. Some say they’re addictive, even designed to be so. The platforms don’t agree; the reality is they don’t care what you think of what they do or how they do it.

In any logical world where advertising is placed would be decided by a combination of control over where the ad finally appeared, and the likelihood of it working by delivering a measured benefit. The likes of price and audience would be inputs not outputs.

Media professionals know all this, there are plenty of smart media agency and media vendor executives. The vast majority think that a world wherein 3 US-headquartered online businesses, operating to their own rules and oblivious to advertiser, regulator or even Government concerns, take two thirds of UK ad expenditure is nuts.

If the professionals know this is crazy, and if they are as well informed as they are, why do their clients do the exact opposite to what logic suggests they should do? Are agencies these days so removed from the real decision makers in client companies that nobody with any real say over budget allocation cares about, or even hears their advice?

Or are agencies so complicit in the hopeless placing of their clients’ ads that they would rather keep quiet?

This is dangerous territory. If advertising on channels taking 66% of adspend doesn’t work (by which I mean doesn’t deliver a measurable and real return) what do we think will happen?

Here are my predictions.

• Those voting with their wallets for the platforms won’t take any responsibility for any failure.
• The platforms will blame the creative misuse of their channels.
• Nobody will own up to making the wrong channel choice in the first place.
• The conclusion will be that advertising these days, wherever it appears just doesn’t work. That is just how it is, these days.

Then what?

Spock, a fictional character after all, had this to say:

“In critical moments men sometimes see exactly what they wish to see.”

And: “Without followers evil cannot spread.”

That second one is a subject for another day.

This may explain why many self-declared experts, influencers and commentators on my feeds seem to believe that they invented advertising.

To many, all knowledge begins and ends with their latest ‘discoveries’ and ‘insights’.

And yet advertising did exist, in fact it rubbed along pretty well, before the days of the internet.

It’s not that this group thinks history is ‘bunk’; it’s more that it doesn’t exist. For them, advertising (like sex) just happened; as Philip Larkin wrote: “Sexual intercourse began in 1963 (which was rather late for me)”.

What matters to today’s professionals is the present and the future. What should matter is using yesterday’s mistakes and successes to do better today and tomorrow.

It was often said by ad people that everyone is an expert in two things: their own job and advertising. This was inevitably accompanied by a wry smile, and the rather pleasant (misplaced) sensation that what we did was of such interest and consequence to the population as a whole that everyone felt it necessary to have an opinion.

The ‘everyone’s an expert…’ quote came from the days when ‘advertising’ meant the creative work. In just the same way that everyone has an opinion on art, or literature, so it was with ads.

Today, ‘advertising’ means more than the ads (it always did to be fair but the perception was otherwise), and thus the number of ‘experts’ has multiplied from those who know a lot about the actual ads to those whose self-confessed expertise is at best tangential to the end result.

Having an opinion is of course absolutely fine. Having an opinion at odds with mine is to be welcomed. My problem lies with those implying that their opinion is supported by evidence when it isn’t.

Or that their opinion is based on an insight of such startling originality that the industry as a whole should sit up, take notice and start issuing the speaking invitations and requests for personal appearances. Whereas in fact the same idea has been knocking around for decades, unheralded.

It would be unkind to single out individuals but it would be smart if those seeking to influence us all do at least the bare minimum of research before letting rip.

As for those of us exposed to multiple opinions, next time you read a blog, a post, a trade piece, or a podcast, at least ask your inner cynic whether the credentials of those doing the expressing make their opinions worth your time. Are their comments truly well-informed or are they just filling space?

There are plenty of people around with masses of valuable experience they’re prepared to share, however poor we are as an industry at cataloguing and formalizing.

Seek them out, read their generous posts and outputs, reach out to them. Listen to the right people, not the loudest.

Principles endure, however much how they’re executed may change.

The same rule applied to TV – advertisers had no right to pressurise those responsible for content.

Consumers bought, read, and believed the newspapers they chose not on the basis of who was advertising in them but on the editorial content.

This did not always work, as two examples separated by over forty years show.

The 1972 thalidomide scandal and the role played by what was then Distillers, was a ‘The Sunday Times’ Insight Team exclusive. At the time the paper was edited by Harry Evans. Evans met with his Advertising Sales Director Donald Barrett ahead of the story breaking. In his 1983 book ‘Good Times, Bad Times’ Evans recalls Barrett pointing out: “Distillers are our largest single advertiser …. I know that won’t stop you and it shouldn’t.” Distillers duly pulled all their advertising from ‘The Sunday Times’.

Contrast ‘The Sunday Times’ stance with that of ‘The Daily Telegraph’ in 2015, edited at the time by Chris Evans. Peter Oborne was Chief Political Commentator at the paper when a global story concerning the banking group HSBC and a tax avoidance scheme known as the ‘Swiss Leaks’ broke. The story was uncovered by a group of investigative journalists organised by The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and involving ‘The Guardian’, the BBC’s Panorama team, and ‘Le Monde’ amongst others.

Oborne maintained he was stopped from writing about the scandal in ‘The Telegraph’ as a result of that paper’s commercial relationship with HSBC and duly resigned.  

‘The Telegraph’ denied this, although they didn’t cover the story at all on the day it broke; 5 days later they buried six paragraphs at the bottom of page 2.

The Cog Blog covered this story at the time, and made the point that this episode would weaken ‘The Telegraph’ in the eyes of its readers.

“By allegedly giving in to an advertiser and downgrading a news-story everyone else seems to think is important ‘The Telegraph’ will have diminished itself in the eyes of its readers.
It seems more than likely that readership will drop, across all platforms.
‘The Telegraph’ will thus lose ad revenue.
And all because ‘The Telegraph’ didn’t want to lose ad revenue.”

Today, 54 years after thalidomide and 11 years after HSBC the line between church and state has blurred, an inevitability given the changes in how and from where consumers receive the news.

Journalists aren’t angels, as Leveson showed, but at a time when the very concept of truth seems at best elastic, we need investigative journalism, committed to uncovering the facts more than ever.

The church and state division was a factor in the existence of a strong, independent media sector. Something everyone, including advertisers welcomed.

Peter Oborne’s current home is ‘Byline Times’, a bastion of breaking stories others chose to ignore.

Another out of the same mould is ‘The Nerve’ set up by five journalists unhappy that their home, ‘The Observer’ was to be sold. One of these is Carole Cadwalladr, whose investigations include breaking the Cambridge Analytica / Facebook story of 2018, and unearthing details around the funding of what is now Reform UK, its leader Nigel Farage and the role played by George Cottrell. A story that has now been picked up by ‘The Sunday Times’.

Carole’s piece is here, and is very well worth a read.

Those interested in maintaining a free, quality, varied press might consider subscribing to titles like Byline Times and The Nerve to ensure that voices like Cadwalladr’s and Oborne’s are not buried by those with something to hide. Investigative journalism is time-consuming and expensive, hardly fashionable in an era of squeezed ad revenues and diminishing attention spans.

To those who argue there’s no appetite for the long game, consider ‘Private Eye’ – a physical title that sells over 230,000 copies (all paid-for), has a readership over 1 million and which has been banging the investigative drum for over 60 years.

I started with Harry Evans, one of our greatest ever newspaper editors. To paraphrase him from many years ago (he died in 2020): ‘the coming of native advertising makes it even more important that Editors should have the final say over what goes in the newspaper’.

Today, many get their news from platforms that go out of their way to avoid being held responsible for what appears on their sites. We’re all editors now, or so say those championing ‘freedom of speech’, a concept that shape-shifts when it leads to exposing certain factions.

Most of us are as unsuited to be editors as we are to be copywriters.

The church versus state notion matters. Advertisers shouldn’t influence journalists. Nor should politicians.

When it comes to reporting the news, details change; principles endure.

Every day I read a newspaper. A printed, physical thing that I have delivered. I also read articles and features from my chosen newspaper and others online.

Some items I prefer to read in the physical paper. I don’t know why this is. I just know I do it; it’s a pleasure to read certain content with no online distractions.

I subscribe to two hard-copy UK magazines delivered by mail, several online titles and Substacks, trades and nationals, general interest and specialised, mainly from the UK, Australia and the USA.

I do watch some old-fashioned TV, and also use / subscribe to several streaming services which I buy, cancel, return to, cancel again depending on what’s on offer. I can never remember what’s on what service. I am a frequent user of the BBC sports service on my mobile.

I look at Facebook, largely from between my fingers. My active use of it has declined over the years. Looking back at past posts is interesting but rather embarrassing (who cares about my knee-jerk reaction to some event?), which may be why I have stopped posting. I can’t be bothered with Instagram. I do use WhatsApp.

I share as little data as possible. I never buy off-the-page from a platform, rather I will go to the brand’s website or to a retail site. I guess I have a fear of being harassed for evermore.

I am uninterested in TikTok but can see the attraction. I used to quite like Twitter; I stopped when it became X. Too much rage, too much hate. I find Bluesky interesting but never contribute. I find LinkedIn infuriating, but that doesn’t stop me posting professionally.

I rarely listen to podcasts. To be honest, I struggle to imagine how they fit into my day.

YouTube is OK but the way they insert ads into content is imbecilic and stops me watching the channel more.

I listen to the radio. I subscribe to an audio books service; I buy physical books. I notice posters and whatever I come across that promotes brands in stores. I see direct mail and wonder why I get so many random ‘Dear Sir or Madam’ letters in an age of AI.

I am unsurprisingly impacted by advertising and having been in the business for so long I like to think I’m quite good at deconstructing what influences me and why.

I suppose I am a heavy consumer of media channels, nothing like as thorough as some of my professional contemporaries but far more involved than most of my non-ad-industry friends. Which is hardly surprising.

There are some very basic lessons from my sample of one.

First, I use different channels for different things, and yet far too often the ads I see on these channels are not in any way designed to fit into how the channel is used. Rather, they’re jammed in willy-nilly. The more the merrier. Often the customer experience is truly dire, too many ads, too poorly displayed, too interruptive. This is particularly (and sadly) true of far too many news brands.

Next, I use a variety of media. Most of us do. The suggestion that anyone wanting to brand build can run an effective, successful campaign by handing over their dollars to any single supplier, however big and letting them get on with it is delusional.

I recently bought a high-ticket item within a category in which I am by no means an expert. Thinking back over my ‘journey to purchase’ I knew the name and something of a couple of brands’ values from TV commercials. I saw and read a physical print ad from one of these companies with the detail. I researched the product and a couple of alternatives online. I bought my choice from the company’s website.

Since buying I have been inundated with online ads to buy another similar product from someone else. Why would I want to do that? I have already spent my money. The principle behind retargeting may be sensible, the execution of it is crass.

All of this is so very basic it feels as if it belongs in ‘Janet and John Do Advertising’. Yet the most basic tenets of successful advertising are being routinely ignored every day (follow Nick Manning’s frequent examples of mistargeted slop on his social feed for a laugh turning rapidly into a groan).

Who is advising clients what to do? Where’s the experience, the lessons learned? I don’t mean the data, the souped-up spreadsheets; I mean how to scatter magic over a good idea to make it sparkle with brilliance.

This is what agencies do or did. Today too many of them spend too long obsessing over numbers. Twenty years ago, the great Marilyn Baxter wrote a booklet called Magic and Logic. We’re out of sync.

It may be useful to look back at the mistakes of the past in the hope that at least we might avoid them in the future.

You’ll note that I think there is a future. Not everyone agrees, but let’s assume for the purposes of this that I’m right and we at least have a chance.

When media agencies (or media independents as they were then called) emerged from the old full-service agencies the pitch was simple. First, reduce overheads (no flash offices) so we can keep our fees low. Second, focus entirely on trading, a single-mindedness that leads to cheaper media that can be audited. Planning can always stay with the creative agency. Third (related to the second) this is all we’ve got; we have to be good to survive.  

This was a genius sell; and of course advertisers lapped it up.

But life’s never simple. Separating planning from trading made no sense. It also made little sense to separate planning from creative but it was a matter of the lesser of two evils. So in by far the majority of cases planning moved. With planning came a new layer of service for the new media agencies; and with too many sellers and not enough buyers the battle was on to keep prices (fees and media costs) low.

Mistake number one: don’t add services for free.

It’s not that agencies didn’t try charging for planning, it’s just they weren’t great at explaining the client benefits. Easier to keep fees low and make money from vendors.

Mistake number two: don’t make money from anyone except clients, unless of course the client agrees. Eventually you’ll get found out and it will all get messy.

Then there was the matter of media research. This had always been a Cinderella discipline within full-service agencies. It was where I started my career, so I speak from personal experience when I say that nobody outside the magic circle of specialists was terribly interested. Everyone knew that measuring audiences was important, after all we had to trade on something, it was the ‘how’ that was to so many so very tedious.

Further, clients really didn’t care about the how (‘I leave all that to my agency’), and the agencies saw no reason to try to convince them. Could they charge for it? Could they make the case? No, and no.

Mistake number three: if you want to be serious about any business you need to understand how every aspect of it works. Otherwise, how are you to know when certain actors start to break the conventions? How to assess the consequences before it’s too late?

Finally, just because it’s easy doesn’t mean it’s right. It’s easy to confuse effectiveness with efficiency, especially when you have a ready-made metric to evaluate one, and the other is oh-so-complicated.

Mistake number four: don’t give the client what he thinks he wants, give him what your experience and expertise tell you he needs.

I believe agencies are well-placed to provide clients with the advice they need.

I agree with Goodstuff’s Simeon Adams when he argues in The Media Leader: “We experiment across dozens of categories, channels and audiences. We see hundreds of marketing problems every year. We build technology, test new workflows, learn quickly and transfer that knowledge from one client to another. That accumulated experience is precisely why agencies remain valuable.”

I would go further. What clients want is successful brands; the most successful brands have something valuable: fame. With fame comes irrational loyalty, premium pricing, a buffer against adversity. These things can be built in many ways, including outstanding customer service, a consumer interface that works smoothly, a product that delivers consistently, and, yes great advertising.

Great advertising as I hope (but sometimes doubt) we all know comes from rigour, from questioning everything, from looking at the problem from every direction, from collaboration between specialists, from open-mindedness.

The process is helped immeasurably by AI but process is one thing, creative genius focussed on solving problems is something else.

In 1982, John Hegarty saw ‘Vorsprung durch Technik’ (it was an old ad slogan from the 1970s, long discarded) on a faded poster on the wall of an Audi factory.

Today I suppose he might have come across it via LLMs and AI, but that misses the point. He was a creative guy in an Audi factory, interrogating the product. I imagine he was meeting engineers, technicians, the people who made the thing he was charged with promoting. He was asking questions, he was exploring avenues.

I have no idea if anyone has ever worked out what Vorsprung durch Technik has been worth to that brand, but I do know that selling the worth of what we do is something we’ve been hopeless at over the years.

With the huge number of SME’s operating without any understanding of marketing, and without any agency relationship the opportunity for agencies is colossal.

Don’t let’s mess it up. Again.

“Modern media analytics is in danger of reducing the medium back to being the medium alone. If we continue down this path, we may end up on a fool’s errand, mistaking accuracy for effectiveness and precision for persuasion.”

This is not a new thought (Charles’ original piece appeared in ‘Campaign’ over ten years ago) but it is one we have studiously ignored.

Today, big numbers rule. It is extraordinary how so many smart people can become obsessed with a metric that is both so superficial and at the same time so provably (and ironically) so meaningless.

Many people, including Omar Oakes and Karen Nelson-Field have used the descriptor cost-per-meaningless-thousand. As Karen puts it in Omar’s opinion piece: “There’s nothing about effectiveness and efficiency that comes with CPM…. yet we all rely on it every day of our lives, as if the cheaper it is, the better it is.”

Omar concludes: That’s why CPMs are misleading: they ignore attention and treat all impressions as equal, turning “cost per thousand” into a “cost per meaningless thousand.”

In one sense we have come a long way. Many old gits like me will recount how we’ve always used ‘attention’ to particular formats, and positions in planning. That is true, in the sense that we all instinctively knew that first-in-break generated more attention (less time to leave the room to put the kettle on…) and that outside back-covers were widely noticed by those not reading the magazine.

Today we don’t have to rely only on instinct. Karen Nelson-Field’s business, Amplified has been working away using AI to find patterns in the approximately 50 billion data points collected over close to a decade.

An independent South African media agency, Connect, part of the UP and Up Group has negotiated the rights to what is called AttentionAI across African markets.

There are several things interesting about this.

First, it’s an indie agency, and its Chief Operating Officer Scott Reinders that has spotted the potential and moved to do something with it.

Second the potential lies in using attention as a planning aid not ‘just’ as a post-campaign evaluation metric.

For something to be used to write plans across a range of advertisers it needs to be based on robust, trusted data. 50 billion data points would seem at first glance to meet the robust threshold; Karen Nelson-Field is clearly a trusted researcher.

As a planning aid AttentionAI can be used to guide creative output by platform, and within platform. What creative formats work best within what channel formats?

It therefore plays a significant role bringing creative and media planning closer together, and at a stage in the process before any money is spent.

In other words, attention is being used not as one element within a post-mortem but as a part of the upfront decision no doubt alongside other tools within Connect’s toolkit.

This case also shows what can be done with AI. This is not always the bogeyman; it often opens doors to create products of great value particularly when let loose on massive datasets built robustly, and with rigour.

If the bricks are top quality, and you hire a skilled architect you’ll end up with a building that lasts.

The Who Cares About Content panel comprised Stephen Colegrave, Founder of Byline Times, Mel Leach, CEO of the independent TV producer South Shore, Dom Ponsford, Editor-in-Chief of Press Gazette, and Damian Collins, ex-Government minister and sometime chair of the DCMS Select Committee, moderated by the freelance journalist Omar Oakes. Their conversation took place within the context that around two-thirds of UK ad revenues ends up with three US-based channels: META, Google and Amazon.

As I said in my introductory remarks, nobody is suggesting that Facebook et al have no place on advertising plans. It’s a matter of balance.

For decades, generations even, we’ve all known instinctively that advertising that appears on multiple channels always outperforms campaigns that focus on one channel.

To use a hackneyed metaphor, you don’t make a cake with one ingredient. You consider, you mix, you compliment, you combine, you experiment, you learn. With practice you get better. You learn that mixing metric and imperial measures is not a good idea.

Despite all the evidence pointing in one direction, despite decades of learnings across any number of celebrated examples, brand-centric advertisers continue to do what has been shown not to work. They continue to spend behind performance activities, not as well as but instead of using tried and tested methods to build their brands.

The result, as outlined in many places (including at the launch of Advertising: Who Cares?) by Michael Farmer, is clear. Sales of many brands within categories traditionally built on brand marketing are as good as flat. The flatlining correlates with the same brands’ move to increased spending on social media.

If it’s brand building you’re after there are many better channels than social media.

This is a niche blog, written for people in the advertising and marketing business. It’s tempting to ignore society, or the common good, but occasionally advertisers’ interests and society’s coincide.

We all, advertisers included benefit from a varied mix of available media. I may loathe news-site A and favour streaming channel B but the world would be a lot less interesting if everyone agreed with me, or, worse if everyone had to agree with me simply because all other choices had vanished.

The Brits are good at creative services. We are good (as Mel Leach reminded us on Thursday) at creating TV formats. We are good at advertising (the UK is the second largest exporter of advertising services, according to the Advertising Association). We are good at measurement.

And yet our ad supported media sector is struggling.

Nick Manning wrote here on the slow, inevitable Americanisation of our media.

I would argue that it’s not only the content of the media, but also media thinking that has been driven by our American friends.

The American media buying market has always been about the biggest number wins. And on that criterion the social media platforms (who of course define their own numbers) win every time.

Planning across media channels, the consideration of content and context, the measurement of attention, all come as second nature to UK strategists and planners, whereas they’re comparatively recent innovations in the USA.

We have strong trade bodies like the AA, ISBA, IPA here. We should continually remind them that a healthy, pluralistic media sector is good for advertisers for sure, but more importantly is good for the country, our economy and society as a whole.

If you search for ‘Conferences on the Future of Media’ what you find are specialisms. Events on media technology, on programmatic advertising, on trading. Or on TV, influencers, podcasts.

I can’t find an event on the very future of the media, as in: does it have one?

Yet it seems a reasonable question, at least as it relates to media forms that rely in whole or part on advertising.

Money continues to flow out of more ‘traditional’ domestic media forms towards the giant US-based online platforms. Around two-thirds of all UK ad pounds currently make that journey.

Isn’t this just ‘the market’ doing what markets do? Markets aren’t always forces for good.

A pluralistic media scene is A Good Thing. Good for democracy; good for holding power to account; good for encouraging informed thought and fair debate.

A strong, varied domestic media industry is important too. Important for hosting locally-centred points of view, as voices that help shape our national identity. As the foundation of our historically successful creative services industry.

Admittedly some way down the list of beneficiaries, a varied domestic media scene is good for advertisers as it builds and engages audiences.

The alternative is US-centric, un-regulated, built on user-generated content that is by definition largely unprofessional and thus avoidable, offering up the sort of fast food media content that might fill a hole temporarily but does not build a healthy body.

And yet this is the path we are on. Why is this debated? And if I’m wrong and it is, why is the voice of the advertising industry so absent?  

There are two key reasons.

First, the ‘church versus state’ debate of the analogue era lingers. How dare advertisers interfere in matters of editorial concern?

This is so outdated that it is hardly worth a comment. Yet many editors still have too little to do with the advertising business; they don’t understand it, they distil success down to ‘more clicks’ and they rarely feature our point of view in any public debate.

Second it has to be said that the platforms have done a truly wonderful job infiltrating our institutions.

The Advertising Association, 100 years young and a source of many good things has as its stated aim the promotion of the: “…role, rights and responsibilities of advertising and its impact on individuals, the economy and society.”

What about when the impact of advertising on the UK economy is impacted negatively by the flow of money to US-based platforms? Or when the quality and variety of our own media outlets’ output is so negatively affected?

Why don’t we question META more (or even at all) on public platforms? To quote one (unselected) question submitted at the AA’s LEAD event: ‘Why are they even here’?

Is it appropriate to have a trade association with members with such a divisive list of commercial goals? Or with members who do not act in a legal, honest or truthful manner?

These are not easy questions, or rather they are easy for a blogger to ask, a lot harder for any membership organisation relying on subscriptions and sponsorships, to answer.

A debate on these issues is overdue and should involve those inside and outside the ad industry. This is why Advertising: Who Cares? is hosting a 3-hour event (Who Cares Wins) at Prospect Magazine on the afternoon of June 11^th.  No sponsors, no paid-for slots, and no axe to grind beyond the objective of a healthy, pluralistic media industry.

Who Cares Wins will have two long-form, moderated discussion panels – one on the threat to content, the other on online safety. These are related.

The more we have a flourishing domestic media industry delivering attentive, engaged audiences, the stronger our position pushing for common standards of regulation and a safer online advertising world free of scams and fraudulent traffic. These ambitions are good for advertisers – certainly better than large unverified audience numbers not to mention fake ads and online harm.

We have one advertising speaker, the estimable Jake Dubbins, Co-Founder of the Conscious Advertising Network, the other five panellists are all ‘outsiders’: a programme maker, an editor, a publisher, an activist and a regulator.

We want to hear from advertisers, professional advisors, trade bodies, journalists, programme commissioners and makers, media owners of all shapes and sizes, and politicians (and we are working to get them).

This is important; it’s essential that those formulating policy hear from as wide a group as possible. Including you.

Tickets are available here.

As Nick and Caroline said (in their fourth chart) “50% of global ad spend goes to 5 companies”.

Things have not exactly improved since October.

Press Gazette’s analysis, published on April 30^th has Google, META and Amazon accounting for 66.3% of UK adspend.

Whilst our ultimate trade body, The Advertising Association, was celebrating its 100^th birthday last week with the cheery news that UK adspend had grown by 6.5% 2025 over 2024, the less cheery news, that TV was down 1.2%, national newsbrands down by 4.6%, regional newsbrands down 6% and magazines down 5.1% received less attention.

It is far too easy to shrug and suggest that the world changes, advertising changes with it and if that means an ad market controlled by three players, well that’s capitalism in action.

But it’s not quite as straightforward as that.

The UK creative services industry has been remarkably successful. Here’s a few more numbers.

The creative economy (including advertising) contributes over £124 billion in gross value added to the economy. Over recent years it’s been growing at between three and four times the national average. In 2024 the sector employed approximately 2.4 million people.  As a proportion of the total UK economy the creative industries contributed roughly 5% to 6% of total UK economic output.

Today, two-thirds of UK adspend going to a few giants means we put our home creative industries at risk. The more money flows towards the platforms the more we underfund our own media channels which in turn is negative on the economy and jobs

A few of us remember when UK advertising was the envy of the ad world; when we made TV dramas and comedies that travelled; when our news gathering was trusted.

Today we fund platforms that harm children.

Can you imagine a TV programme that incites violence and yet has somehow managed to sidestep the regulations and get on air? Would advertisers be happy with their ads appearing in such content? Of course they wouldn’t. And yet, put the content online and somehow that makes it alright.

The dual standards, the hypocrisy is remarkable.

This has nothing to do with having a whack at the online platforms, rather it’s making the case for a level playing field, for common definitions, for regulations that control content excesses.

Our trade bodies talk of advertising being legal, decent, honest and truthful. And yet they stay remarkably quiet when some of their vendor members behave illegally (running fake ads), indecently (undressing apps), dishonestly (designing addictive algorithms then denying having done so) and deceitfully (inflating ad metrics).

On June 11^th Advertising: Who Cares? is holding a three hour mini event, Who Cares Wins at the central London offices of Prospect Magazine.

We will start by reviewing the research into the effectiveness of advertising within different channels (Who Cares About the Facts).

We will host two long-form moderated discussions: Who Cares About Content; and Who Cares About Safety.

Our speakers will not be the ‘usual suspects’. Our discussions will not be yet another couple of panels where everyone agrees.

We will feature publishers, editors, regulators, activists, programme makers. Speaker details will be on our site.

We will invite contributions from the floor.

We are inviting policy makers, politicians to attend.

As with all AWC events this one will not be sponsored; there will be open discussion, without fear or favour.

As Nick and Caroline said, this is a crisis.

We want to try to do something about it. We should do something about it. Lay out the facts, have the discussion.

Do come along to listen, and to have your say. Tickets are here.

We are at an ‘interesting’ moment in the story of advertising supported media channels.

Back in simpler times there existed a virtuous circle. Publishers, editors, broadcasters created stories of interest and appeal to an audience. Whether it was drama, opinion, documentaries, news, entertainment, sport the aim was to attract and engage an audience.

Advertisers wanted to reach that audience and so they advertised within the editorial content. The more engaging the content, the more attention was paid to both it and the ads within it. The more attention, the more successful the ads.

The money generated from the advertising funded more of the same; hence the virtuous circle.

There was editorial, and there was advertising. The line between them was clear and both sides knew where it was. An advertiser may choose not to spend with a particular channel because of a disagreement over editorial content, but it was rare for advertisers to try to pressure editors to change tack; and when they did in by far the majority of cases it didn’t work.

What did work was advertiser pressure on structures. To make up an entirely hypothetical case if the TV companies suddenly decided not to publish audience research data, and not to release the data for analysis then advertisers would complain, loudly. The TV companies would most likely reconsider their decision in the light of advertiser pressure.

There were rules, and regulations. They kept the media safe for audiences and advertisers, they stopped the excesses, they made sure the channels worked for all.

Whilst the simpler times have gone for ever, it is no great exaggeration to say that advertising still plays an important role in our cultural life via the channels that it funds or part-funds. Not only are we entertained and informed by TV, radio, podcasts and print, however and wherever delivered, but also bus shelters are built, and city centres are brightened.

Today, 50% of UK ad funds goes to the giant US platforms. That figure will increase as about 70% of incremental spending finishes up in the same place.

Marketing budgets are finite. Double the availability of media and you don’t double the money available to fund them. This simple fact often catches start-ups by surprise. Many a prospectus claims: ‘we will be funded by advertising’ without explaining how and why. To get money you have to take it from someone else.

Spend a $ with META and you have a $ less to spend with Channel4.

As spend migrates to the US platforms our homegrown channels suffer.

Nobody expects advertisers to act philanthropically but it makes sense to stop for a moment and consider the consequences of spend decisions.

There are many advertisers who state they ‘wish to do good’ in one shape or form; who have corporate guidelines around the non-acceptability of certain ingredients, and rules around how their raw materials are harvested / farmed / processed / handled / shipped.

There are debates around how we treat people within the supply chain, how we ensure a diverse and inclusive workforce, how we pay those working for us.

And quite right too.

What these advertisers say in ads and publicity is important and is subject not only to a great deal of internal scrutiny but also to various regulations designed both to inform the public and also protect them from misinformation.

Shouldn’t these same principles apply to where the ads and publicity material appears?

Yet advertisers regularly express shock and disappointment when some of their materials end up in deeply inappropriate places. Many pearls are clutched, public comments expressing surprise and ignorance are made and no doubt behind the scenes a lot of shouting goes on.

And then life continues much as before.

On June 11^th, Advertising: Who Cares? is hosting an event called Who Cares Wins at Prospect’s offices in Central London to discuss two interlinked topics.

The threat to content created and distributed locally on news-sites, TV channels and the rest as ad funds migrate to the platforms, and the broad implications for all of us. And the concerns over online safety – first and foremost to consumers, and then to advertisers – and what sort of legislation and regulation is appropriate for how we consume media today.

Tickets are on sale now, here. We have an early booking offer running for a month until May 22^nd.

Details of speakers and moderators will be announced shortly.

There’s no doubt these are significant judgements, not because of the fines levied (US$375m and US$6m, small change for the companies involved) but for the creation of precedent. Presumably there’s a long queue of complainants forming.

The question is not around the significance, but what comes next.

There is one safe bet. META, and Google will appeal. The appeal(s) will last years. Who knows what the final outcome will be, but we are talking about two of the wealthiest organisations on the planet, who have the backing of the current US administration.

Bob Hoffman, in his Newsletter ‘Ethics in Advertising and Other Fairy Tales’ makes the point that the court cases led to a lot of posts unloading on the platforms. “Much venom was spilled in the direction of Zuckerberg and his tech billionaire friends.”

Bob, like me is not on these guys’ Christmas card lists. But he is right (as usual) in pointing out that META is over 95% funded by advertising, and yet those who pay for this stuff never seem to get any of the blame when these examples of antisocial behaviour surface.

I had the opportunity to sit down last week with Bob, courtesy of Mike Sainsbury and his asiCast podcast.

I don’t intend turning this into a transcript, but whilst Bob and I largely agree, he is more pessimistic than me. I may not be a little ray of sunshine where this topic is concerned but I do think these court cases are a cause for some limited optimism.

On their own, these and any subsequent cases won’t cause META (in particular, I see them as the worst offenders) to change course.

As Bob’s Newsletter reminds us, in 2020 marketers instituted a boycott against Facebook. The boycott was led by P&G, whose Chief Brand Officer, Marc Pritchard spoke to MediaPost just before this week’s ANA Conference. His topic? A Call for Reinvention. The boycott episode doesn’t warrant a mention.

Mark Zuckerberg’s response to the boycott: “…all these advertisers will be back on the platform soon enough … We’re not gonna change our policies or approach.” He was correct.

Brand pressure doesn’t work, Facebook’s ad revenue is so widely spread even the biggest have no leverage. So why the optimism?

The legal cases didn’t focus on stories but on technical behaviours. META was not found guilty of posting harmful materials but of creating an unsafe / addictive product.

Thus, these cases circumnavigated Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, the one that establishes platforms as platforms, not publishers.

The results of the two court cases have created news stories around the bad practices of the platforms.

Put these together with specific cases, like the Molly Russell affair highlighted by Channel 4’s film ‘Molly Versus The Machines’ and you have a narrative shift.

Maybe a small one, maybe a temporary one, but a narrative shift for sure.

What was a lot of mumbling from within the media community, fuelled by stories like Sarah Wynn-Williams’ book ‘Careless People’ detailing her time at Facebook, has now bled over into stories noticed by real people.

A parallel from another era might be the rise and fall of ‘The News of the World’.

For years this paper thrived on scandal, gossip and rumour, much of it sourced via the hacking of phones. This didn’t bother its many readers, or its advertisers unduly. The people involved tended to be celebrities and royalty; the first group enjoyed a symbiotic relationship with the tabloid press – they each needed the other – the second group never answered back.

But then came the Milly Dowler case. Milly was murdered in 2002; in 2011 came the revelation that NoW journalists had hacked her phone after she had been reported missing, giving her parents false hope that she was alive.

This was a step too far, the resulting public outcry along with the withdrawal of several key advertisers led to Rupert Murdoch closing the paper, and to the Cameron government commissioning the Leveson enquiry.

Different times, simpler times and clearly Facebook / META is of a different scale to the ‘News of the World’.

But there is one similarity. The public narrative can switch, quickly. It isn’t a huge leap from ‘they connect people’ to ‘they harm teens’.

Court cases, and appeals keep the topic centre stage.

Public dialogue is fickle and influences brand owners. Today’s inconsequential gossip can become tomorrow’s major policy shift.

Except – it’s no threat, I don’t have the answer, there’s no land of plenty and it doesn’t all end happily.

In fact, the best I can offer is that I may very well be wrong. It wouldn’t be the first time, although it may be the first time when I really hope I’m right about being wrong.

This isn’t a political blog. But these days politics affects everything; certainly everything in media land. As someone posted a few weeks ago on LinkedIn: Does President Trump now have to approve my media plan?

The huge online advertising platforms go from strength to strength. These are as we all know advertising businesses. Really big, successful US-based ad businesses with unprecedented Presidential backing.

When a decision is taken for marketing reasons not to support a particular channel and that decision then leads to warnings of lawsuits and politicians’ threats to disrupt a business’ business, it’s not surprising that many find it less of a risk to follow the path of least resistance. Just use them, regardless of the effectiveness of the choice. It will be cheaper in the long run.

If you believe everything you’re told, advertising is really very straightforward. Give your budget to META (insert the name of your favourite platform here). Send over your objectives and brief. META (or whoever) will deploy a magic AI tool, which will design a selection of ads. The alternatives will be pretested. They will then place the winning execution across their individual channels.

They’ll adjust the messaging as they go along. The channel reports back on what you got for your money; and how it achieved your goals.

What could be simpler?

Today, most advertisers aren’t Procter and Gamble / Unilever / McDonald’s / Mars. Most are SMEs, who, to quote the Anthony Jones / Fiona Blades presentation to last October’s Advertising: Who Cares? Summit know little and care less when it comes to the theory of marketing.

• 67% operate without a marketing plan
• 49% lack defined KPIs
• Most rely on media owners or generalists for analysis
• Most rely on platform dashboards and ‘vanity metrics’ (reach, impressions etc)
• Ease of use outweighs technical rigour

To which we can add that few use agencies, and most focus on performance driven campaigns.

For many, ads on META et al work perfectly well.

But that is a very different thing from saying that all advertisers should only use META.

It’s also easy to get carried away with performance metrics whilst forgetting the power and value of branding.

The world’s most valuable soft-drink is Coca-Cola. As of 2025 a reasonable estimate of Coca-Cola’s brand value was c.US$46billion. Total sales revenue (TCCC does not breakout sales revenues by brand) can be estimated at between US$20billion and US$25billion.

The brand is worth roughly double its annual sales.

The Coca-Cola brand has been built assiduously over many years, with advertising playing a major role. The same applies to many other brands.

Brand advertising, done consistently and done well builds value. We all know this is true.

Smart advertisers use every tool to build their brand. Once that’s done, performance activities work better too.

Net – you shouldn’t put all your eggs into one platform-shaped basket and ignore everything else

But we live in a short-term world, within which arguing for long-term brand building is tough.

Advertisers have for many years silo-ed media thinking. Many have concluded that price is everything; the detail of where to spend has been left to their agencies; auditors and advisors are too often ignored; ‘audience’, ‘context’, ‘measurement’ have often been placed in the ‘too difficult’ box.

Putting all of this together, on the one hand we have massive media vendors, with a full range of off-the-shelf services, and self-policing measurement systems, all displayed on lovely dashboards. Backed by politicians.

On the other we have the advertiser, often not properly trained, unaware of the questions to ask, let alone the answers to seek, desperate for short-term results that indicate action to their bosses, and keen to stay out of any political firestorm.

‘Branding’? A long-term nice-to-have, which no doubt the vendors will eventually find a convincing way of delivering and measuring.

Now – where in all of this does the agency sit?

I’m talking about expert commentators, consultants, or as some would have it; sofa warriors.

Those brave souls in their corporate bunkers are not always so complimentary. If anyone, ANYONE dares to say anything even a little critical of the organisation that pays their wages, they leap into action. It’s like waving a red rag in front of a particularly angry and rather shortsighted bull.

‘What do you know; you last worked in an agency twenty years ago; you’re not on the inside; you just believe any old rubbish; your post layout sucks; ‘your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries’.’

One of those is I admit courtesy of Monty Python; but if I possessed a little more imagination (or access to a copywriter) they all could be.

Why does all of this matter? Isn’t what gets said on the socials the modern-day equivalent of today’s fish wrapping?

Most thinking people within this industry know we’re not in a great place. We face a number of problems, from ad fraud to a lack of trust, from a business model that is no longer fit for purpose to a set of the most powerful media operators the world has ever seen who see us as at best rather irrelevant.

Our systems of measurement, the building bricks that form the bedrock of any indicator of success have largely moved out of our collective control and towards those whose channels they’re designed to measure.

We’ve also lost perspective. Take the Molly Russell case covered here last week.  It seems that we are less concerned about advertising on channels that play a role in young suicides every week than we are about our ads appearing opposite a negative news headline.

The ad business of today is run by those who receive ad revenue, as opposed to those who spend it.

Nobody really doubts these problems exist. In previous eras the largest and most respected organisations, the agencies in their various forms along with our trade bodies would be leading the charge.

Past misdemeanours have a nasty habit of resurfacing. It’s hard to argue for transparency and beating fraud when you’re accused in court of misusing client money. It’s tricky to make the case for creativity and craft at the same time as closing agencies and making thousands redundant.

The agency trade bodies, the IPA here, and the AAAA in the USA have been disappointingly silent over many of these topics over many years. They should learn from the advertisers’ trade organisations, those representing the views of the guys who pay the bills; ISBA, the ANA and the WFA have all been far more proactive.

The IAB in Sweden showed what can be done when they expelled META from membership last week. For not doing the right thing regarding scam ads. Sadly, the IAB elsewhere has to date done nothing.

The point is not who sits where in the bad boys’ league table but that there are many issues the industry needs to address that its biggest players are ignoring.

That’s why sofa warriors should be praised for raising the issues, speaking out, taking the problems seriously, suggesting solutions.

Our leaders, the largest organisations with the greatest resources really should look beyond the next quarter, and wonder if there’ll be an industry worthy of the name in a few years’ time. Or will the platforms own it all?

If that comes to pass it will be someone else’s fault. Probably someone on a sofa.

A quick postscript. I’m writing this on the morning after the Oscars. The Best Documentary award went to ‘Mr Nobody Against Putin’. In his acceptance remarks, the film’s co-director David Borenstein said: “…when oligarchs take over the media and control how we could produce it and consume it, we all face a moral choice, but luckily even a nobody is more powerful than you think.”

Last Thursday Channel 4 screened the documentary film ‘Molly Vs The Machines’, the tragic story of Molly Russell who took her own life in 2017 aged 14. When the Coroner’s Court came to hear the case in 2022 (5 years of obfuscation from the platforms) the conclusion reached was: “Molly died from an act of self-harm while suffering from depression and the negative effects of online content.”

Here’s a Cog Blog post from the time of that 2022 verdict.

The film is shocking, of course. Molly’s dad, Ian Russell’s composure, his determination to make sure Molly is not forgotten, his polite bloody-mindedness in the face of corporate non-answers not to mention appalling tragedy, are remarkable.

Contributions from various META executives are dreadful. Not just in allowing the content Molly saw to be there in the first place but in their subsequent justifications. The evidence given by their Head of Health and Wellbeing Policy, Elizabeth Lagone to the inquest is chilling, describing the content seen by Molly as ‘safe’ because it adhered to content guidelines in place at the time.

Ms Lagone subsequently apologised. She has since left META, like others featured: Nick Clegg, Sheryl Sandberg, Steve Hatch and the whistleblower Arturo Bejar.

The Molly film should be an inflection point, informing the debate around how or if we should regulate / control social media.

One suggestion is to ban access to under 16s. This is the expedient solution as far as politicians are concerned. It is a knee-jerk reaction (‘look, we’ve done something’). It’s easily understood.

I don’t believe this will work.

A ban creates a barrier between parent and child. If the child is doing something literally illegal (because of course young people will find a way of accessing social media, ban or not) they are less likely to open up to their parents.

Second, it lets the platforms off the hook. If under 16s aren’t allowed access, it’s easy to ignore the underlying issue. Youngsters exposed to harmful material? Not our problem, they’re on our site illegally.

The answer is to strengthen regulation. We have OFCOM and the Online Safety Act. Neither works well, but it must be easier to strengthen what we have than to start down a different path.

Communication channels are full of advice on what to do if you wish to complain or take issue with something in print or broadcast.

The social media channels should be pressured to include a facility for anyone exposed to unacceptable content to complain about it, anonymously if preferred, to an independent authority with the teeth to fine them (or worse).

Use users to police the system, to alert the regulator to misdemeanours.

There will be howls about this. It’s impractical. It’s open to abuse. There are too many users. Complaints will need checking. It will be too expensive.

I don’t agree. Consider these business’ vast profits, and the lack of tax paid. Why not tax them, or fine them to fund such a service?

Then there’s the ad industry. Although META is c.95% funded by advertising, bringing meaningful pressure from such a vast advertiser base is always said to be impossible.

That’s a conclusion based on too literal an assessment.

The only way to hold the social media channels to account is via Government. Large advertisers may be of minor significance in revenue terms, but they are significant as influencers. They have access to policy makers.

One expert group who should be leading the charge to improve social media, our largest marketing services organisations, are compromised by their relationships with the platforms. There are a few brave individuals but corporately they’re unlikely to speak out given their dependence on the platforms.

CMOs will stay quiet too. Decisions on where to spend their companies’ money over multiple years could justifiably be questioned – not just morally, not just in terms of supporting criminal ad fraud, but in terms of reducing their brands’ values.

There’s an irony in quietly continuing to wave through money spent on channels that cause young people harm, whilst earnestly debating whether advertising around news is somehow dangerous.

I may be over-optimistic but my sense is that the dirty water is circling the drain. The criticism of the social media channels is becoming louder; the disconnect between large companies’ ethical and moral values and the places where they choose to spend their money is becoming deeper and more apparent.

There used to be a thing in media selection known as Chairman’s Wife Syndrome. As in, I don’t care what the numbers say, the Chairman’s wife reads ‘The Daily Mail’; make sure we’re in it.

We are now approaching reverse Chairman’s Wife Syndrome. The Molly Russell legacy.

But here we are. The debate rumbles on, an example of how the great debates of our industry have degenerated from things that matter to things that really don’t.

There is nothing wrong with YouTube. It’s a great example of a structure within which creators can create. It’s a brilliant outlet for those who for whatever reason can’t find their way into, or prefer not to bother with broadcast or streaming channels.

It’s also a valuable distribution mechanism for those broadcast and streaming channels to showcase their wares.

So, given its many merits why can’t YouTube just be YouTube? The answer is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of how advertisers ought to allocate their budgets.

You’ll note ‘ought to’.

In a previous post I’ve noted the obsession around big numbers. This is a huge problem; and one that is not talked about anything like enough.

The issue is threefold. First, we are very comfortable with the notion that biggest is by definition best. It’s finite, it’s clean. Two million is better than one million. No judgement required. Case closed. Move on.

Secondly, we are nervous about being backed into making a creative judgement. The most obvious use-case is an over-reliance on advertising research. It’s there to guide not to decide. We’re quick to abdicate responsibility to someone else – and if a decision on creative turns out to be wrong, well that’s obviously the research company’s fault, not mine for being indecisive.

Thirdly, there’s a combination of the first two. We have an innate fear of numbers. They’re boring; the detail is tedious. Far easier to take those nice salespeople at their word than to question how they arrived at their numbers, or to query any creative application of the data.

There’s no room for ‘soft’ data, for understanding why or how people are exposed to advertising. All we need to know is how many were exposed. The rest is irrelevant.

How people use YouTube is simply different from how they use TV. Not better, not worse, just different.

TV is regulated; the content is professionally produced; the number of minutes given over to ads is limited; ads are showcased within their own pod. The audience is measured using a system approved by all interested parties. The data is available for full analysis. The audience data ‘building blocks’ are robust, solid, verifiable.

You can argue that you think the system used, be it BARB, Nielsen or whatever is arcane, old-fashioned, due for upgrade, not fit for purpose in today’s world. You may be right, but the point is a different one – the methodology and the data produced are agreed collaboratively, all is available for analysis, everything is transparent. Any upgrade should stick to these basics.

Ads on YouTube, and on other platforms are placed, to be polite, at random. We’ve all seen online ads that appear literally cutting in to (for example) an interviewer’s sentence. They are interruptive in the worst possible way. They are placed by machine; no human would suggest anything so perfectly designed to be ignored.

Regardless, is the data verifiable; analysable? Nope. You can get data but only on the sellers’ terms.

Does anyone recall in-platform video ads? Or do we all just want them over as soon as possible?

Surely how we consume media channels is an important consideration alongside how many consume.

And that’s the point. YouTube is great, so is TV. But they’re different; we use them differently, our mood-states are (probably, I don’t have data…) different.

I really don’t care if YouTube adds a reach point or two – not least because the data are not comparable (although the likes of Origin will help).

Research is there to guide. It should always be questioned.

It may be inconvenient, even hard – but you, the trained professional, get to decide.

The right decision is to treat YouTube as YouTube, not as something it isn’t.

What there is, what we do, is informed guesswork.

How could it be otherwise? Circumstances change; people act unpredictably; moods swing; ad qualities vary; ad contexts fluctuate from the deeply inappropriate to the highly relevant. Advertising is not an industry conducting regular scientific experiments under laboratory conditions.

The more information you have, and the clearer your objectives the better the chances that your guesses will pay off.

 Here’s a simple choice. Would you prefer to focus on your ad being seen by masses of people, or to take actions that contribute to you selling more stuff?

It’s a choice because these two things are not inextricably linked.

The ‘masses of people’ who ‘saw’ your ad may not actually have done so. They might have had an opportunity to do so, but that’s quite a different thing.

And when we say ‘saw’, or even ‘opportunity to see’ we don’t mean ‘notice’ let alone ‘remember’. What we mean is that a pair of eyes were (possibly) on a screen for a second, maybe two during which an ad may have played.

Did it play? If we’re talking online, we think so, but we’re not sure. Nobody will guarantee anything beyond saying the likelihood is the ad was served. Was it all played? Shrug.

Can we say where and within what context the ad appeared (if it appeared)? No. We can guess but we don’t know.

Furthermore, when we say ‘masses…’ we’re not sure how many masses. And when we say ‘people’ we more accurately mean devices. And when we say ‘devices’ many of those may be phones racked up in their thousands and programmed to click away automatically.

So, the first part of your choice might more accurately read: … for your ad to have been served (not necessarily at all, let alone in its entirety), but has not necessarily appeared on many (we’re not sure how many) sites (we’re not sure which), on an unvalidated number of devices some of which (but not all) may or may not involve a pair of eyes (we don’t know how many) open (we hope) in front of the screen for a second or two.

I once wrote a chart for an MRG Conference paper. Goodness knows where it is now, but from memory it contained a pyramid the base of which read: ‘How many people saw any edition of a magazine used by my client?’

The next step up changed ‘any edition’ to ‘an average edition’.

Then moving up: ‘How many people saw the actual edition of a magazine in which my client’s ad appeared?’; and on to ‘How many people saw the actual page on which my client’s ad appeared?’.

There were several other stages until at the top of the pyramid we got to ‘How many people saw my client’s ad and acted upon it?’

My point was we were stuck on the lowest segments of the pyramid.

This was in 1980. 45+ years ago.

Now replace ‘magazine’ with ‘website’ and change some of the obvious descriptors.

At least back then we knew that our ads had appeared, where, and the surrounding context. Now we don’t.

Back then there was one unquestioned source of audience data. It may have been guesswork but everyone had the same base. No longer.

Remember the digital evangelists sneering how we have so much more audience knowledge today than back in the ‘dark ages’?

On 23^rd January, ‘Private Eye’ reported, in the context of several states considering banning under 16s from social media: “Both META and Snapchat have said there is a significant margin of error when seeking to determine whether a user is in fact under 16.”

And yet the platforms sell on the basis that they can tell advertisers exactly who their ads reach, on a one-to-one, minute-by-minute basis.

The foundation of advertising is to be Legal, Decent, Honest and Truthful. Those words are important; over time they’ve shielded advertising from external regulation.

The ASA builds on these foundations:

• Truthful: substantiate all objective claims.
• Non-misleading: must not deceive, omit or mislead through exaggeration
• Social responsibility: must not encourage illegal, unsafe or anti-social behaviour.

Shouldn’t these foundations apply to the collection and use of online audience data as much as to any other advertising discipline?

There is plenty of evidence on which media forms deliver consistent business results for advertisers.

Guesswork informed by evidence beats buying the salesman’s patter. Without question.

I started my career in audience measurement. The top audience researchers were, still are (to coin a phrase) serious people. Professional, thorough, happier in the background.

It was (is) a community of experts, the media industry’s caddies. They knew and understood the game. The sales guys played the shots and took the glory; the measurement guys kept their council, maybe lifting the odd eyebrow.

They believed that the industry should come together, agree on the highest measurement standards and apply them. Set up processes to keep the whole thing under technical review and make improvements as required.

These principles were the foundation pillars of the JIC system. Questioning them was out of the question.

All of which is background to a number of the dilemmas we face today.

First, today’s biggest players don’t care about the rules. Question the principles, change the language, keep the data hidden. Do what’s best for them regardless of any higher good. Move fast and break things, as Facebook had it.

Second, without the largest players the JICs can no longer set industry-wide rules. The new players not only aren’t a part of the game; they aren’t interested in being on the pitch.

Third, analytic techniques have advanced to great effect assessing what works. Audience measurement is a means to an end, not the end itself. The time for inward looking micro-debates and discussions is past.

But: there is merit in agreeing on the fundamentals.

Take definitions. If we can’t agree what the words ‘viewer’, ‘impression’, and ‘reach’ mean, and we can’t, any debate involving more than one media form becomes by definition fallacious. It’s not so much comparing apples and oranges, as failing to agree that both are fruits.

The what-things-mean debate of a few years back has been towed off-road where it remains parked in a layby. Eventually it will be towed away and scrapped.

The ‘definitions’ game moves on – to the square marked ‘outcomes’.

Why does it matter what Facebook (insert your favourite platform here) decrees as ‘an outcome’? Facebook carries ads; Facebook considers all ads on Facebook as successful.

That’s the word from above – now, off you go to prove it.

If only it were that simple. Advertisers of all shapes and sizes spend money to achieve something. What exactly is rooted in their individual businesses. It may be sales, improvements to margin, reputational gains, or influence over Government policy. Or any combination of these and other things

Whatever the goal, it’s a laudable aim to assess which elements of spend have contributed what.

Media life is complicated, whatever the platforms (or Sir Martin Sorrell) tell us. To pretend, post launch, that comms life starts from the moment you place an ad on any channel is silly.

There will be years-worth of advertising (and other commercial activities) on multiple channels to consider.

There are largely non-measured, non-advertising channels like shopfronts, promotions, call-centres, online reviews, influencers.

Done well everything works together. Each element adds something; done badly, with no synergies wastes money.

To make sense of everything you need a way to tease apart the inputs and the outputs. You need models, advanced analytics, skilled interpretation. You need a way to quantify the unquantified.

Models are only as good as what goes into them; including a measure of who has been exposed to the message, and in what numbers.

If audience measures are compromised the model is less reliable.

Houses are more likely to survive the storm if they’re built with the best bricks. Compromise on the bricks and you’ll pay a lot more when you come to rebuild the house.

All of which is a long-winded way of coming to five conclusions and one ambition.

• Validated audience numbers are important not just as a trading currency but also as an accurate input to the assessment of effect.
• Including unvalidated numbers in models can lead to misleading conclusions. Always question the composition of the bricks.
• Measuring ‘outcomes’ is desirable as long as the measurement is comprehensive, inclusive and independent.
• Believing unexplained cod data presented by the vendor as an extensive analysis of effect is for the birds.
• Stirring the mud using one word, ‘outcomes’, to mean two different things only helps the person wielding the biggest stick.

We need a centre for learning; to which all expertise contributes. Lessons learned can be aggregated and the aggregation made available for the good of all. Individual advertisers can contribute elements from their own bespoke work to add to the sum of knowledge.

This is one part of the ambition for the next stage of Advertising: Who Cares? Join us to help.

The fact is our largest agencies, the very organisations who should be leading the industry, are conflicted. Who at the end of the day is their client?

I’ve always thought that everything starts and ends with the advertiser. Build a great relationship based on trust; make sure your advice is objective and in the best interests of the client; be honest over fees; rinse and repeat.

This may be hard, although there are plenty of independent agencies from the7stars down who seem to manage, but that’s no reason to trash transparency and objectivity.

Those that put cash from media or adtech vendors ahead of open-ness find themselves conflicted when it comes to speaking up.

Last week The Advertising Association were kind enough to invite me to their LEAD 26 Summit, on the theme of leadership through trust.

I fully understand the need for the AA to find LEAD sponsors, including this year META, and Google both of whom appeared on stage (Google twice, once as YouTube). But sponsorship shouldn’t equal a free pass.

META and YT have been in the news recently – YouTube has been busy sending ‘cease and desist’ letters to BARB; META has been accused of profiting from scam ads that remain on the platform.

Alison Lomax, YouTube’s UK MD stressed the need to play by the rules, and the importance of measurement, without the inconvenience of being asked to explain how this fits with the BARB row.

META’s Security Policy Manager, Rita Amin said that the extent of revenues from scam ads had been exaggerated, without being pushed to explain what they were planning on doing with the $4bn or so admitted to (it seems unlikely any will be going to the vulnerable suffering from the worst excesses on their platforms).

Talking of which, and as a contrast, I was also last week invited to a preview screening of a film called Molly Vs the Machines followed by a discussion featuring some of those involved.

The film tells the true story of Molly Russell, the 14-year old who took her own life in 2017 in part as a result of what she was exposed to via algorithms on Instagram. I wrote a Cog Blog post on this dreadful case when the Coroner’s verdict emerged five years later in 2022.

The film will be shown in UK cinemas for a couple of days in early March and will then air on Channel4 on March 3rd. It is powerful, emotional, inspirational and horrific all at once. Do watch it.

It’s the advertising industry that largely funds the sites that are implicated in this and other tragedies.

We should be asking the platforms, and their representatives at the IAB (also on stage at LEAD) questions around content and regulations whenever we get the chance, and especially at our industry’s top events.

Not to do so is to avoid responsibility; to be complicit.

There are many good people working for our largest agencies, and our biggest clients whose potential influence to drive change is considerable and far greater than the odd blogger. They should be encouraged to speak out.

By stopping them from doing so the organisations they work for are, by denial, delaying any solution to these problems.

Ad people naturally enough believe this to be true. The greatest asset they have is their people, and the reason for that is that they’re convinced, as am I that advertisers buy people. Plus it’s always reassuring to be described as an asset.

Clients buy experience, talent. They want people they can trust, people who will put their needs first, people who can sit alongside them and help them solve their problems.

That’s not to say they don’t want tools, technologies, AI, data geeks and dashboards. It’s just that those things are a means to an end, not an end in themselves.

To paraphrase Sir John Hegarty at the launch of Advertising: Who Cares? in September 2024: ‘Nobody remembers Gutenberg’s second book. The guy invented an astonishing piece of technology, which changed the world. As far as we know he never printed a word of his own. Bartolomeo Cristofori may have invented the piano, but history suggests he never composed a note’.

This reliance on human creativity unsettles those happiest with spreadsheets. How can they value a genius over a mere mortal? How do they identify a genius in the first place? Geniuses are unstable assets; they may very well go down in the lift and then continue on straight out of the door.

Of course many also can’t articulate why AI will change the ad world for the better, although they’re happy enough pointing out how many jobs it will replace.

I was working in Leo Burnett in the US in 1993 when a Chicago-based fund manager called David Herro initiated the campaign that eventually led to Maurice Saatchi and his brother Charles being removed from the agency they founded.

I was asked by my bosses for my opinion, I suppose as the resident Brit. I said I thought it likely that the brothers would attract a number of Saatchi and Saatchi clients to their new agency, M&C Saatchi. Others would be unsettled. Maybe we could benefit?

This observation was met with incredulity; clients were loyal to institutions, not individuals.

Turns out many weren’t then, nor are they now.

These thoughts were prompted by what’s happening today, with mergers, layoffs, closures. Ivan Fernandes’ post a week or two ago on LinkedIn puts it well. Those being cast aside won’t disappear; they’ll reappear bursting with talent and ideas that have been suppressed over their time in a large holding company.

Many will use the tools, the technologies in the way they’ve learned. They’ll focus on clients and putting the tools to work. Rather than boasting online that solution A is so superior to solution B for reasons that only the true specialist can be expected to appreciate, they’ll be adding in their human expertise, and mixing it all together to benefit their advertisers.

Thanks for the piano Bartolomeo, time for the geniuses to create music.

Just in the last two or three months (and only in my world) we have lost Denise Turner, the IPA’s Research Director at an unfairly young age, my old agency colleague Bryan Smith, and the peerless Dominic Proctor, CEO of JWT, Founder CEO at Mindshare. As I wrote in another place, Dom was loved not only by those who worked for him and with him but by those of us who competed against him.

WPP Media put on a fine memorial for Dom. There were many of us old agency guys there, many memories to unearth and enjoy.

In one conversation with JWT’s one time Media Director, Ron de Pear we got on to agency thought leaders; and where are they?

In my (and Ron’s) day we had big thinkers in the agencies to look up to: Jeremy Bullmore, Stephen King, Simon Broadbent, David Abbott, John Hegarty, John Webster, Paul Feldwick.

In the media world the likes of John Perris, John Billett, Mike Yershon, Chris Ingram were all highly visible. What they had to say about the business and the media was consequential, and mattered.

Where are the media agency thought leaders of today? Those who should surely be leading, those at the top of the largest media agencies tend to stay quiet. When you work for a large corporate you presumably need to check every public pronouncement with some group PR in case of causing offence.

This leads to the mundane, the avoidance of controversy. Agencies these days follow, they don’t lead the business.

Today’s thought leaders are more likely to be consultants, media vendors, research suppliers than agencies. Go and listen to any panel of agency leaders at any conference. What you get is violent agreement; a competition not to challenge.

With agency revenues coming from so many sources these days you need fancy footwork not to upset your paymasters.

It’s not just the lack of original thinking in agencies that Ron and I were decrying, but the disappearance of deep business relationships.

A number of years ago there was a memorial for Peter Howard-Williams. For those who don’t remember Peter, he was Mr Cinema. He was a larger-than-life legend.

He retired to sunnier climes and then sadly passed away.

His memorial was attended by a who’s who of the media world. Agencies, salesmen, clients, past and present.

I remember wondering at the time if anything comparable would ever happen again.

In Peter’s day the human touch in sales counted.

Is this just nostalgic rambling? Up to a point, but in an era within which we all agree that collaboration is key; that creativity in advertising is no longer a department but everyone’s responsibility, we need human interaction more than ever.

Listening to the reminiscences the other evening from those who knew Dom Proctor best what stuck out was the humanity at the heart of all the stories. He succeeded; Mindshare succeeded with the toughest clients because of this.

Of course he was smart, a man who, as the current boss of WPP Media, Brian Lesser pointed out, spotted talent and encouraged everyone to strive for excellence, with a smile. He was also, as the number of sales guys present indicated, a partner, a seeker after great ideas from wherever.

We need more Doms, now more than ever at just the time when I fear they’re in short supply.

With hindsight this has been brewing for decades; ever since media excellence was defined as delivering the biggest numbers for the lowest cost.

Many see ‘media’ as being all about the buy. It is sad that even today, multi-functional media agencies are still reduced to the lazy shorthand descriptor: ‘media buyers’.

We remain in Wildean territory, understanding the price of everything and the value of nothing

As media (and tech / data) people we don’t help ourselves; we revel in our own language, we don’t welcome outsiders. We wallow in our specialism.

Big numbers rule, even if we have to make them up.

The US media business is the main culprit; we all follow along. Yet historically the way the US ‘does media’ has leant towards the making of the buy over the construction of the plan.

The upfront was a thing – is a thing.

TV audience measurement was (is) programme, not commercial based. Selling audiences to commercials rather than programmes may reflect reality but it meant smaller numbers. Heaven forfend.

Someone in the US will reply to this and blame advertisers not their advisors. This is like saying we were only following orders in prioritising the wrong thing for the wrong reasons.

Buying a large audience, cheaply, may have obvious benefits, but it’s unbalanced. The nuance of how ads are displayed, how they’re consumed; how their effect is impacted by context are all important.

We know this; but when push comes to shove, we follow the biggest numbers and spend accordingly.

There is a real danger this will end in tears. Consider the giant social media platforms, the big number factories.

They’ve weaponised audience measurement; everything is acceptable as long as the number is big. They avoid scrutiny and hide within walled gardens.

But what if, despite ever-bigger numbers, time shows that for many the ads don’t work? Who will call who to account?

There’s a parallel with ad fraud. Today, advertisers waste something like US$100 billion a year advertising to nobody.

That is an extraordinary fact. The ad industry ignores it.

There are lots of reasons why we do, but arse-covering is never a long-term solution. Nor should funding criminal activity be written off as ‘cost of doing business’.

Eventually some CFO, or CEO will join the dots; in fact, I’m in little doubt that that is already happening.

Here’s a fictional advertiser non-marketing perspective.

‘We are spending millions of dollars, and when I ask you what we get for it you quote numbers made up by those taking the money. I read that a significant amount is going either on supporting those who mislead the public with fake AI-generated ‘ads’, or who mislead our shareholders by buying ads that nobody sees.

I hear on the news that people die as a result of what they see online. There’s an AI product that ‘undresses’ women. There’s talk of bans amongst young people.

When I ask what we’re doing to ensure our ads only appear appropriately all I hear is algorithms, and political pressures.

My agency recommends we ‘spend behind the numbers’ regardless; but nobody can explain to me what the numbers mean in my world.

My sales are down; my margins are under pressure. My brand is being undercut.

We should take a break from wasting money on advertising and review what we can do instead.’

We should start by educating our clients. We know that 200 million is bigger than 150 million but there’s more to media thinking than that. We need to moderate our obsession with big numbers

We are expert advisors. We need to do what’s best for our clients, not follow the herd or be bullied by politicians.

Clients pay for everything. The rest is noise. Agency and holdco CEOs need to stress that, again and again to their shareholders.

They need to look forward, to read the room. As Pesach Lattin’s Adotat has it this week: “A lot of people inside adtech have realised this apparatus isn’t good for anyone. Not brands. Not agencies. Not even vendors long-term because eventually the music stops and someone notices the room is full of people pretending to dance while pickpocketing each other.”

For their part clients and only clients can make change happen. Educating them in how to ask the right questions, how to value their media spend, what to look out for should be our job.

This is why Advertising: Who Cares? is going to pull together the best thinking without fear or favour, for everyone to use.

One contribution to cleaning the Augean stables.

At one stage Murdoch asked the Kellogg’s man how many boxes of cornflakes he sold. What would it cost to advertise Sky on the back of the packet? My memory is the Kellogg’s guy knew the volume of boxes sold but had no idea how to price an ad on the back. He said he saw no reason why this couldn’t happen.

To my shame (and against myself given the rest of this post) I didn’t contribute anything; I guess I just assumed this was an interesting exchange, nothing more.

The next morning, early, I had an angry Kellogg’s CMO on the phone. What was I thinking; didn’t I have any idea about the production timetable on cereal boxes?

Apparently, Murdoch had his people call the CMO first thing to close the deal and to ask when they could expect the first boxes with Sky ads on them to hit the stores.

It never happened.

Fast forward a few decades. A Board Advisor from one of the platforms arrives in London by private jet to see a major advertiser’s CEO. His message was ‘why are you wasting all this money on TV advertising? All you need is us’. Luckily the CEO is well enough informed, and close enough to his CMO to deflect and refer. The Advisor flew home with nothing.

Another couple of decades passes. I am on a call with a large US-based client. This client has decided to make a major advertising investment in one of the platforms. All dealings would be direct, not via any of the roster agencies. Everything would be via the client’s FD and team; marketing would not be involved.

I asked how the client would know if this activity was working. Easy, came the reply, the platform concerned tells us, they share the numbers.

What all of these stories – separated by 40-odd years – have in common is how great salesmen, Murdoch, the Advisor, the platforms themselves, go about convincing their prospects to buy whatever it is they’re selling. They bypass those who may be sufficiently well-informed to question what they’re being told and instead go to the top.

Agencies have increasingly become bit-part players; they’re not consulted by the upper echelons of their clients’ managements.

One large agency told me the other week (loudly, and slowly) that I had to understand that it’s all about JBPs (Joint Business Plans, for sake of clarity) these days, and that at the end of the day the agency can only advise.

Goodness.

Agencies, like any other professional advisor exist to advise. The point is their advice was once upon a time considered essential. It was rare for any client to agree an over-arching deal with a media vendor without the agency’s input.

But over time we’ve become note-takers, ciphers, rather than valued advisors. That’s what a lack of trust does.

The main platforms are remarkably good at selling. They avoid the ‘experts’, those with the awkward questions and go straight to the top. Let the grown-ups do the deals and then the foot soldiers can sort the detail. Keep the experts happy by sponsoring the odd talking shop. No top manager is ever going to admit being played.

Would the CEO call his agency? Nope.

There’s one likely outcome. The investment in advertising on the platforms to the exclusion of most everything else won’t work for brands. There’s already plenty of evidence it doesn’t work. The value of brands will decline.

And who’s fault will that be?

You have one guess.

My LinkedIn feed filled with lovely posts, not just around the content created by our workstream leaders and their teams over 8 months, but with praise for the whole notion of a volunteer movement.

It is indeed remarkable that very busy people, in senior jobs and with a lot of plates to keep spinning have been prepared to give up their time, for free.

It seems a fair conclusion that many do indeed care about advertising; as a cultural phenomenon as much as a way to earn a living.

The ad business has always been a mix of science and creativity, of logic and emotion. At its best it can stir you. At its worst it can annoy you and interrupt you even as you studiously ignore it.

We have our four-year old grandson and family living with us for a few weeks. We have watched all sorts of TV shows (many funded by advertising), we’ve been to the cinema, we’ve looked at printed Marvel comics (which he chose) and then the other day he happened to be watching my phone when the Honda Cog ad from 2003 dropped into my feed.

He’s been hassling me to watch ‘the film with the car in bits’ more times than is good for him. 22 years after it came out. An ad that predates YouTube, and AI and allegedly took 606 takes. An ad so perfect that even the voice over (the voice over has seven words over the 2 minutes) featured a then-recognisable talent (Garrison Keillor). To choose Joe Nobody would have been to betray what went before.

Did anyone in procurement argue about using Keillor? Who knows, but I very much doubt it. If you’re producing art you don’t spend time fussing about the cost of the brushes.

Yeah yeah, old hat not relevant to today, blah blah.

This week the 2025 John Lewis Christmas ad dropped. It’s lovely, a professional piece of communication put together by professionals. I may wonder why they’ve gone a week earlier than last year (come on, I’m a media guy) but there’s no doubting the quality of the content.

What John Lewis has done, first with Adam and Eve and now with Saatchis, is recognise a good thing and stick with it. I have no idea what financial return the JL company has received over the years since they reinvented Christmas advertising, but I bet it’s considerable.

Honda on the other hand – can anyone remember or quote a Honda ad from the last 22 years? Does anyone these days associate Honda with precision engineering excellence, the Cog message?

Consistency works better and for longer than one-off tactical thoughts.

Honda could have owned precision engineering. Surely that would have been a valuable association on which to build.

We work in an endlessly fascinating industry staffed by interesting, varied talented people. People who can convince a brave client that it’s a really good idea to drop 250,000 balls from the top of a hill in San Francisco to dramatize colour. People who can turn the aggravation of waiting longer for your pint into a positive. People who can make confusing two similar-sounding words into a campaign for a boring insurance price comparison site, and then into part of the language.

We care about these things because (quite aside from adding to the gaiety of life) they work for our clients. Regardless of the impressions bought, the likes gathered, the clicks. They work.

There is simply no comparison to sitting watching Cog in all its 2-minute glory versus being interrupted by a YouTube ad featuring a chopped-up Cog, produced on the whim of some soul-less media buyer who’s convinced the client he really needs ‘to maximise reach and frequency’.

The best advertising is about ideas with numbers; creativity married to metrics. Reduce the art down to numbers alone and it loses. Link art and science and you make both work better.

At its best advertising works, gloriously. It builds businesses. It funds quality media forms that people like to watch or read. It brightens city streets. It allows us to stay in touch with friends the world over. It funds the world’s greatest ever source of knowledge and information. It opens the door to creativity and allows the talented to flourish from their bedrooms.

It does all of these things and more – online, offline, it’s a matter of balance.

It also allows me to sit in a chair with a four-year-old on my lap and watch a 2-minute thing of beauty, 22 years later. And to watch him being fascinated by it.

Is it any wonder so many of us care?

To the first, the matter of definition. Is a shop front advertising? A shirt sponsorship? Where does promotion stop and advertising begin? When does an influencer become a channel? And so on.

I prefer a simpler definition: to the consumer it’s all advertising.

Last week saw the Advertising: Who Cares? (AWC) Summit. In full disclosure I am Co-Founder with Nick Manning of the whole shebang, but my point is not to say how wonderful it was, how great the speakers were, how comfortable the seats or how immaculate the on-the-ground organisation. No, my point is this: SO WHAT?

This event was deliberately titled a Summit. We want to achieve something with AWC; we want to make the advertising industry a better place to work, that produces better work for the advertisers we are there to serve.

Last week’s effort was not a conference, in the modern meaning of the word.

Useful discussions can and do take place at conferences. They often happen in beautiful places. They are forums to exchange ideas. They allow participants to practice the much under-appreciated skill of ‘networking’. Many are pay-to-play, something not always clear to participants. I spoke at my first conference in the late 1970’s. I’ve never paid to speak (I’m rarely asked these days) and I can’t think of a single speech I’ve made that’s changed anything significant.

A homily on a placard on the desk of a Chicago newspaper editor in the early 1900’s read: “Whatever a patron desires to get published is advertising; whatever he wants to keep out of the paper is news.” As long as everyone understands the rules, then good luck to them.

The AWC Summit (not conference) was not sponsored. Not everything we had to say is popular with certain actors. At various times since we started 18 months ago we’ve been accused of being anti-adtech, anti-platforms, anti-holdcos, anti-modern business. We are it seems an equal-opportunity upsetter. The accusations are nonsense. Anyone can join our supporter group; anyone can volunteer to help. There’s no fear or favour involved.

Last week’s Summit has generated a lot of comment. Much has been very kind, perhaps too kind, too soon. We are, to coin an awful phrase, on a journey – we need to pay attention to the many great ideas that have emerged from 8 months’ worth of hard work by 70 volunteers across 9 workstreams, and then with them, and with our trade bodies and their various excellent initiatives move forward.

Don’t let’s fool ourselves: we are in a mess. We are facing a group of enormously wealthy people who think that advertising is so simple it can be left to them to sort everything out automatically. These are people who believe that anyone can be an expert in advertising.

Meanwhile many genuine experts are busy looking the other way; ignoring the evidence in front of their own eyes. If the techbros don’t destroy us, we’ll destroy ourselves.

There is quantity and there is quality. How you mix them is a skill, if you mix them is a choice, but regardless there are two axis. It is unusual to go 100% one way or the other; generally a mix works best.

Later posts will go more into how not to confuse cost with value.

For now – Advertising: Who Cares? is on the way to somewhere. Hopefully somewhere better.

The trouble is, ‘planning’ has become one of those words that means different things depending on who’s using it. It is a member of the ignoble club of mis-understanding. Fellow members include ‘outcomes’, ‘reach’, ‘impressions’, ‘views’, even ‘agency’. To qualify for membership, any attempt to define what exactly a word means is followed by: ‘It depends’.

To an OOH specialist, the proportionate mix of different formats constitutes ‘planning’. To a video expert the balance between broadcast, streaming, YouTube, FB Video requires ‘planning’.

There’s nothing in any way wrong with this, what we used to call intra-media planning is essential but there’s an issue that is a lot more consequential than what we put in some dictionary of terms.

And that issue is: clients won’t pay for intra-media planning. Why should they? The balance between OOH contractor A and contractor B is something the agency does as a matter of course. They can’t buy space (in this case) without doing it.

Agencies have since the dawn of time worried about how to increase their revenues. I remember the old commission versus fee debates; and the jealous glances cast in the direction of management consultancies.

Regardless of what is on social media, this is not a new problem.

The Cog Blog has commented many times over the last 12 years on the various smart, devious, open, hidden ways agencies have tried to extract more from their clients; or as the agencies (and I) would prefer it – how to get paid fairly for the value they bring.

Increasing revenues from clients falls into the too difficult bucket for many, who prefer the easier route of looking to vendors. This is neither wise nor any kind of long-term strategy for success.

Agencies of all hues spend their lives advising clients on what they should do. ‘Listen to your customers; make sure you satisfy a customer need’.

Five years ago in a post considering lessons from the 2020 recession I wrote:
“We are very quick to offer advice to others but, like the cobbler whose children went without shoes we are less good when it comes to our own industry”.

We all know clients need help. Furthermore, ‘planning’ as I mean it, is immensely valuable to clients.

How to justify and build my budget? How to split the budget? What % to advertising, what to events / PR / sponsorships? Within advertising, what to video, what to audio, what to online? Within online what to Meta, etc. And on.

The last part of those questions is classic agency-land; the first part isn’t. The middle bit? Sort-of, depends on who you believe.

And yet it’s the first part that’s the most valuable, the most needed, and also where the greatest opportunity lies.

Marketing budgets are by definition larger than ad budgets; offering services that move upstream from advertising can if done well unlock new sources of revenue.

It’s essential in explaining effect. Which channel delivers the greatest effect is an important and actionable output from modelling; what happens downstream, within a channel is less easily explained in any manner that can be acted upon.

It’s the difference between strategy and tactics; between upstream and downstream; between big picture and points of detail.

These are all comms issues; how to use different channels to communicate. There’s a whole separate stream of expertise built around what used to be called account planning; what to say on these channels and how to say it. The two streams are interwoven, like two strands of rope combining to make the rope stronger.

This may all sound a bit esoteric, but it isn’t.

Clients won’t pay extra for planning, so runs the perceived wisdom. No, they won’t nor should they if ‘planning’ means deciding between YouTube and TikTok.

But if ‘planning’ means building and justifying a budget, dividing up what can be done by advertising, and what by some other means of communicating a message, then working hand-in-glove with creative teams to ensure a perfect fit between medium and message, two factors come into play.

First, you’re more likely to deliver success. Second, you’ll be providing value worth paying for.

Planning is the key to rebuilding the trusted relationship between the agency as partner and the client.

Fake news is (according to Wikipedia) ‘false or misleading information … often (with) the aim of making money through advertising revenue’.

YouTube is (again, according to Wikipedia) ‘a social media and online video sharing platform’.

TV is a source of entertainment in large part funded by advertising. TV advertising has been described as the most powerful form of advertising so far invented. As such it attracts large budgets.

Last week a couple of interested and, you must understand entirely unrelated events occurred.

In no particular order, BARB released data collected from its service on viewing to YouTube. Justin Lebbon’s piece on The Media Leader is a useful summary. Two important findings are that the Top 200 YouTube channels account for 0.3% of total viewing; and that the key demographic driving YouTube viewing on TV sets is very young children.

The second event, naturally unrelated to the first one, is that YouTube cancelled its BARB subscription, although this does not mean that BARB will stop reporting on viewing to YouTube.

As background mood music we have YouTube’s CEO, Neil Mahon declaring in Cannes that his platform is ‘the future of TV’ and delivers on average over 200 billion views each day. If the world’s population is 8 billion, that means everyone on the planet views 25 YouTube short videos every day.

In parenthesis, YouTube has also (rather quietly) changed the definition of a ‘view’ to cover every time a video appears on screen, whether it’s actually, well, viewed or not.

In his ‘Media Leader’ piece (TML is doing a good job consolidating its position as the must-read channel for media opinion), Omar Oakes makes the point that this is equivalent to his being exposed to an OOH site in Piccadilly Circus for so-many minutes as he was technically within 50 meters of the site, even if he was on the Piccadilly tube line stopping at Piccadilly Circus station at the time.

What must advertisers make of these shenanigans? Let’s recap.

1. YouTube is ‘viewed’ 200 bn times a day; 25 views per day for everyone on the planet.

Take-out: YouTube is very big, easiest the biggest ‘TV’ channel.

• YouTube accounts for 0.3% of viewing on TV sets in the UK.

Take-out: YouTube as a TV channel is insignificant

• YouTube doesn’t want to support independent, industry-accepted measurement of TV viewing, presumably because the industry’s numbers disagree with its particular world view.

Take-out: YouTube doesn’t like to be questioned.

Now, I’m not as green as I’m cabbage-looking. I know perfectly well that YouTube, as measured by BARB is nothing like the totality of the channel.

I also know that most viewing on YouTube is on screens other than static TV screens.

I use YouTube myself, as I’m sure do you. I also think (as do the other 8 billion on the planet, and I know because … I just do) the way they display ads sucks.

My unique take-out (unique because I’m writing on social media and I’m the only person ever to have had the thought) is that YouTube is a wonderful social media platform. It’s not TV and pretending it is is silly.

My next unique take-out is that advertisers are a) not idiots and b) don’t have time to dissect the issues surrounding audience measurement as it relates to YouTube.

My final unique take-out is that as we are not idiots we are able to distinguish between something that’s TV and something that isn’t. Not being TV doesn’t make you somehow worthless as an advertising medium; in fact, not being TV allows you to come up with a measurement approach appropriate to your particular strengths as a medium.

To avoid the Victor Meldrew trap it’s an idea to come up with an approach that is sensible, is shared with, endorsed by and is acceptable to buyers. And above all is believable.

Pretending to be something you’re not has consequences, you join a club with certain rules, one of which concerns measurement.

Shouting about 200 billion views is noise. Fake news; fake numbers.

The answer, believe it or not lies in more talking, but talking honestly, openly and with a purpose other than selling something.

The second Advertising: Who Cares? (AWC) event, takes place at The Vue West End, Leicester Square all-day on October 16^th. Tickets from www.advertisingwhocares.org.

Yet another conference? There are many conferences sponsored by organisations who would rather not answer questions, or even better not be asked any in the first place. This isn’t one of those.

AWC is a voluntary movement, with 700 signed-up supporters. It costs nothing to join, and nobody is paid anything for the work they do. Any surplus goes either to charity or is ploughed into building a knowledge-sharing resource to benefit the industry. We have no sponsors, although we accept services from those kind enough to help. We’re beholden to nobody. We have nothing to sell; our aim is to discuss and debate how to improve the industry, and then to put ideas into action.

Nick Manning and I started the Who Cares movement in 2024 on the back of shared concerns:

• The advertising business is in a mess.
• The business model is no longer fit for purpose. Everything flows from this.
• Advertising as a career doesn’t hold the same attraction for today’s graduates as it once did.
• There is plenty of money – advertising is now a global US$1Trillion business – but huge amounts are wasted driving impressions to non-humans.
• The production line from an ad’s creation to its appearance is too long, too complicated, too divorced from any campaign’s core aims, and siphons off far too much money,.
• Measurement of audiences, once a model of collaboration has been weaponised, leading to confusion and poor decision making.
• Craft skills that build on technology risk being subsumed by the technology; the servant is becoming the master.
• We have a multi-faceted trust problem. Trust between agencies and clients; trust amongst consumers.
• Too many ads are low quality, disliked or ignored.
• If the industry worked better, the ads would improve.
• Better ads deliver better results.
• A happy industry is a productive industry.

We want to encourage as wide a debate as possible around the issues we face and together find solutions to them.

This is easier said than done. Many of those closest to the industry’s problems would really far rather not talk about them. Admitting that the status quo isn’t working is hard. Too many are too vested in continuity.

Everything is connected to everything else; tackling an issue is like grasping a jelly; just when you think you’re getting somewhere the problem shifts elsewhere.

If agencies aren’t paid properly for the value they bring to their client’s business, they’ll chase revenue elsewhere. The twin victims are transparency and trust.

If the true value of advertising is hard to measure and quantify then the temptation is to measure something easy – like impressions.

If you don’t like the rules of measurement, that, for example define an impression, then change the rules. Obfuscate; confuse. The victim is clarity.

If, despite all the evidence, you believe that ‘gross impressions’ is a useful metric then it follows that the more of them you can get the better, regardless of where you find them. Advertising becomes commodified – the principle is Jack Cohen’s: ‘stack it high and sell it cheap’. The victim is original, quality content.

If we rely more and more on smart technology; the temptation is to hire cheaper people and train them less. All leading to less craft and more commodification. The victim is creativity.

Less creativity leads to samey, dull advertising. Work by Karen Nelson-Field and Adam Morgan (and others) demonstrates that dull advertising is expensive in the long run; it doesn’t work as well as the best advertising can. The victim is long-term brand value.

If advertising isn’t working as it should, the natural reaction is to blame someone. Working collaboratively is a more productive use of time than looking for a scapegoat. The victim is well-rounded ideas.

The AWC Summit will be about solutions. We have nine workstreams, each led by an acknowledged expert and ‘staffed’ by around 80 of our supporters, which will form the spine of the day. All by definition are people who care, from agencies, advertisers, vendors and our industry’s trade bodies.

We will build in time to listen, so if you care you should come along. By attending you’re helping improve the industry.

We won’t solve all the industry’s problems on October 16^th but we will point the way.

Plus you get lunch, if not golf.

It’s been a strange few weeks in what some of us still see fondly as ‘adland’.

Much of the strangeness involves WPP. I hesitate to suggest such a thing; there’s an ‘under-seige’ sense that seeps out from many LI posts from WPP-ers. Not every commentator is:

• Nothing but a disenchanted ex-employee
• A WPP-hater
• A holdco-hater
• Old and out-of-touch

Granted, in my case one of these is at least partly true.

Pushing on regardless, and in case you’ve been on Mars (sorry, poor choice of planet):

• WPP announced the end of GroupM and the launch of WPP Media. Unfortunately, this was leaked to a trade paper before those most directly affected were told, leading to considerable stress and worry.
• WPP has lost business
• WPP lost many senior media staff including the team that built what was MediaCom, the UK’s largest and over time most consistently successful agency.
• WPP lost its CEO who has announced he’s leaving with no successor named.

Let’s try hacking away at the weeds whilst aiming off for vested interests.

It’s almost as if WPP, and I would contend some of the other legacy holdcos too have left the ad business, in order to become suppliers of specialist services to the ad business.

One commentator, @Pesach Lattin, in his sermon suggesting Brian Lessor, of WPP Media should get the top job, even goes so far as to advise his champion to build an ‘adtech business pretending to be a holding company’.

I’m not sure why there’s any need to pretend, but he may have a point. The question is: is that wise? And, what is the ad business?

Here’s what Dave Morgan, of Simulmedia has to say about the current state of play:

“Unfortunately, too much of the ad industry fell in love with the means — automated, data-driven ad planning, buying and measurement — as tools for media trading, not as tools for great advertising.”

I agree with Dave.

There’s a gulf that’s developed between on the one hand those who write the briefs for those who then craft the ads; and on the other those who create the tools that lead in theory to better briefs and, down the road a measurement of success.

We mistake the tools as a means to an end in themselves, as opposed to a set of, well, tools to do a job. Meantime, we’re at risk of forgetting what the job is.

To return to WPP, to be fair I have never seen a presentation on WPP Media; although I have seen videos and read posts from some involved.

It’s hard not to be impressed. Combining datasets is terrifyingly difficult, and politically next-to impossible. But they’ve done it, or so it appears.

The front-end, AI-driven planning system has similarities in its base thinking to the Carat Sphere tool from the 1990’s combined with a technology several generations along. Sphere was similarly brilliant, but it didn’t last for many reasons, including internal politics, a lack of continuous training of those using as opposed to those building, and absorbing the new tools into day-to-day business. In short, reality got in the way.

And that brings us to the ‘C’ word – clients.

Agencies build services to win and keep clients. Granted I don’t spend as much time with clients as I used to, but I think it still likely that the one thing clients crave above all from their agencies is results, and that what delivers results according to those far clever than me is creativity.

Brilliant tech is of course in a sense creative, but brilliant or not, it’s not an end in itself. You still need ideas.

What I see and read about WPP is the brilliant tech without the creativity. Closing JWT and Y&R and coming close to doing the same at Ogilvy does not send a sign that this is a business that interested in great ads.

Look at the noise around WPP. It’s all about ‘media’, ‘AI’, ‘technology’. Look at who’s speaking up for the organisation, the technocrats.

I don’t see or hear much from WPP creatives. Unless it’s about them leaving to go elsewhere.

Others do it differently, combining media in every sense, including technology and research with creative output. VCCP is one beacon of this approach – they’re not alone.

Clients come in all shapes and sizes, and nobody doubts that huge complex advertisers need huge complex solutions. The old MediaCom had an uncanny ability to handle the huge and the tiny in one shop, and do great work for both often going above and beyond ‘media’ thinking. That’s a trick worth learning.

Great tech is just that. I get that having it in close to great strategies and great creative execution is in theory a good idea, but culturally I’m not convinced it works.

The stresses and strains inherent within any publicly quoted business often conflicts with serving client needs through great advertising.

Has WPP left the building? Quite possibly, but the new building may suit their cause as a publicly quoted business better.

His conclusion: advertising designed to build and sustain brands does not work on social media. The SM sell at the time was all about building one-on-one relationships between consumers and brands; as Bob Hoffman was to comment no-one’s terribly interested to chat to a detergent.

It is 2024. Thinkbox, alongside Ebiquity, Essencemediacom, Gain Theory, Mindshare and Wavemaker release Profit Ability 2. 18 of the sharpest minds in media are listed as contributors (this excludes those at Thinkbox).

In their Executive Summary the authors write: ‘short-termism short changes brands’. It seems reasonable to conclude that they see ads on social media as promoting short-termism.

It is 2025. Peter Field, one of our greatest experts in understanding how advertising works, writes an article for ThinkTV in New Zealand: ‘To drive growth we must strengthen the brand’, and (quoting Karen Nelson-Field’s Amplified), ‘the value of an ad that is viewed for 10 seconds is around 8 times greater than one viewed for just 5 seconds’.

A few weeks later, at Media360 Field presents research for Newsworks that calls out ‘the madness of brands moving ad money to social media from newsbrands’.

We seem on fairly secure ground to conclude that TV and other more ‘traditional’ media forms work better in brand building than social media.

Now for the gainsayers.

All the evidence that TV works comes from those funded by the TV companies. Same for newsbrands.

And where does the evidence that (to pick on one at random) Facebook advertising works come from? How much independent validation and verification is there around any data produced by the social media platforms?

Look back a few paragraphs. Thinkbox’s work is co-authored by 18 experts. Are they being held hostage somewhere?

Much of Peter Field’s work is informed by analysis of IPA cases. Can Peter be bought off by sponsors? It seems unlikely.

Moving along the line of gainsayers, if a medium doesn’t work it’s the fault of the creatives’ use of it, all we do is provide the audience.

What audience? Where do social media audience numbers come from? Who validates them? Who examines them? What if they aren’t true? What about the time FB claimed to reach more of a demographic than there are actually people within that demographic?

What about fraud?

What about definitions – half a screen for 2 seconds equals an exposure. Really? What about Amplified’s findings? Shouldn’t we take account of effective, or attentive exposure, not some random 2-second number dreamt up by the social media platforms to suit the fleeting way that most use their channels?

The last Cog Blog listed some of the contradictions in our thinking about advertising, including that adspend doesn’t correlate with what we know works.

The point of this post is to highlight how much we’ve learnt over time and forgotten.

There is a lack of institutional memory in this business.

It is not a matter of everything moving so fast that past learnings are irrelevant. This is about not knowing how to do the job.

Yes, core principles need to be reviewed within the context of today, but whenever that happens the thought occurs that maybe David Ogilvy, Bill Bernbach and Simon Broadbent knew instinctively what they were doing.

Last year’s Profitability 2, like Amplified’s work, and much more, likely won’t reach the parts other studies cannot reach (old taglines need all the help they can get). Yet they should be foundational texts, required reading for everyone.

In 2014 I was a judge of the early stages of the IPA Ad Effectiveness Awards.

The winner in ‘my year’ was Fosters with their beach hut campaign, ‘Good Call’.

The case study of the entry toured. I went to an IPA session for students featuring the agency, Adam and Eve, the brand team, the data, the story. Hugely impressive.

A few months later Fosters junked the campaign.

Four years later they brought it back.

It would be interesting to evaluate the cost of the decision to junk and re-introduce the campaign.

Just last week VCCP’s Will Parrish, with Amplified’s Karen Nelson-Field presented some fascinating research called ‘Hacking the Attention Economy’.

One stand-out conclusion: if you’re skilled enough to have developed a distinctive brand asset (DBA) you don’t need as much attention to maintain it as you would if ‘all’ you had was an average ad.

DBA’s are valuable assets; they save you money.

VCCP are good at this – CompareTheMarket and Meerkats, O2, Cadbury and purple come to mind. And as an agency with an in-house media function they make the point that ignoring DBA’s in planning (much more likely if creative and media work separately from each other) is inefficient.

Smart marketers and their Boardroom colleagues know when they have a winner, they don’t chop and change, and they reap the benefit.

Most of us don’t learn; and it costs us. Not a good call.

There are good reasons for adopting this ungainly position.

For decades we’ve been told how unimportant and insignificant we really are. Marketers spend a tiny proportion of their time worrying about advertising; and a small fraction of that tiny proportion on anything to do with media. So runs the stated wisdom.

This is either nonsense – in my long experience most clients worry, a lot – or it should be.

Not being concerned about where multiple millions of dollars are spent would surely be a gross dereliction of duty to any business and its stakeholders.

Agencies are professional advisors; we exist to help clients get the best results for their money, to spend those dollars wisely. Yet how we act isn’t always in line with this.

For example:

• There is solid evidence that for those whose primary concern is to build or maintain brands, advertising on television is peerless, delivering the high attention needed to build brand stories.
• And yet brand marketers keep spending huge sums on lower attention, social media channels.
• There is solid evidence that where you advertise matters. Which is why every agency worth the name hires skilled strategists, comms planners, analysts etc.
• And yet some agencies buy media as principals, seemingly regardless of whether what they’re buying delivers the carefully built plan.
• The online ad industry has spawned a criminal enterprise under the generic title of ad fraud.
• And yet we keep pretending we are cutting out fraud – even if it mysteriously keeps growing. It’s almost as if we don’t really want to look too closely.
• Advertising can play a huge role in driving brand growth – and there are volumes of data and case studies to prove it. Clients want growing, successful brands that build and improve their margins.
• And yet we spend our time being judged not on the growth we deliver but on the cheapness of what we’ve bought.
• Advertisers hire procurement professionals whose job is to procure what’s best for the business at the lowest available price. They hire consultants whose job is to assess the value the agency brings to the business.
• And yet we blame these people for not judging us against the ‘right’ criteria. Without telling them consistently, and comprehensively how they should be measuring us, and on what basis they should value us.
• This business is full of bright, creative people. People wired to think differently, persuasively. People who can convince Cadbury that the best way to sell chocolate is to stick a guy in a gorilla suit behind a set of drums without once mentioning the words ‘chocolate’ or ‘Cadbury’.  (Other great examples are available).
• And yet we give credence to those who apparently want to destroy any semblance of craft in advertising. Listen to Mark Zuckerberg on how he intends to do away with the need for any form of ad agency. Or the owner of X threatening to sue advertisers for not using his platform.
• How do we react? We take their money sponsoring our conferences and put them on the biggest stages to be interviewed (ever so gently) by our top leaders.
• We have spent decades building up thoughtful measurement systems through collaboration and compromise.
• And yet we are prepared to believe what suits the largest vendors without question and without any hint of criticism. Indeed, we build what suits them into our thinking, with scant regard as to whether it fits with what we know.

We are in a crisis in large part of our own making.

This crisis is what prompted Nick Manning and me to start Advertising: Who Cares? just over a year ago.

We see the industry as a whole in a hole. Not one hole that could easily be fixed but a whole warren of interconnected holes.

The problem with warrens is that they weaken what’s above them. They may be nice and warm and safe until the structures above them crash through.

This has nothing to do with harking back to some golden age or wishing for a long-gone era.

It has all to do with an existential threat.

If we continue to fail to convince our clients that what we do is worth paying for, if we spend disproportionately in channels that don’t work, and if we encourage those whose criteria for success are self-defined and out of reach of any validation, we deserve what’s coming.

We should challenge more, starting by talking about these issues. We need to do a far better job bringing all the evidence, dispassionately and objectively to the attention of advertisers, their marketing teams, their CFOs and their Boards.

This is what Advertising: Who Cares? is trying to encourage, and it seems to be happening, slowly.

By attending our summit and putting your point-of-view on October 16^th in London you can help us all do our bit to make things better.

Seriously.

For as long as I can remember the UK and US advertising industries have run on parallel but distinctly different paths.

The UK industry has always considered itself strong at strategic thinking, at basing creative ideas and media placements on what influences how consumers think, and at measurement that goes beyond headcounts.

The US has always been great at selling; there is none of the snobbery apparent in the UK about being a salesman, no suggestion that marketing is somehow a more thoughtful pursuit than getting out there and selling stuff.

We all want to sell stuff; one approach does so by defining who’s likely to buy and then by understanding what makes them buy. The other does so by assuming that the louder you shout to the maximum number of people the more you’re likely to sell.

One assumes that advertising works best when all variables, like creative message, context, timing, audience align and goes to great lengths to understand what is required to shorten the odds in your favour. The other assumes advertising will work as long as it is seen often enough by as many people as possible.

There’s no right and wrong in this. Different strokes for different folks. And there were ‘different folks’; when global media meant doing deals in multiple editions of ‘The Readers Digest’ the industry celebrated national differences.

Now we have global platforms, offering global solutions. Virtually all are US-based and so solutions naturally emerge from seeing the world through a US-lens.

Differences emerge when we start to deconstruct what is meant by ‘seen’, ‘often enough’ and ‘people’.

The likes of Google and Meta realised early and have exploited brilliantly the reality that he who controls measurement controls revenue.

If you own the platform why would you agree to let anyone from outside your organisation have any control over the measurement levers?

Who needs collaboration when you can have solus control?

But something is going wrong. There is a mass of evidence that advertising on vehicles apparently delivering the biggest audience numbers don’t work as well as ads on those with smaller audiences but more impactful environments.

Maybe people don’t like being bombarded with messages that interrupt, and which are all too often entirely irrelevant.

If the volume audience game doesn’t deliver results, then how long before advertisers start to question its veracity? There is anecdotal evidence that such a thing may be starting to happen.

Meantime, an interesting exercise is to explain to anyone outside our bubble that an ad is said to have been seen if half of it appears on a screen for 2-seconds. Once the laughter dies down you can explain that yes, the world’s biggest consumer goods organisations really do spend billions of dollars on that basis.

Recently I had a client explain to me, very patiently that ‘yes Facebook advertising works for us; we know because Facebook tell us.’ That may not wash for long if sales revenues say something different.

It also must be hard to explain internally that yes, ad fraud now accounts for (let’s be conservative) tens of billions of dollars a year and that no it seems our buyers, amongst the biggest anywhere are doing so little to stop it that this estimated figure appears to increase every year.

Why would a procurement specialist not be concerned at the huge sums being spent advertising to bots? After all, bots don’t buy anything.

To return to the theme, we have got so used to bigger audience numbers equalling better outcomes that we are unprepared to consider any advance that just might result in smaller gross numbers.

Even if smaller numbers are closer to the truth.

Even if smaller numbers are demonstrably connected to better returns for the advertiser.

We need to snap out of this obsession, and quickly.

Do we see an industry within which ads, in all channels revert to a norm, and creativity, including in media choice makes no difference?

Or are we going to stand up for individuality and creativity?

The former is shortsighted, based on an ironic obsession with short-term margins over long-term prosperity. Yet it does seem to be the policy of many of the largest holdcos – the very people who should be our flagbearers.

The trouble is this is a short road to nowhere, as a glance down memory lane shows.

Jeremy Bullmore was right. ‘People build brands as birds build nests, from scraps and straws we chance upon’.

Scraps and straws come in all shapes and sizes. A purpose-built nest with them is likely to last longer than one without them.

But who needs a nest that lasts? Let’s just build a production line churning out identikit, cheaper nests and move on.

As they put their portfolios together a few decades ago, the holdcos saw ‘media buying’ as an arcane specialism ignored and not understood by most clients, full of numbers, and attractive to those believing everything could, and should be quantified.

Far easier to deal with hard metrics, however spurious, than trying to put numbers on feelings, emotions, creativity.

Today the talk is of these holdcos reinventing themselves for the AI age, as media and / or data businesses. Including reselling technology and media to clients, who, once upon a time, hired them to act objectively and in their best interests. Clients who now find themselves unable to question via audit or compliance everything they’re being sold.

The industry faces an existential threat if it goes down the path decreed by the biggest. The holdcos range of sellable expertise is shrinking and has a fast-approaching sell-by date.

Smaller, nimbler players are outdoing them creatively, comms planning specialists are thriving by selling objectivity across all channels, independent media agencies are winning by offering objectivity in planning delivered through transparent buying.

It must be depressing to sit in a holdco agency, doing amazing work on how media channels work only to hear your CEO commit your agencies to spending on social media channels you have just spent months demonstrating aren’t optimal. Whatever happened to client needs?

Furthermore, the competitive set is expanding. Clients are doing more in-house; the largest vendors are offering creative, production and analytic services and are increasingly disintermediating even the largest agencies.

It’s hard to see what the giant vendors get from collaborating with the holdcos beyond the medium term.

For now it seems that many see their best hope as industrialised ad production and media buying for the incurious and the unwary (there’s a lot of them). Buys increasingly untouched by human hand, executed by machine. Buys offered up by the agency acting as principal. Some would argue that’s unethical; ethical or not it’s not a long-term strategy for success.

In 1891 a group of advertisers met to discuss the burgeoning business of advertising. They set out certain principles: ‘The advertising agents were unfriendly, if not definitely hostile … many of them, including some of the biggest held the sole agency for the sale of advertising space in one or more well-known publications and since … they depended on the commissions they earned on the space they bought or sold they, naturally, sided with those who paid them. The advertiser, like any other buyer … had the right to know how many copies were sold of the newspapers and magazines in which they advertised. Facts and figures were what they wanted, not the fables and fantasies to which they were accustomed.’ (Source: ISBA)

The result of this meeting was the advertisers getting together to form ISBA; and advertising agencies as they were then evolving their creative and thinking capabilities.

Today, the ad business is fragmenting. We have creative agencies who are stretching what ‘advertising’ means.

We have the adtech and platforms who are in the data business.

And we have many of the largest holdcos, increasingly funded by vendors whilst paying lip-service to their clients; clients who, don’t let’s forget pay for everything.

They’re the ninety-oners, recreating a model that failed 134 years ago. And then again in France 32 years ago. In both cases the agencies focused on themselves, and the short-term, not their clients’ real business issues, or on building long-term partnerships.

The ad business exists to serve clients; to offer the best, objective advice; to make brands famous; to balance the long-term with the short-term; to advance thinking by understanding what works; to engage with and delight consumers with interesting, relevant work; to fund quality media channels; to provide employment with enjoyment to brilliant people.

Advertising remains a powerful weapon in building brands and businesses; it seems advertisers increasingly don’t need the current large agencies to do it for them.

Whatever business the ninety-oners are in, it’s not the ad business.

But where we are now feels different, certainly as far as the media agencies are concerned. Putting individual companies aside, and making the case as objectively and dispassionately as possible:

• The largest media agencies have long promoted their strategic and planning capabilities – with good reason. By so doing they have sought to position themselves as competing in the same high-margin space as the management consultancies. This ambition seems no more.
• At the same time, they’ve become in effect sales agents for the large platforms and the adtech businesses – being paid by them under all sorts of labels (including consultancy, training and in one case apparently selling space for promotional posters on the agency’s office walls).
• And they’ve developed their high-margin, low risk principal-based buying practices – seen it seems by some of their CEOs as central to the case for a giant merger.

These are incompatible aims.

The first one relies on an investment in time and resource, the growing and nurturing of a group of skilled practitioners who are aware of and absorb the latest research and thinking around how media works and as such are of potentially great value to clients’ businesses. It relies on objectivity.

The second and third rely on putting the agency’s interests first, whilst seeking to convince clients otherwise, using the argument that what matters is buying the most basic set of media metrics at the cheapest rate, regardless of any other evidence. This ‘once in a lifetime’ offer is available only if the client foregoes any right to audit or third-party investigation.

In trying to square a circle the largest agencies have managed to lose the trust of their clients; cause embarrassment amongst some of their most skilful strategic thinkers; and I would argue bring the ad business into disrepute.

There is an irony in this obsession with short-term financials (which is what drives this – without their media arms the holdcos are deep in the mire) given all the evidence produced by many of the very same organisations on the value of long-term brand building.

It’s time to take a breath and reset.

When media agencies first emerged from the old full-service model, they were buyers. That’s what they did; that’s what they were called (still are by many clients).

Planning and strategy stayed within the creative agencies.

It was essential to ensure that what was planned was bought. It made no sense to separate the planning from execution and sure enough it changed.

But what if the plans and the buys aren’t linked? What if the agency plans one thing, to suit its clients needs and then buys something else to meet its own commitments?

That is what happens now in far too many cases. It was at the heart of the case made by Jon Mandel to the ANA in 2016; it’s still the case.

It was the basic principle that fuelled the Japanese media industry for years. The biggest agencies acted as both buyer and seller; plans were more a post-rationalisation, measurement atrophied, based on gross impressions.

Sound in any way familiar?

Then Nielsen introduced people meter audience data into the Japanese market, bringing target audience ratings (TARPs) to a market previously limited to gross ratings (GRPs).

Suddenly plans based on target audiences became a thing. A planning agency, called Strategic Planners International, or SPI emerged.

SPI started using the targeted data to audit actual delivery against plans.

In due course SPI started doing the planning themselves for clients, with the buying remaining with the giants. SPI audited the buys made against their plans.

We’ve come a long way from TARPs and GRPs but if plans and buys aren’t linked, why do they need to be done in the same house?

A specialist comms planning agency could be hired by a client for the quality of its thinking and expertise. The planning agency doesn’t buy but it could be made responsible for its plans being executed. The client relationship is with the planning team; the buying team is accountable to the planners who are held to account by the client.

Like most models this will appeal to some clients more than others. For some a relationship with a media agency that plans and then buys what it plans, openly and transparently would make more sense.

Also like most models this needs scrutiny, detail and constructive criticism. Perhaps this post can start that discussion.

When something isn’t working, we shouldn’t be afraid to break things apart before putting them back together.

As to SPI, the business was bought by Aegis (way before Aegis itself sold to Dentsu), merged, then demerged, was subject to a management buy-out and most recently has been sold again (in 2023) – to Deloittes.

It’s Founder, Kim Walker created and now Chairs Aprais, a business that ‘works to build stronger business relationships’.

If a week is a long time in politics, and a day is an age in the wacky world of online media, I’m not sure what 266 years and a week is. On the 20^th January 1759 Dr Samuel Johnson published an article in the 40^th Edition of The Idler (insert your own joke here as to the modern equivalent of The Idler; maybe it’s the WPP Work-from-Home Manual). In it he said:

“Whatever is common is despised. Advertisements are now so numerous that they are very negligently perused, and it is therefore become necessary to gain attention by magnificence of promises, and by eloquence sometimes sublime and sometimes pathetick.” 

We have always known that some ads work better than others, and that for ads to work at all there has to be not only an opportunity for them to be seen, but for them actually to be noticed.

Even I do not personally remember Dr Johnson, but I do remember a study done by the agency I was working at in the 1980’s, Leo Burnett, whose legendary Media and Research Director, Dr Simon Broadbent took himself off to individuals’ homes and spent a few evenings sitting in their living rooms watching family members watching television.

Even back then, in a simpler time, before the invention and emergence of online media forms, it was obvious that different TV shows attracted different levels of attention, so did different editorial contexts in print media. But the obsession with opportunities to see, the biggest possible gross numbers and the lowest cost-per-thousands meant that Simon felt it necessary to put a more considered, nuanced view to our clients.

No creative sets out to bore the audience into ignoring his or her work, whilst in media the best of us have tried to plan with attention levels in mind ever since we first learned what an audience was.

Media vendors conducted studies – into how TV attention levels fluctuate between programmes and within ad breaks within programmes; into how ads on inside covers are noticed more than those appearing on pages within the magazine. But these were about justifying higher prices for premium positions, as opposed to any genuine wish to understand consumer behaviour, and to use that understanding to feed into the content the agency created.

Unfortunately, the complexities of the media market, where a video on one channel is simply not viewed in the same way as a video on another – despite them both being ‘videos’ – has coincided with a deepening of the division between media and creative practitioners.

This in turn has led to a desire for over-simplification, for an obsession with lowest common-denominator numbers even when even such basic data is subject to misuse, misunderstanding and mis-definition.

We need to take a breath and remind ourselves what exactly it is we’re trying to do.

We are trying to place a piece of commercial communication in front of the right people in such a manner as to increase the chances of it being noticed.

Every commercial communication is different, every channel is different, every audience is different.

An individual watching TikTok watches content on it differently from the way he or she watches YouTube, Netflix or broadcast TV.

And that individual’s behaviour is different from his neighbour’s.

We’re playing three-dimensional chess, with audience, channel and creative variables and with each and every combination producing different outcomes.

Fortunately, these days we don’t have to rely on an ad legend sitting in peoples’ homes. We have access to massive amounts of data and decades of expertise. Simon would have loved it.

There are though no easy answers. There are patterns and similarities but there are also exceptions, which is where competitive advantage lies.

Headline averages can only take you so far; they’re a guide, a benchmark to aim to beat.

Better to treat every campaign plan as unique, to consider all channels as different, and plan how and where you first create and then deploy your communication assets accordingly.

Your advertising will improve, and it will be noticed.

It will trend towards ‘the sublime’ and away from ‘the pathetick’.

So what?

On the one hand, a rebrand shouldn’t surprise anyone. Brands, even companies come and go, they’re acquired, they merge, they change shape. Life goes on, companies and brands don’t exist in a vacuum, inured from the elements around them.

On the other hand, the disappearance of an agency brand reminds the ad world that nothing lasts for ever. We have moved from risk-takers to moneymakers; from craftsmen to machine operators; and, yes, from madmen to mathmen.

This does not always end well.

J Walter Thompson, David Ogilvy, Bill Bernbach, Raymond Rubicam, Leo Burnett were all proud of their work, they literally put their name on it.

We still have John Bartle, John Hegarty, Maurice and Charles Saatchi, Charles Vallance. But the number of people prepared to put their name above the door is increasingly small. Maybe it’s just not fashionable; maybe it’s a matter of anonymising responsibility.

I worked for Leo Burnett, the agency, not the man (he had long gone by then) for 14 years. It was a great place to work; I am forever in the debt of Mike Yershon who hired me and the late Simon Broadbent who took me under his wing.

Burnett was an agency with a strong sense of itself. Every office throughout the world had a bowl of apples on the reception desk – a throwback to a remark in one of the Chicago papers when Mr Burnett founded his agency in the 1930’s and offered an apple to any prospective client who visited. ‘Mr Burnett will soon be selling his apples on a street corner’ read the piece.

I don’t know if the agency still does that – I suspect the apples have long gone the way of a procurement driven cost-saving programme, but I would be delighted to be proved wrong.

New recruits were given a book of Leo-isms to read and a video of the man himself.

Certainly, you could accuse some of forever looking over their shoulder at Leo, but this was an agency with a heritage built around a set of principles to which it stuck like glue. It knew what it was.

Principles live on. They survive different ages, different circumstances

It’s unusual to have the chance to listen to the guy who set the agency’s principles enunciate the agency’s principles. That’s what Leo Burnett did in a 1967 speech entitled: ‘When to take my name off the door’.

It’s here: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=htAMJSX8S54

Less than 10 minutes long, a bit shaky but a rare opportunity to listen to a legendary ad man.

More than that, a chance to recall Bill Bernbach’s words: “A principle is not a principle until it costs you money”.

Mr Burnett’s agency has long gone. Now his name is off the door too.

“Don’t worry media. We need ya.”

The history of media agencies began with an arrogant lack of interest in the media process by those leading full-service agencies, mainly account handlers who considered (with some justification) that their clients couldn’t care less about the boring detail on how their media money was spent.

Today we have an industry unrecognisable from those days, shaped in large part by technology and the social media platforms constructed with it.

There is another rarely commented-on change from back then.

In the last century the UK punched above its weight when it came to advertising thought leadership and creative excellence. Account planning started here, promoting advertising effectiveness started here, collaborative audience measurement via the JIC system started here.

The discipline of media planning may not have started in the UK (depends on what you mean by the term) but it was certainly further advanced here than in most other major advertising economies.

The way we have ‘done’ media in the UK has changed from being all about the buys (the original media agencies were and, in many cases, still are referred to as media buying agencies) to add strategic thinking, communications planning, effectiveness measurement and so on. Certainly, we can argue whether all of these are well-done, or whether recent buying initiatives have denuded planning but there’s no doubting the innovation, the progression, the desire to understand more and to do better.

But now we, like everyone else are bit-part players in an industry shaped by the US platforms. How come?

In the US, by observation (full disclosure: my time spent actually working full-time in the USA was limited and a long time ago) media has been about the buys. The numbers. The bigger the better, the cheaper the better.

It’s the land of the gross impressions. Any light and shade is tolerated only if the gross numbers are unaffected, or if they go up.

Anecdotes are dangerous but in 1993 it was common practice in the largest media department in the US to add TV GRP’s to print and radio GRPs, unweighted, to arrive at a huge gross number. When this was questioned the answer was: ‘that’s how the client likes it. The bigger the better’.

Rarely has a lack of interest and understanding had such disastrous unintended consequences.

It’s worth remembering that the US is the only major ad market still trading on programme ratings as opposed to audience numbers based on those exposed to commercials. After all, audience numbers may fall during breaks.

I know I’m generalising and exaggerating, that there are attention measurers doing good work in the US, that there is a move towards what’s referred to (erroneously) as ‘alternative currencies’ and that the nature of media quality is being discussed a great deal more than it used to, but it’s all a bit ‘on the fringes’.

The focus on the biggest numbers plays perfectly into the hands of the social media platforms.

Their enormous success means they make the media weather. For all of us, globally. They not only rule on what we see, but they also decide what’s measured, what data is released, what constitutes an impression, what can be said to have worked. They set the rules, globally.

They have played the audience measurement community – who in any sane world really thinks that a 2 second exposure constitutes a meaningful view? Yet we accept their definitions of ‘impressions’ and ‘reach’.

The media agencies, once objective representatives of their clients’ best interests, as well as being in their own right important thought leaders and drivers of progress are now in thrall to the platforms. If they or their clients don’t like what appears, what’s hidden, even what constitutes ‘truth’, tough.

Never mind the quality; the platforms deliver huge numbers, who cares whether they’re accurate, or if the audience is human, let alone noticing anything on screen. Who cares if the ads that appear attract attention, or if they work?

The numbers are big, the CPMs are cheap. Validation and verification is for geeks; and no-one listens to geeks.

Until they do.

What we’re seeing is the inevitable consequence of how the US media industry has always worked. Planning, in the strategic sense as opposed to any post-rationalisation is and always has been rare to non-existent. Total comms planning is to a large extent unheard of.  

But as happens we may be about to witness the consequences of over-reach.

Meta’s decision to do away with fact-checkers has not gone down well – at least outside the US. Musk’s behaviours towards and views on advertisers, let alone his political interferences have not gone un-noticed.

Meta and X need audiences, and they need advertisers. X is and always has been an unimportant ad vehicle for many; Meta is certainly important.

Zuckerberg and Musk assume ‘the audience’ will always be there and will grow. That it’s an amorphous mass that couldn’t care less about fact-checking and bile. This may be partly, even majority true but it is not 100% the case. Making up ‘audiences’ is not a long-term strategy.

Plus – advertisers with an eye on brand reputation can be fickle. Remember when we used to hear: ‘We must be on Facebook, everyone is, it’s the place to be and to be seen’?

That sentiment can change – very quickly.

Advertisers, we need ya.

The answer was ‘The Sun’.

And yet ‘The FT’ continued to attract the same advertisers as always, at a hefty CPM premium over ‘The Sun’.

Any media man worth his or her salt would have no problem explaining this. Context, editorial suitability, time spent with the publication and thus quite possibly the ad too are all sensible reasons.

Somehow the planners of the day managed to work this out and sell the concept of quality to their clients without the plethora of data and research available today.

It’s instructive to translate this example into the present, move the market from the UK to the USA, and change the participants from media planners to online adtech professionals, platform sales people or investors in media properties.

Bigger audience? Cheaper CPM? ‘The Sun’ would win every time.

This simple example is at the heart of my issue with so much poor media thinking today, when plans are subservient to the buys, where quality is a concept that seems to exist only on conference stages and in trade articles, and where those making the buys are the servants of data and technologies they rarely understand.

A world within which seeking the truth about how audiences behave comes a poor second to commercial considerations. Why else is the US the only major media market that trades on the audiences to TV shows, not commercial breaks?

Could it be because there’s an assumption that audiences go down in breaks? And if that is the case, shouldn’t the measurement and the currency reflect that?

It’s also why I dislike the notion of Principal Based Media, the practice promoted by every major holding company in analyst calls and in pitches (and yet, rather remarkably not exactly featured on their websites, in trade press interviews or from conference platforms).

PBM (another good old three-letter acronym) has been around for decades. It may be more sophisticated (read, convoluted) now but even in comparatively modern times (let’s not count the buying of newsprint-rationed press space in pubs before retrofitting clients to the space acquired), it was the model behind the enormous success of the original French Carat business. Back then the established agencies (now the holding companies) sneered at what they called The French Disease.

It took the French agency establishment (companies like Publicis, ironically) to scupper the Carat model via an amendment to a law designed to do something completely different and introduced by the then Government. Loi Sapin decimated Carat profits.

Today’s variation on the same theme boosts rather than decimates the profits of the largest agencies, at a time when non-media disciplines within the holdco organisations have lost their way and their margins.

I can see the attraction of PBM to advertisers for whom gross numbers deliver the best results, but these are very largely not the advertisers with the brands coveted by / served by the largest agencies.

These advertisers spend time trying to understand what works for them, and why. And for them, planning, quality and context count.

Buying cheap media and selling it on at an undisclosed margin takes the industry back decades. It leads to mistrust, and to a relationship based not on objective quality advice but on what’s best for the agency.

After all, if you have a garage-full of cheap tat to sell you’re going to do all you can to sell it, including (as Carat did) conducting cod research into why the tat is exactly what the client needs.

All of this dents trust. It forgets that agencies are there to serve all their clients by offering them (all of them) the best advice to meet their particular circumstances.

The ‘best advice’ also covers the most appropriate technology for the client’s needs. Who’s to say that ‘A’ does a better job than ‘B’ when there’s a chance that ‘A’ is being proposed because of some agency or holdco-wide deal.

It also plays perfectly into the disintermediation game played so well, for so long by the platforms. Why listen to biased advice from your agency when you can get equally biased, but at least transparently biased advice from me? And not pay for it.

What are agencies for if not to offer expert, objective advice to all their clients?

No wonder more and more advertisers are doing it for themselves. Most of them would back themselves to tell the difference between ‘The Financial Times’ and ‘The Sun’.

We feel that the obsession with short-term metrics, the lack of transparency in media trading, the lack of trust between advertiser and agency and the tremendous power wielded by the online platforms all contribute to a state of affairs that delivers ads that few like, and that often don’t work.

We bombard our audiences and don’t respect their privacy, time and attention. We serve up irrelevant, intrusive ads in profuse numbers.

Huge value is lost every day to ads that no one sees or hears and to pure fraud. A lot of money, time and effort is wasted on advertising that is simply invisible, or criminal.

Measurement is a muddle. Audience measurement, once non-controversial and based on gold-standard methodologies now uses the same words to mean different things. Effectiveness measures regularly conflate long-term brand-building with the short-term and immediate.

One consequence of all of this is that advertising has become a less attractive industry to work in, and to join.

Another consequence is that in obsessing over audience numbers we’ve set aside the connection between advertising investment and original, creative and effective paid-for media communications.

This connection serves a dual function. It helps fund a healthy, quality media eco-system that serves the public well. It also provides larger, more diverse audiences across a multiplicity of vehicles.

Currently, those media providing the highest quality content are losing ad revenue to platforms who create no content at all and where the ad environment is inferior.

Addressing this would direct money to well-resourced news reporting, where objectivity and truth are vital. It stops adspend funding mis- and dis-information.

We believe that advertising and the industry as a whole has a responsibility to add to people’s general well-being. It is not just there to provide advertisers with a competitive advantage.

In September we put on an event for those who care. It sold out, was well-received and has led to a lot of commentary, as well as podcast and conference appearances where the natural question was: ‘Now what?’

‘Now what?’ indeed. We’ve listened to all the comments, the positive and the (few) negative; we’ve consulted with our supporter base; we’ve spoken with the key contributors to the September event and we’re now ready to reveal the next stage in the Who Cares? journey.

One key lesson from the September event is that everything is connected. The cogs in the machine all work together.

From a set of outdated business models flows poor remuneration for agencies. From poor agency remuneration, agencies seek non-transparent revenue streams from suppliers including broadcasters/publishers. Revenues from suppliers lead to a lack of objectivity. A lack of objectivity leads to a lack of trust. A lack of trust inhibits anything daring or new and encourages the dull and the safe. Dull advertising is not attractive to consumers (if they even notice it). Media strategies based on an unthinking maximising of impressions means we bombard consumers with these unattractive messages. This is unpopular and leads to a diminution in the trust consumers feel for ads. Meantime, adspend flows to those media vehicles who rely on user-generated content, with a poor ad environment and, at the extreme, content which inflames societal turmoil.

Add it all up and you have campaigns that don’t work and are not worth paying for. Which leads us back to the business model issue.

This starts within advertisers themselves, and senior management who are often incentivised for share price growth rather than true business gains. If cuts are necessary to move the share price, advertisers inevitably seek unrealistic economies from their service providers.

Of course there are exceptions to this bleak picture, as awards ceremonies and effectiveness studies show, but the great examples we all applaud within the industry are the tip of the iceberg when it comes to what the public is subjected to, day-in, day-out.

We need to recognise, and then break this circle of ineffectiveness and inefficiency.

This has to start with the business models that have led us here. This includes the buy-side models of advertiser and agency behaviour and the sell-side models that dictate media vendor and adtech ways of working.

We have to be radically honest about how our industry really works if we are to start reconstructing it to be better. We have to redefine advertising’s role in today’s (and tomorrow’s) world.

We believe that advertising can play a significant role in shaping the future when it is responsible, intelligently designed, executed and is welcomed by its audiences.

We need to champion the principles of good, effective advertising that people value. We need to promote the great thinking and execution that leads to better advertising and a better industry for people today and tomorrow.

These principles have to be supported by evidence, case studies, data and research; in short, the facts that support the case for better advertising. We need to demonstrate that such principles lead to success with responsibility and then make the case frequently and consistently to advertisers at all levels but particularly CMO, CFO and CEO.

Much can flow from there, like accreditation systems and ISO-style standards.

Luckily, we don’t have to start from scratch. The trade bodies, the media marketing organisations, conferences, pressure groups, academics, professors, even trade titles all do good work, but what they do is inevitably driven either by single-issues or by vested interests. Sometimes these interests compromise the need for radical honesty about the business models that distort our industry.

There’s a lack of joined-up thinking, and much that is neither honest nor objective. This limits what can be achieved.

We have to identify the vested interest behind the ostensibly impartial.

Our ambitious aim is to pull together a central repository of evidence that sets out the principles of great advertising and its benefits – across every aspect of the industry, everywhere.  A ‘best practice’ guide that aims to offer practical advice, not just theory.

A set of evidence-based principles that exists without fear or favour and which acknowledges the business models that determine current behaviours.

We care about advertising and the advertising and media industries; we care about the symbiotic relationship between effective advertising and a healthy, pluralistic media eco-system

We think advertising should be properly and quantifiably valued. We want to rebalance the debate around the long-term benefits of craft and experience, across all disciplines.

We will be producing updates and articles / blog posts as we go; and will aim at a second event in Q4 2025.

Our aim is to provide reliable, lasting building blocks, to ensure that the buildings designed by practitioners are as good as they can be.

We will be publishing more details of the subject areas we intend to include, and who will be leading them shortly. Fortunately for us all the workstream leaders from our efforts so far have agreed to continue to help.

We are under no illusions about the scale of this task, and we know it will take a lot of effort from a lot of people who care. As Artificial Intelligence develops, there is a risk that the advertising industry succumbs to automation rather than uses it as a tool for the creation of effective and engaging advertising. We should aim to preserve an industry where human values come first.

‘Advertising: Who Cares?’ is a movement to help the advertising industry retain its economic and societal values into the future.

We are thrilled at how many people do care. We want to encourage as many people as possible, from every corner of the industry to join us. If you care, do please sign up, and suggest doing so to others too. It’s free and you can do it from our site: www.advertisingwhocares.org.

Onwards.

This all demonstrates a few things to me. Not least on the importance of encouraging free debate and discussion, something that rarely happens at sponsored conferences where speaker selection and sponsors are intertwined – but that’s for another post.

People do indeed care. As I’m writing this we have close to 450 supporters, worldwide.

Why do they care? Because we are in a mess and they feel that something has to be done. Lucy Jameson’s outstanding keynote played an ad for OVO Energy featuring the famous line from Howard Beale’s speech in ‘Network’: ‘I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore!’

Whose fault is it? This seems to me irrelevant. I have my views, others will have theirs but again to quote from Lucy (Arthur Miller’s Willy Loman in ‘Death of a Salesman’ this time): ‘I’m not interested in stories about the past or any crap of that kind because the woods are burning, you understand? There’s a big blaze going on all around’.

The question is what to do about it.

There were notable absences from our RSA launch event. We didn’t invite anyone, we just put the event out there and people bought tickets or they didn’t.

Amongst those who didn’t were the platforms. Or the streaming services. Or some of the largest holding companies (one or two did buy tickets, plus there are individuals from these organisations on our supporter list, but anonymously). There were few media owners.

There were advertisers, trade bodies, research businesses, consultants, independent creative and media agencies.

There are understandable reasons why those that didn’t come chose not to come.

One was: we can’t afford to upset A, or B, or C.

But why not? If the aim is to improve the industry, isn’t that a good thing? As I said in an earlier post who wouldn’t want the industry’s myriad problems addressed?

What we do next has to involve the biggest players. We know we’ve been noticed. Our supporter group grows every day and we see the names of the people joining whilst respecting their desire to keep their involvement quiet.

We know that some are following a policy of ‘ignore them, the whole thing will blow over’.

We don’t think it will. After all, revolutions start on the streets, not in the institutions.

The Who Cares? idea has generated some interest outside our bubble. It’s always revealing to speak to those not closely involved.

When I explain the extent of ad fraud; the threat to independent journalism posed by the online social media platforms; and the fact that we are increasingly funding the spread of misinformation there is general disbelief.

Furthermore, even casual observers agree that the ads themselves are just not terribly good.

Of course, there are exceptions but overall, the standard in creativity reflects the fact that these days advertisers are more focussed on audience numbers than on the messages they put in front of those audiences.

Numbers are an easy sell; even if the numbers quoted are nearly always misleading and unvalidated. Creative judgement is hard. Numbers are quantifiable; creative opinion is ‘pink and fluffy’.

We have agencies (most particularly within the holding companies) looking for non-transparent ways of making a margin to fund their underperforming siblings, and then denying they’re doing anything remotely dubious. And at the same time complaining about a lack of trust in the industry, as if they had nothing at all to do with that state of affairs.

We have adtech businesses overcomplicating and overclaiming what they do in order to convince investors of all shapes and sizes (most with little in-depth understanding of how our industry works) that they and they alone hold the keys to the kingdom.

And we have so many people invested in the status quo that they’ve lost sight of the key benefits that lie in powerful brands created at least in part by famous advertising.

If you step back, outside the bubble this is all truly crazy.

Think about it. We have ‘trusted advisors’ who aren’t trusted, spending budgets to benefit themselves first and their clients second, using tech companies to justify their actions via often ill-defined data not validated by anyone.

Nick Manning and I started Advertising: Who Cares? to shine a light, to start a dialogue. It’s up to others how they run their businesses, of course, but we think they should make decisions based on the full knowledge of the consequences of their actions.

This is impossible if we aren’t honest, open and transparent. It seems a lot of people agree with us.

So, now what?

We have with input from many supporters generated masses of ideas, and we are keen to work with like-minded organisations and individuals to help us develop and promote our approach.

We will be contacting our supporter group with ideas to consider shortly. If you haven’t yet joined (for free at www.advertisingwhocares.org) now would be a very good time to do so, to ensure you have your say in how we should go about refocusing the ad industry.

In April, Nick Manning and I had one of our regular two-old-guys-in-a-coffee-shop-moaning-about-the-state-of-the-ad-industry sessions. This one was a little different – for two reasons.

First, we joined the dots. Maybe it took us longer than it should, but it finally struck us that one reason for the overall poor quality of creative output these days is because advertisers’ focus, directed there it must be said by those who should know better, is more on the numbers reached than on the message delivered.

And secondly, we decided to try to do something about it. To be fair we were a bit like a couple of cartoon characters: thumping the table (metaphorically you understand) and shouting ‘something must be done’ (rather quietly so as not to upset the good citizens of Putney) without having much idea what exactly.

We settled on a blog – there’s revolutionary for you – and in that original post wrote: “We intend putting on an event whose shape and scale will be driven by the interest we generate. Maybe we’ll need a conference venue, maybe a large table, maybe a small desk.”

We laid out our manifesto, and decided on five key topics. In a nutshell:

• Business models (nobody thinks the current model, largely unchanged since the 1970’s, works)
• Trading, transparency and trust (trust in advertising is in short supply, shining a light on how the industry works can only be a good thing)
• Measurement and accountability (metrics that mean little and are often wilfully misinterpreted need to be replaced by meaningful, validated data)
• Recruitment and well-being (starting salaries in agencies are virtually the same as they were 20 years ago; and there’s less satisfaction, and enjoyment to act as a counter-balance. A career in advertising isn’t the attraction it once was)
• Brands and journalism (shouldn’t we consider the societal benefits of original, professionally produced content when deciding where to spend budgets?)

The aim is for a group of like-minded people to discuss and debate, and to emerge with pragmatic, forward-thinking, positive ideas on how best to move the industry ahead.

I find it hard to think of a single reason why anyone would have any problem with any of this.

Do we really think that the current business models work? Not if you listen to the moans around the industry on how we’re not appreciated, not properly rewarded.

Is spending someone else’s money without explaining exactly why we’re suggesting whatever we’re suggesting, and the benefits, professional?

Are we happy with the obsession with numbers that have little connection to business effect; and the lack of a full debate on what to do about it?

Is it acceptable that today’s graduates simply don’t consider advertising to be an attractive, enjoyable profession?

And shouldn’t we at least consider the consequences of breaking the ties between ad spend and original content creation?

The old virtuous circle – do great work, attract more clients, grow the business by doing great work for those clients, has been replaced by a linear model driven not by admen but by money men. Identify an opportunity, invest, grow, cut costs, sell.

It’s said of social media that you, as the user are not the customer but the resource. In today’s ad world the client, whose business we’re there to grow is it seems no longer central.

The Advertising: Who Cares? movement has attracted 340 individuals who’ve volunteered to help re-centre the industry. There are some interesting things about this group.

First, they are individuals who care. They’re not corporate shills, no-one is being told to do this.

In fact, just the opposite; a fair few wish to remain anonymous. Many of them work for large advertising businesses. We are delighted to have their support and to protect their identities.

Isn’t it strange that the largest advertising businesses on the planet are not actively supporting an attempt to make advertising as an industry work better?

Not only that, but some have created a culture within which free-thinking individuals working for them feel they have to go undercover to support this initiative.

The same is true of the platforms (although I do sort-of get why; they’ve done extremely well on the back of what might politely be termed a lack of buyers’ curiosity).

It’s also true of some (‘The Media Leader’ is an honourable exception) of our trade press and, weirdly the ad agency trade body (which disappoints me as an IPA Fellow).

What drives Nick and me is a desire to do what we can to make the ad industry a better place. One that attracts the best people so that they can bring their skills to bear on clients’ businesses.

We – and those many people and organisations helping us in one way or another are doing this for free. If we do make anything we’ll donate the balance to NABS. If we don’t cover our direct costs, well, so be it.

Our launch event in September has attracted attendees from all over, including the US, Australia, Europe, Scandinavia, China and New Zealand. With two weeks to go we have 9 tickets left.

We’re sure initiatives will emerge but just what they’ll be we won’t prejudge.

We hope the largest players will join us.

Others have had their fun pointing out how little Musk knows about the ad business, but his comments (and the video posted by his CEO Linda Yaccarino, who you would think would know a thing or two) do seem to be rooted in some fundamental differences between the ad business here (and elsewhere) and the USA.

First there is the belief that bigger simply must equal better.

The US media market has always tended to be a buying as opposed to a planning market. In buying markets, bigger audiences always mean more revenue.

In many places we’ve moved on from ‘biggest equalling best’ without any further discussion being required.

The notion of planning campaigns around a set of quality metrics and then buying against those metrics is simply not how it has traditionally been done in the US model.

This explains why the US is (I think) the only major media market where audiences on TV are reported not by commercial break but by programme within which the commercial break appears.

If the unit was the commercial break the gross number may go down. And that would never do – even if it reflected reality.

The fact that the media market has changed out of all recognition is not the point, the point is the continued focus on the biggest numbers.

I imagine Musk and Yaccarino find it hard to conceive that advertisers don’t just automatically go after the biggest numbers, whatever the circumstances. Whether the context is relevant to a brand’s needs, socially acceptable, whether the numbers are bot-driven, all of these are to a greater or lesser degree not part of their conversation.

X, and before it Twitter has never been particularly important for advertisers. The format isn’t conducive to showcasing great work, the audience is neither particular large in the context of others’, plus it’s easily reached elsewhere. And the surrounding ‘editorial’ has always been controversial.

What about freedom of expression, a term used on both sides of the Atlantic to mean different things, as Bruce Daisley, ex of Twitter, pointed out this week in ‘The Guardian’?

If you want to exercise your freedom of expression, within the law on X then good for you. But advertisers are free to advertise where they think most appropriate to meet their objectives and needs.

Often that place isn’t X.

The second difference between the media markets is that the US has often struggled with the concept of collaboration between competing parties.

Take audience measurement. Whereas most major ad markets operate a system within which research is commissioned and managed via a collaboration of all interested parties, the US does things differently.

Take TV, where Nielsen has for many years had the major contract. There has always been a quoted anti-trust issue that stops the industry collaborating fully to commission one source of audience truth. Whether this is a real issue or something confected decades ago by Nielsen and never challenged is a moot point.

To an outsider like me the US measurement industry has never seemed to move at the pace of other markets because of a) an obsession that only big numbers count, and thus anything reducing the headline number is undesirable and b) a belief that collaboration is somehow anti-competitive.

This is finally changing, slowly. Attention as a factor has emerged; so-called alternative currencies which are neither alternative (alternative to what?) nor currencies (surely you can only have one base currency?) at least have broadened the debate.

Meantime back in the land of the great suer, anyone who’s ever had anything to do with advertiser trade bodies will know that the very idea that they can somehow insist that advertisers act in concert in how and with whom they trade is delusional.

What trade bodies do is lobby governments, set standards, organise studies, and all manner of other activities that raise the bar for all. They’re frequently infuriating (‘why does everything take so long?’), and inevitably underfunded. The fact they work at all is down not only to the talents of those employed by them but also to an army of volunteers who do a sterling, unsung job for nothing.

Not only is Musk’s legal action against the WFA absurd (and I suspect won’t work as he intends) but it is also damaging to the industry. It could lead to advertisers thinking twice before joining any association whose goal is to collaborate for the greater good.

It will make the job of those working selflessly for the industry harder.

This is a complicated industry; far more complicated than ‘the biggest number wins’. We need representation in front of power, and standards, agreed by all and applied consistently in order to instil confidence in those who ultimately pay for everything.

Every boat, even X, rises on a rising tide.

Or: last week the ad tech giants along with a number of circling bankers and assorted money men came together in Cannes to celebrate the takeover of the ad business by a combination of machines and mathmen.

Regardless of which Cannes you were at (I was at neither), the ad business is not in a good place. An industry built around creativity (in the broad sense), and the application of creative thinking to solve clients’ business problems, is being reduced to number chasing.

The issues we face are many.

It’s hard to recruit the brightest to an industry many find hard to define, and frankly rather boring.

It’s tough to explain how true objectivity in client recommendations can sit alongside the deals buyers make with media and tech vendors.

It’s not easy to make the case for access to boardrooms and for higher fees at a time when advertising effectiveness is confused with online metrics that are neither consistent nor independently verified.

It’s hard to persuade a client to trust you when certain behaviours are questioned across so many dimensions.

It is uncomfortable for marketers to justify putting more and more of their budgets into media forms that are not only largely devoid of professional content but who also take no responsibility for what appears. And to do so at a time when independent journalism is under threat.

None of these things are easy – and what makes it harder is the lack of open-ness in discussing them. The worry is that key players might with-hold their favours (or worse) from anyone daring to open up a discussion. It’s a strange and insecure business that cannot take criticism without resorting to insults and threats.

A couple of months ago Nick Manning and I decided to try to do something about this state of affairs.

It started with a blog post: Advertising: Who Cares?

Since then, we have been amazed at the level of support, whilst noting how some have misinterpreted our intentions.

This is what we’re trying to do.

We would like to make advertising and the advertising industry better for everyone. We are seeking solutions and ideas to help make this happen.

We believe in good advertising. Creatively what constitutes ‘good advertising’ is largely subjective but there are some pretty uncontroversial definitions. Good advertising:

• Engages, informs, is relevant and responsible
• Is respectful of its audience’s time, attention and privacy
• Is accountable; and effective in building business
• Contributes positively to the economy
• Does not bombard the public and is not excessively intrusive
• Is welcomed (or at worst tolerated) by the public
• Funds high quality content (including high quality journalism) which in turn provides a suitable environment for advertising
• Doesn’t harm the environment

Achieving these things requires care and the application of craft skills in the content of the ads, their placement and in their evaluation.

We believe in an advertising industry that uses these craft skills to make the advertising experience better for those buying it (clients), for those selling it (media vendors), and crucially for those consuming it (the public).

To do this the ad industry has to be accountable, transparent and responsible, and to be seen to be all of those things.

It needs to treat its people and the skills they bring to bear with respect.

It needs to appreciate that the cheapest deal is not always the best thing for the client. 50% off the wrong thing does not suddenly turn the wrong thing into the right thing.

We need to go back to providing employment with enjoyment. If we continue as now, we simply won’t attract talented people.

We need business models that reward success, not just that pay for the distance travelled. We are skilled consultants, not taxi drivers.

The large agencies are a critical part of this industry. They have more interest in its success than anyone.

They know as well as anyone that there are many issues faced by the industry. One fascinating aspect of the Who Cares? initiative has been the number of people mailing us from the holding companies’ media agencies, and from large vendors, supporting us, agreeing with our ambition and wishing us well whilst at the same time asking us to keep their names out of what we’re doing.

We are delighted to have them and to respect their request but at the same time we think it sad that they feel the need to do this.  

The Who Cares? effort crystallises at our launch event on September 12^th in London at the RSA.

Over the past weeks we have established five workstream topics, each with a high-profile and respected leader and each open to supporters to join and contribute. On September 12^th we’ll hear their positive, creative suggestions as to how to improve across all five topic areas.

We will also hear from creative and media agency leaders, and from clients.

There’ll be no whinging, no finger-pointing, no apportioning of blame. We all know the issues; what we are looking for are solutions.

There’ll also be no sponsorship – we aim for an open discussion without fear or favour.

Of course, one event won’t fix it. We hope we’ll start various balls rolling towards our aim to make the industry a better place.

If you’re interested in what we’re doing, if you want to join us on the day, or if you would just like to be kept informed as to what happens next you can find all details on our website: www.advertisingwhocares.org.

We need to come together to fix the industry. We won’t do that by fighting amongst ourselves.

It really is a matter of ‘altogether now’.

The motivation bit is easy. We’ve both had long careers in advertising; and we’ve both had a great time. Further we both retain an enthusiasm for the business, tempered by a real worry that it is losing its power, influence and popularity. And, underpinning all of these it’s losing its attractiveness as a career.

Why is Who Cares? necessary?

Nick and I both write a fair bit – blogs, articles, conference speeches and so on. We’ve found ourselves writing about largely the same things.

The marketing industry is responsible for one of the world’s largest criminal enterprises; ad fraud is yet to overtake drug trafficking in the league table of bad guys, but the suspicion is we’re edging closer.

The agency world and their clients waste huge amounts of money. The more we waste, the less likely anyone in any position to do anything about it is to call it out.

Add in principal-based buying (broking as it used to be called), a lack of transparency in trading, the neutering of planning, the silence around deals done by the agency and sold on to the client, unverified audience research, poor data masquerading as valuable insights, problems in recruitment, lack of motivation within agencies and you end up with an unhappy industry staffed by unfulfilled people.

All of this is well-known, if only we would admit it.

Our lightbulb moment was to realise that this isn’t just some geeky adtech matter impacting media agencies.

We are as an industry producing large volumes of poor ads; poor ads don’t work; and it’s not a huge leap to go from there to asking why anyone would spend anything on ads that don’t work?

It is a reasonable question to ask why it is that few if any of these topics are being discussed at the Cannes Festival of Creativity this coming week. But they’re not; and if by chance any do come up it will be with an air of mutual congratulation that we’ve fixed the issue.

But we haven’t, and we know we haven’t.

The best ads have always emerged from teams. Media planners and strategists are key team members. Yet their thinking and input is often minimised – by the physical division between media and creative agencies, and shamefully by their own bosses and the deals they make.

The irony is that media agencies, in the UK at least, emerged from an inequality in full-service agencies.

If creative was king, media was well down below the salt.

In the 1970s a few farsighted entrepreneurs took a risk and laid the foundations for the media buying (later planning and buying) industry.

The full-service model was unbalanced. The old joke was that the client presentation was 75% about where to hold the shoot; 24% about who would be in the film; and 1% (typically the 5 minutes before lunch) rather grudgingly spent discussing where the ads would appear and at what cost.

With a few exceptions most clients were uncomfortable discussing creative. It’s ungraspable, unquantifiable, soft not hard, opinion not fact. They loved mixing with the stars, but most were out of their comfort zone.

Of course there were exceptions – brilliant creative thinkers, happy to look past headline research numbers, and confident in their ability to sell an idea to their management.

How different from today.

Media today is exactly in the client’s comfort zone. It’s facts, numbers, measured, precise, graspable, absolute.

Except when it isn’t.

And increasingly it definitely isn’t.

None of us feel comfortable when something we consider immovable moves; something solid dissolves; something visible disappears.

When this happens, we try to pass it off as someone else’s problem. We rarely admit that it’s us that has caused it.

Take one small, relatively uncontentious example.

Why do we persist in thinking that an ad has truly been exposed after two seconds? Surely that’s starting at the wrong end. “How long do people typically spend looking at an ad on our channel? Two seconds? Well go off and prove that two seconds is all anyone needs”.

It’s upside down logic, start with the answer then work out the question.

Who Cares? has no ambition to rubbish technology, online media, social channels, TV, or anything else. There are plenty of events that seek to sell you something by rubbishing something else.

Rather we want to have an open discussion, based on experiences and evidence. And from that start-point to look for solutions. We are putting on a half day (afternoon) event at the RSA in London on September 12^th to try to start to find some.

We want every side of the industry, holding companies, independents, analysts, journalists (an unhealthy ad market isn’t great news for them either), tech businesses, platforms, to attend. They all have much to contribute.

We are very grateful to have persuaded (dragooned…) Jenny Biggam, Michael Farmer, Ruben Schreurs, Denise Turner and Crispin Reed to help us.

Whinging is banned (that’s what blogs are for); creative thinking is the order of the day.

We are trying to do our bit to redress the balance from mathmen towards madmen.

You can help us by buying a ticket (www.advertisingwhocares.org). We aren’t making a penny from it, any balance will go to NABS, any shortfall will be picked up by us.

Why are we doing it?

We feel someone has to, and Nick Manning and I are both at that stage when we can try to do something good for the industry.

Who Cares? We think more people than perhaps you think.

It’s about a month since a Cog Blog co-authored with Nick Manning appeared, and kicked off what has become known as the ‘Who Cares?’ movement.

Since then, we’ve had over 150 supporters approach us to offer to help. Many have asked to remain anonymous (hardly surprising given where they work). We’re happy to guarantee that.

Even (maybe especially) those inside the companies at the heart of the many criticisms around the industry aren’t it seems happy with what the ad business has become.

To balance things, we’ve had the usual, expected pushbacks. We’re just two old men harking back to the good old days; we’re dinosaurs; we’re anti online advertising; we’re anti agencies; we don’t understand the modern world; we simply don’t get social media / data / current systems / DSPs / SSPs.

All of this is rather tiresome even if some of it is undeniably true – I am indeed old.

The point is that the ad business is in a mess. Anyone who knows anything about it knows this to be the case but looks the other way. This is hardly some sort of golden era for advertising.

The question is not whose fault this is but how best to fix it?

Maybe the agencies’ trade association, the IPA (4As in the USA)?

I have a long association with the IPA. I served on many of their working groups, represented the agency sector on several joint industry committees and was appointed a Fellow in 1983.

The IPA has always been a fine example of a trade body, well-funded and appreciated by its members.

But it looks to me as if today it is compromised. Is it there to represent the best interests of its members, including the holding company media agencies? Or to promote and support the ad industry?

Because right now those two things appear in conflict.

Both the IPA and the 4As have decided that saying nothing is the best policy.

How about the usually oh-so-vocal large media consultancies, those who seek to ‘do media better’? Not a word, although a few individuals have joined us in a personal capacity.

Silence on these matters is not a good look.

The Who Cares? movement has from the start (all of one month ago) been clear about one thing. We are trying to make things better; and the first thing to do towards that goal is to talk about things openly and honestly. To shine a light where previously there have only been shadows.

We all know the problems, there are plenty of articles, blogs and podcasts doing a fine job. Simply repeating them gets us nowhere.

Nor does blaming anyone. We all have our bogeymen and our pet theories as to where exactly the industry has gone wrong, but there’s little point in having a crack at anyone or any sector.

What is clear is that the issues faced by the ad business have an impact far beyond the ad business. This isn’t a little local issue.

The media industry historically relied on advertising as a key source of revenue, along with the price paid by consumers for the content delivered.

Today that business model is shot. Few are prepared to pay for news, or content generally; and ad revenue taken by the publishers is now measured in cents not dollars.

The giant platforms have done a wonderful job for their shareholders by refusing to be categorised as publishers (‘publisher’ means taking responsibility for content) and have ripped apart the old ad revenue plus cover price model.

Over time they’ve misused data (Cambridge Analytica, anyone?), hidden audience statistics inside walled gardens to avoid scrutiny, and misstated audience numbers.

The scale of the main players and their disdain for any advertising form not controlled by them are not good for any of us.

This is not to say that advertising on FB, YouTube etc doesn’t have its place. Clearly, they reach loads of people and are enjoyed by many.

They are but the visible tip of an iceberg that siphons off so much money to un-necessary middlemen, to ineffective MFA sites, to tech that doesn’t do what it says on the tin, to ad fraud, that the true advertising industry is left decimated.

Since we broke cover, we have had individuals from trade bodies, advertisers, agencies, consultants, publishers, ad tech firms all ask to join us. We seem to have hit a nerve.

Given our backgrounds we naturally lean towards the ad business, hence the original Advertising: Who Cares? title.

But what’s happening in advertising impacts far more than advertising.

The benefits of a flourishing, diverse media with professional journalists seeking out the truth; the huge influence of the ‘old-fashioned’ TV world (the UK Post Office scandal brought to public attention not by Google, nor by Facebook, YouTube or TikTok but by ITV), these things are threatened by ad revenue being diverted.

This is nothing to do with harking back to some idyl; it is all to do with true freedom of expression, the importance and recognition of quality and the airing of sometimes uncomfortable truths.

Who Cares? is not against anything as such. We are for creative thinking, great and objective planning, and successful agencies paid properly for the business and brand building work they do.

We aim to shine a light on what’s going wrong, whilst providing a space for discussion hopefully leading to improvement. We really hope that all sides of the industry, even those who are yet to comment, take part.

We strive for solutions, not whinging.

We are all pros, no cons.

The last Cog Blog post, co-authored with Nick Manning created a stir. Described by some as a ‘call to arms’ and no doubt by others as ‘two old blokes desperately seeking relevance’ (which by the way we neither need nor want), the point we were, and are making is that for many in the advertising industry the advertising itself has become an after-thought.

This is a far bigger problem than many recognise. Even if it sounds familiar, few would like to admit that what’s been happening over the last decade or two is putting the future of the business, and many who work in it at risk.

Let’s start at the beginning.

Customers, prospective customers, real people don’t care about adtech, platforms, data or media rebates. They care, if they care about anything in our business, about the ads.

Are they fun? Entertaining? Informative? Persuasive? Interesting? Shareable? Noticeable? For me? Relevant? Timely?

Perceived wisdom has it that nobody notices a media plan. True enough but get the media plan wrong and nobody will notice the ad either.

Getting the plan right is at the heart of our Who Cares? initiative.

The best, the most effective ads come from a collaboration between strategists, creatives, media planners, and analysts.

It may be stating the obvious, but the strategist distils data into a core idea; the creatives work the core idea into an execution; the media guys amplify the execution by placing it in those places where it will have the greatest impact; the analysts report if it impacted the business and together everyone decides what needs to improve next time.

Where are the buyers in this? The dealmakers? The adtech suppliers? The DSPs/ SSPs and all those other acronyms?

They exist to execute the plan. As efficiently, and as painlessly as possible.

Not to change it, fiddle with it, create frankly dubious numbers and concepts to ‘improve it’.

Just to deliver it.

This isn’t easy, it is both a sophisticated and a skilful business, but it’s the last stage in the process, not the first.

It’s also table-stakes. Yes, it needs to be paid for, but it shouldn’t be seen as a hidden source of revenue for the agencies. That should always be, must be the client.

Our issue, and why we started the Who Cares? campaign is that these delivery mechanisms are negatively affecting the end product, the ad.

Nobody is suggesting we should go back to the ‘Madmen’ era and ignore anyone who questions the creatives’ art; but equally it’s wrong to rely 100% on the ‘Mathmen’.

Some say this is an inevitable evolution of the business. It isn’t – in evolution the best bits survive.

The ‘Mathmen’ approach ends with messages that deliver sameness, blandness, and, for the consumer, tedium.

Messages that don’t work.

It takes away judgement and replaces it with a false certainty, the sort of certainty that claims that my enlarged photocopy of the Mona Lisa is a greater work of genius than the original just because mine is on a bigger canvas.

‘Mathmen’ may not destroy the ad industry but they are turning it into something else, with all sorts of unpredicted consequences.

One such is that we’re no longer an attractive proposition for those young people best suited to a career in a creative industry.

This has come up a number of times in the response Nick Manning and I have had – from students, their professors, and teachers. Advertising is simply no longer a particularly attractive profession.

Starting salaries in media agencies are, we have been surprised to learn much the same as c.20 years ago. There’s not even the balancing factor of ‘fun’ anymore. And there’s still the same mental stresses and strains, the uncertainties, the (often un-necessarily) long hours.

Those who have contacted us privately from the holding companies talk of the primacy of the dealmakers over those with client knowledge, and the favouring of media channels with whom their parent has deals, over doing the right thing for the client.

It’s worth remembering the 2016 transparency scandal started in the USA by Jon Mandel, supported by the ANA, ignored, scandalously by the agencies and their trade association.

Here’s a link or two to blogs from back then. Nick Manning, my co-troublemaker in Who Cares? was deeply involved in the reporting of this at the time.

This isn’t a new point – but it is one that needs the disinfectant of light applied to it.

We’ve received more support than we imagined likely for the Who Cares? initiative.

We’ve so far heard from clients, creative agencies, media agencies, research businesses, consultancies in UK, USA, Germany, Holland, Estonia, China, Singapore, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.

About 4,000 have read the blog post and about 120 have written to offer us help, support and active participation in the event we’re planning later in the year (September 12^th – save the day!).

One thing that hasn’t unduly surprised us is those we have not heard from.

Nothing from many of the usual experts and commentators. Where are the high-profile media consultancies? Where are all those people who tell us in posts and on platforms, how to ‘do’ advertising? Strangely quiet this time.

What about the large adtech businesses? The platforms?

What about the holding companies? Not a squeak.

We’ve looked at where the audience to the original post came from.

Four out of the top five organisations hosting the largest number of individuals accessing the post came from holding companies and major platforms.

It looks as if we are generating interest amongst individuals, even if not with the organisations for whom they work.

We are delighted to hear from anyone, or any organisation interested in our plans. Some from the larger, silent organisations have contacted us in a private capacity. We are especially grateful to them.

We are happy for people to contact us anonymously and to ask us to keep their names hidden. We know how hard it can be to speak out against working practices with which you may disagree.

The event we’re planning (September 12^th) is for all – we think it will be far better if those currently remaining silent do decide to attend to put their point-of-view.

But to those wishing to support us, you don’t have to cause problems for yourself.

We’ll make the fuss; and we’re beyond caring – except for the business we love.

Consider low levels of viewability and attention, ad fraud, MFA sites, unverified (and often unbelievable) audience data, agencies who make more money from their suppliers than from their clients (thus threatening the very objectivity they’re hired for in the first place), bland creative generated by AI, and an audience that increasingly resents our work.

Articles, speeches and tweets from those who make money at arm’s length from the actual advertising, whilst not caring a jot for anything except short-term revenue, are everywhere.

Nick Manning, ex Manning Gottlieb and Ebiquity, and I share concerns over this sorry state of affairs.

We see two choices.

Write yet another article, give another conference speech, and accept the headlines whilst knowing in our hearts that nothing will change.

Or at least to try to start to change things for the better.

It is easy to dismiss us as two old gits, whose time of influence within the industry is past and who now can do little else except meet up for a moan.

This would be true but for one rather inconvenient fact. There are many who seem to agree with us who are neither old nor past it but who are worried. Most feel unable, and literally cannot afford to speak out.

Nick and I care about the ad business. We don’t care about pay checks, future jobs or mortgages.

So, as planners, we’ve hatched a plan.

There are a number of inconvenient truths in adland.

The first is most of us know what’s going on. Yet no-one in any position to influence anything talks about the issues.

Take media agencies. Here we should acknowledge those independents who have for years made transparency in media selection and fees a point of difference from the networks. Valuable though they are, it’s the networks who drive the market, and whose behaviours create the weather.

Everyone at any level of seniority in every agency in the land knows that ad fraud is a massive problem. Everyone knows about MFAs.

Everyone knows that too much advertiser money is spent on unproductive adtech, and that the network agencies are forever looking for new ways to make undisclosed margins.

But no-one wants to talk about these issues.

The reason for the silence is obvious. For years, the largest network media agencies have made more money from their suppliers, be they media vendors, fraud detection specialists, or adtech companies than they have from their clients.

Holding company revenues are largely dependent on revenues from their media arms – whose margins are high. Anyone running a holding company media operation is all too aware of the pressure to deliver high margins; their parent simply can’t survive without them.

So – do a deal with a fraud detection business / adtech vendor / specialist research supplier, pretend to the client that everything is under control, and don’t rock the boat.

The problem is that courtesy of all sorts of interfering so-and-so’s the cat is now well and truly out of the bag. Clients are asking difficult questions; questions which cannot in all truth be answered without compromising a valuable supplier.

Consequently (and we can argue which came first, chicken or egg) trust between client and media agency has eroded.

Respectable media vendors have found themselves disadvantaged unless they play the game. No matter their quality brand-safe environment, their valuable audiences, unless they play in the agencies’ sandpit they simply can’t generate sufficient revenue to fund their uniquely valuable content.

Some of our trade press too largely ignores these issues – there’s a symbiotic relationship between journalists, adtech vendors, platforms and agencies. There’s advertising to consider, and pitches to get excited about.

What about independent auditors? Too many still rely for their bread and butter on old-fashioned cost grids, and audits based on the same dodgy principles that were around in my, and Nick’s day. There’s much talk but the truth is they’re not sufficiently tooled up.

Trade bodies, and the verification organisations? Take the IPA as an example, it’s well-funded, but it faces a dilemma.

If the IPA is to represent and protect the interests of its members, what is it to do if those members’ interests are not necessarily aligned with a healthy, trusted ad business?

Stay schtum seems to be the answer. When did you last see an employee of a major agency break cover to comment publicly on ad fraud (and keep his or her job)?

What can two old guys, who do care, do?

We intend putting on an event whose shape and scale will be driven by the interest we generate. Maybe we’ll need a conference venue, maybe a large table, maybe a small desk.

If there are costs (for the venue for example) we will charge a modest fee to attend, with any profits being passed on to the advertising charity NABS.

We will not accept sponsorship, although we will approach a select few to ask for practical assistance.

We will select speakers on the basis that they will be well-informed and prepared to speak the truth. Everything will be on the record. We won’t pay speakers, nor will we pay ourselves.

We will invite journalists from serious business titles, as well as advertisers. From early soundings we think many will attend.

We will publish who we’re inviting (we’ll invite all the big players), who attends, and as importantly, who doesn’t.

We will produce a set of actions from the event.

This post is our first attempt to gauge interest.

If you’re interested you can comment as usual, or if you would rather remain anonymous for now you can mail me at brian@bjanda.com  or Nick at nick@encyclomedia.international.

We hope that interest will win out over apathy; and that the seriousness of the situation we’re all in will overcome short-term concerns.

We’ll see.

Representative or not, the fact remains that a far higher proportion of advertising professionals would rather talk about a topic than put in the hard yards required to put the theory into day-to-day practice to the benefit of their clients.

Whether it’s attention metrics, cross-media measurement, ad fraud, effectiveness measures, using AI in planning, or a whole host of other shiny new items on today’s to-do list, there’s saying and then there’s doing.

You could argue this is a function of time. Early adopters take ideas and run with them; the rest of us take an age to catch-up.

But as befits a blog written by a Cynical Old Git (hence COG Blog) I take an altogether more cynical view.

A well-known media consultant once described the media buying and selling business as being rather like a well-appointed casino.

There are the beautiful people to lure you in, and their counterparts serving you drinks and food as you play.

Then there are the guys setting the odds and making the money. They typically keep out-of-sight but everyone working there knows they’re there, calling the shots.

This all may sound a bit melodramatic, but it does explain some of mysteries within this industry.

If you were a Naïve Old Bastard (the NOB Blog?) you would be forgiven for believing that the leaders of the media agency industry should be speaking out individually or via our trade body in favour of behaviours designed to build trust and strengthen the agency business.

High on the agenda would be driving any practices that damage clients’ belief in advertising as an effective driver of business success (like ad fraud) from the industry.

Are they speaking up? No, they’re not.

It seems they are happier promoting the latest, largely incomprehensible systems designed by and for online media platforms to their bemused clients.

It would be incorrect to assume that what agencies say in pitches about serving their clients’ interests above all things is true.

 The incomparable Bob Hoffman, in his latest newsletter ‘Review the Rot’ is in no doubt.

Bob believes that the actions of our industry-leading media agency leaders and their online friends is less about client benefits and more about:

• “Enabl(ing) hundreds of billions of dollars of theft
• (Delivering) years of imaginary marketing outcomes
• (Producing) a tidal wave of media misinformation, disinformation, lies, defamation, hatred and stupidity
• (Causing) enormous harm to responsible journalism”

Bob makes the point that a small business, Adalytics, “essentially led by one guy named Krzysztof Franaszek, has done more to bring to light the true nature of online advertising than all the holding companies, all the media agencies, all the trade associations and the entire marketing trade press community combined.”

I would add a shout-out to Dr Augustine Fou and his business, Fou Analytics who has done more to first uncover, then understand and finally show how best to minimise ad fraud than the huge suppliers hired by the holding companies.

And now two of these huge suppliers (IAS and Double Verify) are seeking to add genuine innovation and measurement respectability (via two of the largest attention measurers, Lumen and TVision) to what has been to date a distinctly underwhelming fraud detection offering.

Putting all these manoeuvrings and machinations to one side, underneath it all this is a pretty simple business.

Our job is to create and place commercial messages that build business success for our clients.

If we do that well and can demonstrate that we’ve done so then we deserve to be fairly paid for it.

Clients have a right to expect the agencies they hire to work in their best interests, including using the latest tools and techniques to help them do the job better. They are right to expect us not just to say, but to do.

I’ve been accused of being out of my time, of being idealistic, of representing a long-ago and long-past age, and of course that’s true on one level.

But on another level, it’s not.

Our industry was in a far better place when we cared about our clients, and let our own wealth and success look after itself.

The other day Neil Jones, who heads Performance Media at Boots UK posted a question to the LinkedIn community. He asked: “For agency talent, what makes a specific account desirable to work on and how can clients create the right kind of environment where those on the agency side want to work on your business?”

First, all credit to Neil, a client, for asking the question. I have a nasty suspicion that most clients today couldn’t care less whether or not agencies want to work on their business. ‘You don’t like the way we do things? Fine, we’ll just whistle up the next cab on the rank.’

Sadly, there are plenty of cabs offering cut-price travel without mentioning the lack of seatbelts, or even seats.

I grew up in an era where the client / agency relationship was absolutely crucial. One of my first major clients was Kellogg’s. They had a simple principle when it came to working with their agencies. Every new brand manager was given a book to guide him or her in the ‘Kellogg way’.

The first sentence in this book read something like this: ‘It is not your job to fire the advertising agency. It is your job to get the most from the advertising agency.’

Account teams came and went; media executives too (I was once removed from the account at the insistence of a soon-to-be-ex-client for, in my view, standing up for what was right – a long story for another day) but we never in my 14 years with the agency had to re-pitch the business.

The agency wanted to be treated as a valued partner; a large part of this meant an immersion in the client’s business.

We worked shifts in McDonald’s; we went to car manufacturers’ launches for their dealer networks; we happily tasted petfood; we went out with sales teams; we toured factories (BBH’s Audi line, Vorsprung Durch Technik was famously taken by John Hegarty from a factory wall).

None of this was considered strange or limited to the suits; media people, planners, creatives all did this.

We were curious about our clients’ businesses.

They wanted us to be curious about their business.

I’m aware that these posts can sometimes seem to view the past through tinted glasses, or to hark back to a time long gone. And of course, on one level that’s true.

But on another, the desire to understand the client and his business, it is no such thing. Rather the past offers today’s practitioners a roadmap towards better relationships.

From a good relationship comes trust, and vice versa. You really can’t have one without the other.

If today’s agencies could have brought themselves to have the difficult financial conversation around fees with their clients when trust still existed between them, we wouldn’t be in the mess we’re now in.

But no, they chose to ignore the tough discussion, and instead went down a path of obfuscation, hiding behind deal techniques and more latterly technologies, using a language that no-one even pretended to understand.

Out of confusion comes margin, as GroupM’s one-time President Irwin Gotlieb is rumoured to have said.

In a culture of everyman for himself, of caveat emptor, and of media pitches so regular that it’s newsworthy when they don’t happen, the massive benefit that comes from a strong relationship has gone missing.

You can blame who you like: agencies blame procurement (for calling them out presumably), clients blame agencies, everyone blames holding companies.

But the fact remains the industry is short on trust and relationships. We’ve lost the ability to speak openly and honestly to each other.

We are missing the understanding that we’re all on the same side, a feeling that led The Coca Cola Company inviting their media agency partners (note the word) to attend their global marketing convention held over several days in Atlanta. At this event we were called up on stage together for a Q&A and asked, with no prior notice: ‘What can we do to make us a better client?’.

And after we had all come up with some platitude or other, one of the agencies (not me I wouldn’t have had the nerve) replying: ‘Well, you can stop stealing our staff for a start.’

Honesty, open-ness, curiosity go a long way.

For some while now the industry has faced a problem with its basic metrics. I say ‘faced’ although the truth is we haven’t faced up to the issue at all, doing that curious media dance of sticking our fingers in our ears, twirling round three times, clicking our heels, and hoping the problem will go away.

Take share-of-voice, or SoV.

Understanding competitors’ creative and media activities is a standard feature of every post-campaign evaluation.

Beyond these, SoV is often considered an input to plans.

I’ve never understood this. Planners don’t benefit from magical foresight into competitive plans, so aiming to achieve a certain SoV relies on guesswork.

Plus, SoV is based on available adex or analysable audience data. That made sense when most major brands’ spend was on TV or press where expenditure and exposure data were reliably reported across the industry.

But that is no longer the case. Owned and retail media forms are growing, as are online channels where data is limited / non-existent.

So, share-of-voice is based on data from media forms that no longer represent the majority of a brand’s communication activities. Drawing conclusions from it can be highly misleading.

It makes more sense to examine activity from the other end of the telescope; moving from what’s transmitted to what’s received.

The IPA has recognized the importance of owned media and has worked with MESH Experience on why owned channels are important and how to create tools to measure them.

This allows brand owners to assess the relative importance of all communication channels – from paid-for advertising through retail media to owned websites, vehicles or clothing.

MESH has created the Experience Impact Score (EIS) for all brands within a category. EIS uses data on what’s received, and what’s noticed providing planners with something complimentary to impressions-based audience data.

A classic use case for SoV is in setting budgets.

Back in the last century, Carat created a tool called ‘Budget Bearings’, the brainchild of their resident genius, Phil Gullen. The idea was to gather as many pieces of information relevant to the task of budget setting as possible and plot them within the tool. The more information, or points of reference the better in plotting an accurate position.

Budget Bearings relied primarily on output measures, calculated from available data, like share-of-voice.

Marketing then was seen as a cost with few long-term business success metrics attached to it.

Slowly we’re starting to win the argument that building brands through marketing and advertising is an investment, not a cost.

This shift should be reflected in the way budgets are set.

Setting budgets around an output metric like reach or SoV is no longer sufficient at a time when we have access to so much more.

Basing financial recommendations around concepts the industry either does not measure across all channels or can’t define makes no sense.

We need to learn FD-speak, and to be precise and consistent. Most FDs are neither familiar nor impressed by the metrics used within planning and buying.

We buy audiences because the number seeing and noticing the advertising is connected to financial results.

But audience data is a stepping stone to the destination, not the destination itself.

We should make more use of modelling, taking in all communication channels, advertising and non-advertising (given the upside that marketing budgets are by definition larger than ad budgets).

My Crater Lake colleague, Co-Founder of the analytics business NavigationME, David Beaton makes the point that in over 20 years building brand models, most underspend against their market opportunity. 

David believes this is because of a lack of reliable, accurate, consistent tools not only to measure this underspend, but also to predict and optimize the effect of any increases.

Many econometric and market mix models limit themselves to paid-for media forms and look backwards, using limited inputs. Many don’t consider consumer research data, as if how consumers think has no impact on what they eventually do.

David’s advice to anyone considering modelling to justify budgets is:

1. Build models that cover a holistic list of factors that drive or suppress sales. Not only paid media, but also earned and owned; and baseline factors important to the category and brand.
2. Any statistical model has to demonstrate accuracy by aiming to explain over 90% of variation in sales over the last three years. This will help persuade the CEO and FD and reduce the risk of misattribution and poor outcomes.
3. The model must be able to use optimization and simulation to estimate the gains to be had from budget increases. These models typically yield a diminishing return curve; as spend increases, incremental sales lift falls. At some point, any further spend increase yields no sales increase at all; this is where marginal benefit equals marginal cost.  Given the current situation, this is the maximum level of sales that marketing communications can drive. This is not the same as ‘maximizing marketing RoI’. In optimized campaigns marketing RoI falls as spend increases, so maximum RoI happens at low spend levels; chasing marketing RoI leads to lower budgets.
4. Combine both prediction and optimization at different spend levels. As spend increases, the channel mix should change, as different channels have different effect curves.
5. Test alternatives. Work your way up the spend curve over time; controlling for both your own spend risk and factoring in likely competitor reaction.

Agencies like to believe they can do anything. But they’re hardly channel neutral. They see advertising as the solution to any question. If you call in a plumber, he’ll find you a leak.Predictive modelling is a specialist area, like creating great copy.

When all anyone had was output data, the agency could plot the position.

Now we have storms, choppy seas, and an under-equipped boat. It’s not the weather to be out with amateurs.

He’s right – and it is disturbing.

The job of any advisor must be, first and foremost to do the best for his or her client. ‘The best’ doesn’t mean simply telling the client what he or she wants to hear, nor is it ignoring the harder road in favour of the short-cut.

And yet this happens increasingly often, even within what was the hermetically sealed world of audience measurement.

Delivering ‘the best’ involves honesty and integrity.

Take the issues over the years of the social media platforms. I don’t believe anyone seriously believes some of the audience measurement claims made by the largest players. No-one really thinks that a 1 or 2 second commercial message can do anything beyond the most basic reminder job. No-one believes that campaigns using social media channels aren’t influenced, for good or ill by brand messages appearing outside the magic SM circle.

No-one believes these things because of experience – all the evidence we’ve accumulated over the years.

So why do we seriously even consider that these things might be true?

It’s a combination of FOMO (fear of missing out) and the attraction of big numbers which are neither properly explained nor fully understood by so many of those doing the buying.

It’s an updated version of what used to be known as ‘Chairman’s Wife Syndrome’. As in: ‘The Chairman’s wife reads the Daily Mail religiously, we need to advertise there. I don’t give a fig for targeting, numbers, cost, effect – just do what I ask’.

Now we have ‘CFO Syndrome’. As in: ‘Don’t give me all that fluffy research theory, just look at the humungous numbers those nice people at the platforms have given me and place the order’.

Take an initiative like ISBA’s Origin, of which I’m known to be a fan.

Forget the politics for a moment and consider what the industry needs.

In an increasingly complicated world, a missing piece is for a cross-media (cross-media, not cross-video, or cross-platform) measurement framework to help in decision making.

Audience measurement has always been paid for by the seller.

No seller can be expected to fund a measurement system over which he does not exercise control.

The major beneficiary from a cross-media system is the advertiser.

Thus, the advertiser should fund any cross-media system.

Put all of these factors together and what you have is Origin.

So why is it so controversial, such an issue for existential debate and discussion? Is it because of concerns over how best to undertake the project? I don’t think it is.

The reason is politics, and an ideology that hates anything that cannot be controlled and is thus perceived to be a risk.

Whether it’s right or wrong long-term, the feeling exists that we can’t support any innovation in case the short-term results might not suit us.

This is narrow thinking undertaken by those who have the answer before the question has been asked.

The last Cog Blog was about lessons from the Post Office scandal. One is the danger of believing what you want to be true, regardless of expert advice: ‘The computer system in which we invested millions is robust; now what’s the question?’

The best experts stand up to generalists; the best generalists know they need and can benefit from experts.

If the people who largely fund the paid-for ad industry decide that however hard it might be to deliver, what’s needed is a system to help them  and their advisors to decide between different channels, including in due course non-advertising channels, then it’s the expert’s job to make sure that such a thing is delivered brilliantly.

It’s the difference between ‘we shouldn’t do this because we’re concerned with the immediate commercial implications’ and ‘we need to do this, it’s the right, long-term thing to do; the only question is how to do it as well as possible’.

We should support research that helps us do a better job building brands.

Whatever the politics.

The last few weeks in the UK has produced a story media people and marketers can for once actually learn from.

This is the saga of The Post Office. For overseas readers, hundreds of postmasters and postmistresses, the people who run our local post offices found themselves accused by their bosses at HQ of fiddling the books. In fact, they had done no such thing – the fault was within a new computer system installed in-branch by Fujitsu and believed as gospel by Post Office Headquarter Managers.

The result has been devastating. Many local postmasters/mistresses have lost their jobs, their savings, their houses, their sanity, their freedom (some went to jail). Some even lost their lives.

And all because of glitches within a central computer system.

In 1999, ‘Computer Weekly’ broke the story. ‘Private Eye’ followed it up with regular lengthy and well-researched articles. ‘The Daily Mail’, ‘The Daily Telegraph’, ‘The Guardian’, ‘The Times’ and I expect others all covered the unfolding scandal. Although maybe not as frequently as they might have done.

The BBC ran both TV and radio programmes dedicated to this; the main news bulletins carried updates.

There was some debate in Parliament, calls for compensation, and an enquiry has been grinding its way through the facts, but progress is slow.

This has been going on for more than 20 years.

The story was out there in other words, but it didn’t catch.

And then just after Christmas, ITV broadcast a 4-part drama streamed across the week called ‘Mr Bates Versus the Post Office’. It told the true story of several victims of this injustice and starred Toby Jones, Monica Dolan and Julie Hesmondhalgh. All good actors, known here but not particularly well-known internationally. ITV scheduled and promoted the series most effectively.

The drama ran and suddenly things happened. After years of inactivity the postmasters and postmistresses are being pardoned and compensated. It’s been all over our papers for days; it’s been debated in Parliament; things are at last moving.

‘Computer Weekly’ today has 200,000 subscribers to its online magazine. Back in 1999 it no doubt had fewer.

‘Private Eye’ circulation has been growing and is now about 250,000, so maybe 750,000 to 1 million readers. In 1999 it no doubt didn’t have as many.

I believe the ITV drama pulled in around 7 million viewers live. Including time-shifting and streaming that’s risen to between 12 and 13 million.

The point is these are not huge numbers in the Facebook, TikTok and Google era. Numbers aside, the drama made things happen.

There are lessons to be learned.

1. TV is still supreme at telling a story, at creating empathy amongst millions, all at once. This simply wouldn’t have happened anywhere else. Social media can amplify the story, but nothing beats TV for empathy and impact.
2. The TV drama would I strongly suspect never have been made without the work of many print-based journalists. Good old-fashioned journalism made this happen.
3. Computer systems aren’t always right, but if enough senior generalists believe what they say, despite caveats from the specialists it’s easier to believe them than question the output.
4. The biggest numbers do not guarantee the greatest effect.

Marketers and their agencies have poured money into social media using automated techniques that are prone to fraud and unfortunate placements.

Many talk of brand safety, and cry tears over a young girl taking her own life because of peer pressure allowed by the likes of Instagram. But they carry on spending on these channels.

They’re told of fraud and largely ignore it. Admitting an expensive media placement error has consequences.

Advertiser and agency initiatives designed to benefit society proliferate. Green packaging; less sugar and salt; more inclusive and diverse workforces; electric vehicles; media schedules that take account of carbon emissions. All good of course.

But as I said in October 2022: ‘When it comes to where they advertise, as opposed to what they advertise (marketers all too often) look the other way’. They see the huge numbers and look no further.

Meantime broadcasters haemorrhage ad revenue and subsequently cut programme budgets. Drama is expensive so expect less of it.

Some, like EssenceMediaCom are starting to consider how consumers perceive media forms, and how that perception impacts results.

Regulated media held to account for their actions are generally brand safe and impactful. I suspect (although I haven’t seen the EssenceMediaCom work in full) that such channels are also perceived positively by consumers, which increases the impact of the ads appearing on them.

We should continue to encourage advertisers to look beyond misleading numbers.

We should question computer generated schedules, to ensure our plans consider context and impact, quality and effect.

We should actively support media forms that are regulated, measured and accountable, and are committed to bringing the truth to the audience.

Not just for philanthropic purposes but because this stuff works.

There’ll always be rogues but sometimes the good guys win.

But to win they need to be supported.

In his speech to this year’s MRG Conference Phil Smith, DG of the UK advertiser association, ISBA made the point that advertising isn’t quite as powerful a force as its creators like to think.

Phil quoted my old mentor, Simon Broadbent who said: ‘Advertising is, to the chagrin of many advertisers, rather a weak force whose effects are often hard to see.’

Even the best advertising struggles against the headwind generated by a poor consumer experience. The work of MESH and the IPA to stress the power of total brand experiences, including owned media channels is timely.

Too many business leaders don’t join the dots. They assume that the act of communicating certain values via glossy ads somehow absolves them from the responsibility of living those values every day.

Direct Line car insurance is one of the UK’s better known marketing success stories.

From the iconic red telephone to more recent commercials featuring Winston Wolfe the company’s ads are well-crafted and well-known.

Furthermore, they have been at the forefront of paid media effectiveness analytics, championed by Sam Taylor.

But inevitably real life and marketing promises collide, and so at this point I’m going to revert to a personal tale of a man, his wife and their insurance company.

My wife and I both have a car. For convenience we use the same insurance company.

A few years ago, the company we both insured with was acquired by Direct Line Group. We didn’t notice – until the price of our policies went up, lots.

We decided to move to a small company called By Miles who track the miles you drive, and (in part) charge by the miles driven (neither of us does many miles).

By Miles was a disruptor. They did things differently to my earlier insurers. For one thing they answered queries. They had a handy app to record the miles driven. They were friendly and didn’t use chatbots. They were rather fun (if an insurance company can be fun).

They talked on their site of their values – or virtues.

Then By Miles was acquired by Direct Line Group. All will continue as before we were told.

Not quite. Talk of virtues seemed to vanish for a start.

Then By Miles informed me that they could no longer insure my car, a year-old hybrid, bought new, with a factory fitted immobiliser, an added tracker and a bright yellow steering wheel lock.

Nothing had changed at my end. I’m in the same house. I haven’t added any new drivers. I haven’t had any convictions nor any accidents. I’ve not made a claim.

So why was my cover cancelled with three weeks’ notice? No-one seemed to know, beyond blaming anonymous underwriters and hiding behind the ‘we’re only a small company’ schtick which given the Direct Line acquisition isn’t even true.

As a consumer my relationship is with the insurance company. If a third party like an underwriter decides not to cover a make or model, I feel their concerns should be explained to those impacted, or even made public in the interest of encouraging harder-to-steal or safer cars?

My enforced search threw up about 100 companies prepared to insure my car. It’s clearly not that weird. The only ones I found that refused me were Direct Line Group companies.

Naturally nobody has to do business with anyone. Any company has to consider multiple risk factors, but I would contend that this is when good communication minimises brand harm. I’m sure anonymous underwriters couldn’t care less about such things, but consumer-facing businesses like insurance companies should.

We decided to cancel my wife’s By Miles policy and explain why (it’s just easier to deal with one company). This certainly caused a reaction, primarily of surprise. Why would I do such a thing?

I wrote personal emails to the leadership team at Direct Line Group asking them to explain why I had been cancelled. Maybe I shouldn’t consider that marque of car again?

Zero reply from anyone – not even those with ‘Customer Relations’ in their job title.

The (comparatively new) By Miles CEO and CMO didn’t bother replying either.

The By Miles service team did forward my concern to their complaints team. I was promised a response within 72 hours. That was on November 20^th, and there’s been nothing.

Direct Line has spent years building their reputation, through their marketing efforts. It took minutes to destroy it, certainly through the opaque underwriter system but also by not using their owned media channels well (or indeed at all).

I’m not arrogant enough to claim I’m any kind of influencer when it comes to which insurance company anyone should use.

But I know I won’t be using any Direct Line brand again – however good their advertising and however much I admire Sam Taylor’s work.

Direct Line’s 2022 Annual Report states:

“Our mission is to be brilliant for customers every day. Our vision is to create a world where insurance is personal, inclusive and a force for good. Our purpose is to help people carry on with their lives giving them peace of mind now and in the future.”

It goes on: “The Group’s financial results fell below expectations in 2022…”

This session is all about looking at the world of audience measurement from an advertising, and advertiser perspective.

I believe we are fast approaching a tipping point. We have for years inhabited a world within which the most important, some would say the only thing that mattered was how many ‘somethings’ you bought, and at what price.

This was the world of trading; the world where the biggest number always wins; the world where ‘big’ beats ‘precise’ every time.

How else to explain the US upfront system? Or the preference (again in the US) for programme ratings as the trading metric as opposed to audiences to commercials?

How often do we see ‘oh but it generates clicks’ as a justification for some inane piece of editorial content? Why does that matter? Because in the heads of Publishers and Editors click volume equals advertising revenue. They’re not wrong, but they should be.

There can only be one reason for this obsession – a fear that numbers may go down and that if they did ad revenue would consequently and inevitably decline.

 Never mind that what we’re buying is commercials, and what we’re measuring is programmes. Never mind that clicks hardly correlate with business success.

Big is good, we must feed the monster even if all logic suggests that it’s irrational to do so.

Why else do we continue to focus on metrics like ‘views’ even though the way we define what constitutes a view varies from channel to channel?

Why does the industry ignore ad fraud within programmatic buying even though everyone knows it happens at scale? Because fraudulent clicks mean bigger numbers and bigger numbers are good.

The truth is that all of these things get us big numbers – even though they’re demonstrably questionable as well as being of limited (at best) pragmatic use in meeting our clients’ goals.

We’re now moving into a world where why things work matters as much as what works.

A world where it is not only legitimate but increasingly popular to question any association between the most basic audience metrics and business effect. To what degree do outputs impact outcomes?

A planners’ world defined by a desire to understand how people consume media, not just how many of them do so.

A world of combinations, of searching for the best mix of communication channels to meet a defined objective.

A world where we look beyond narrow advertising-funded channels to consider owned media forms, earned exposures, and formats like in-game, or in-programme product or message placements.

In this world, cross-media measures matter. And if I may put in a plea to many in this room, cross-media is not the same as cross-platform, or cross-video despite what you might hear from some speakers on this platform. Words matter, definitions matter and if we can’t rely on the professional research community to speak accurately then we’re in a bigger mess than I thought.

If we’re to plan in a truly cross-media manner, then we need the vision of Origin and similar initiatives. That’s not the same as saying everyone has to agree with every detail, but it does mean a belief that the vision is worth striving towards.

I think the opposition we’re seeing to Origin (specifically from broadcasters) is misplaced; it’s backward-looking, narrow and rooted in the old trader mentality.

Much more importantly, it does the broadcasters themselves no favours. They’re in an immensely strong position as an impactful, brand-safe, flexible medium, a point made very well by Nick Manning this week in The Media Leader. Further they have a large body of evidence pointing to the medium’s success in building brands and businesses.

They are far better off inside the tent where they can ensure that any cross-media system develops in a way that benefits them by bringing their strengths into play. 

I’m encouraged by the number of large advertisers embracing the world of planning. They want to move forward to understand not only what works but why. That way they can focus on what works.

I’ve never understood the ‘you’re either for us or against us’ mentality. Promoting tools and techniques to help planners doesn’t mean stopping measuring audiences.

Audience measurement by channel is, as it has always been, essential. Its a crucial building block in measuring advertising effectiveness. It’s not, and if truth be told it’s never been the whole house.

Relative newcomers, like the attention measurers, the smart TV manufacturers, the neuro-scientists all provide blocks – some big, some small.

We certainly need to be careful not to throw the baby out with the bathwater, but even the most carefully filtered bathwater needs refreshing occasionally.

I didn’t go to Adwanted’s ‘The Future of Media’ event the other week – it seems inappropriate for an old guy who started his career in the full-service era to attend anything with ‘future’ in the title. As one delegate put it: “This is The Future of Media, not the future of 1980s ad agencies.” 

But, and there’s always a but, it does no harm to learn from past mistakes.

And here’s one waiting to happen: “Ultimately, the room appeared to agree in principle on redefining the importance of measurement”.

What’s wrong with that? Surely measurement is key?

Indeed, it is, as I should know better than most. Early on I worked in an ITV station’s research department. Later, I headed the media research function at an ad agency and sat on both technical sub-committees and management committees at various JICs. And I was responsible, with Dr Simon Broadbent in persuading the TGI to add what we called ‘lifestyle questions’, developed as a proprietary Leo Burnett study, to the industry survey where they sit to this day.

If there was a Media Mastermind (actually there was such a thing once) my specialist subject would be: ‘audience measurement initiatives I have known’.

So why am I saying the consensus that we need to ‘redefine the importance of measurement’ is wrong?

Because it’s passing the buck. It’s easier and far more politically acceptable for those leading agencies to blame ‘measurement’ than it is to talk about failures in transparency in trading, acceptance of fraud, and the end result – a lack of trust.

Instead let’s talk about measurement in the certainty that we’re kicking the can down the road.

Agencies have form when it comes to talking big on measurement.

Years ago, some decided that the TGI was both essential and too expensive. They decided to group together to produce their own superior version. That went precisely nowhere (with apologies to Jim Kite at UM who did actually do something about it for a few years).

Then the agencies decided to group together and start something through the IPA. Luckily for them the IPA Head of Research back then was the brilliant Lynne Robinson who came up with Touchpoints.

This it was agreed was a great idea and to keep it untouched by vendor biases it would be funded by the agencies. That did happen for (I think) one cycle. Touchpoints is still a great idea but it’s no longer the agencies’ great idea.

On the vendor side, what about the sterling efforts of the media marketing agencies – Thinkbox, Radio Works, Magnetic, Newsworks?

They’ve certainly done excellent work over the years – but how much of their output and findings have translated into how media is traded?

Observe the reaction to ISBA’s Origin – an initiative that moves the ball forward both in its scope and ambition and in how it’s funded.

Are the buyers and sellers behind it, supporting their clients? With a few notable and it must be said significant exceptions the reaction has been rather disappointing. The broadcast vendors seem to want nothing to do with it and the agencies (ironically) moan on about how long it’s taking.

As if creating and delivering a new planning tool from nowhere is something that can be done in the odd lunch-hour.

In a couple of weeks, I’ll be on stage chairing the advertising session at the annual asi audience measurement conference, widely recognised as the best of its type. The future of measurement will, as always, be very much front and centre. How many agencies and advertisers will attend to contribute to the debate? Very few.

‘After Cannes we have no budget left’ is the typical agency response. Which is more important? Hobnobbing with clients or contributing to improving measurement? The answer of course is both – yet one seems more important to the guys running agencies than the other.

Finally, what about effectiveness measures? Nick Manning has argued convincingly that that’s where the future lies, and I agree with him. But who’s going to drive such initiatives? Surely the agencies, as unbiased professional advisors should take the lead.

But as we all know the agencies aren’t trusted, nor are they seen as fit for future purpose. If your holding company looks the other way whenever transparency, or fraud is discussed, why trust them with accessing and analysing your proprietary data?

There are certainly ways for agencies to lead their clients in commissioning and applying effectiveness measures. They can also do a lot of pragmatic things to regain trust, which really should be their number one task.

I’m afraid showing up to an event and throwing a hospital pass to under-resourced research guys isn’t the answer.

Especially if the kernel at the heart of your ambitious plan for the future is to change the description from ‘measurement’ to ‘impact’.

Last month Sir Martin Sorrell was at DMexco being interviewed by Ralph Simon, the CEO of the mobile consultancy business Mobilium.

Here’s what SMS had to say about the future of media agencies:

“My view is that the media planning and buying organisations that we see in the six agency holding companies probably employ about 200,000 – 250,000 people. They will not all be employed there …. even in two years’ time.”

Sorrell was the pioneer of media agency mini-holding groups, in his case GroupM, whose original reason for being was volume and volume deals.

I have an SMS quote from 15 years ago, when he opined that media agencies were entering a new era of ‘brain, not just brawn’. It’s been a while coming, the lure of high margins was just too great, but better late than never.

Media agencies grew up as buyers first and foremost. Clients referred to them as media buying agencies – many still do.

Planning was an after-thought, the front-of-house people designed to get you in the door. Once safely inside you were escorted to the smoke-filled, windowless room at the back where the deals were done. Truth is, you came for the deals, and everyone knew it.

Times change, today the opportunity is all about understanding audiences and turning that understanding, those insights into practical actions.

Buying the right thing beats taking on any old cheap tat.

Or it should do. There are still some dinosaurs around the industry, talking of share deals, cheap CPM’s, optimising clicks, using words like ‘views’ and ‘viewability’, ‘attention’ and ‘attribution’ without really knowing what they mean.

It’s an understandable confusion; if you ask 10 agencies for their definition of (let’s pick one at random) ‘attention’ you’ll get at least 15 different answers.

We don’t know what we mean ourselves, so why should our clients?

What we’re seeing today is the painful (re)birth of the planning era, an era defined by insights and creativity, not audits and CPM’s. The dinosaurs will die out, or at least retire comfortably, still raging against the platforms, and advertiser research initiatives whilst their ex-employers’ revenues drift away.

Their old allies the buying agencies are of little use. They have been hollowed out. A combination of a lack of trust, the giant platforms going direct to their advertisers, and a lack of real training in creativity as opposed to media technology has done this to them.

They’re understaffed, their margins aren’t what they were in the golden era before some busybodies and know-it-alls invented transparency and the large groups are in ‘deal hock’ to the major vendors.

They have little to say, few opinions about the issues of the day for fear of upsetting some corporate applecart somewhere.

They’re fast in danger of becoming irrelevant.

But there is hope.

Advertisers need help with navigation. There has never been a more complicated media scene and we’ve never had more data to help in the navigation. Data that can be insightful, or highly misleading.

Advertisers know this. Last week’s WFA and MediaSense research indicates that 24% say their media agency model is ‘unfit for their future needs’. Just half that number (11%) say their agency does meet their future needs.

The best agencies are full of bright people who between them combine the creative with the technological.

The rest are full of people terrified of making a mistake, whose horizons are defined not by doing the best for their clients but by keeping their superiors’ deals in line.

The best love the challenge of working with ambitious, risk-taking clients.

The rest settle for an easy life and simple solutions.

The best embrace accountability and search for innovation in modelling effect.

The rest look to control and bend results to their end-benefit regardless of validation or accuracy.

The best form a close bond with their clients and have no difficulty arguing for and justifying higher fees.

The rest cut client fees to win the business and moan about it for evermore, whilst finding ways to top up their revenue from suppliers.

The best create innovative plans, and find a way to execute.

The rest subcontract ‘planning’ (more accurately, allocation) to vendors, and post-rationalise what they’re fed back.

The best will survive and thrive; the rest will be replaced by machines and algorithms.

There’s certainly a bright future, as long as the agencies replace the rest with the best.

The ball is with them.

I mention this as the concept of integration of media with creative is hardly new. It’s where we started.

Back then, ad agency Media Directors argued for greater recognition within the agency, and when that didn’t happen several entrepreneurial characters took their ball away and started what were then called media independents.

The premise back then was simple. We only do media; we’re more invested in the subject and thus we do it better. Furthermore, we don’t waste money on agency fripperies and so we’ll deliver great value for money via better prices and lower fees.

Somewhere along the way from then to now we’ve mislaid something. The desire to do great work for clients.

Yes, I’ve read the award entries, but the day-to-day and the award entries rarely align.

It’s no doubt annoying when cynical old gits like me start sentences with the words: ‘In my day…’. So, I apologise to those easily annoyed for what follows.

In my day the client was front and centre. You did great work; you won more business. You won more business; you made more money. You made more money; you hired more and better people. And the world continued to turn.

I have a memory of making a speech like this to a group of my fellow Media Directors and assorted agency luminaries at a Media Circle event in the Channel Islands and being accused by one of my peers of extreme naivety. It was naïve of me to expect to get out of there alive, that’s for sure.

As I was told in no uncertain terms, clients wanted to pay less, we in agencies needed to make our crust from someone else, and the only option left was deals done with the media owner.

Why not, I asked, make the case to clients for better work and better outcomes being better rewarded? Too hard. Far easier to do media deals and keep the benefits.

No-one talked about it, no-one cared.

Until they did. We all know what happened next, with Jon Mandel, the rush to transparency, the agency sector’s failure to regain client trust, all leading to the mess we’re now in.

This is hardly news. Today the arguments raise eyebrows if not remedial actions.

What is mind-numbingly stupid is the largest agencies are making the exact same mistake again.

This time they’re assuming that no-one cares which ad tech they’re using, which firm they’re cosying up to, what ‘benefits’ they’ve negotiated for themselves, in the same way that they assumed no-one understood enough about ‘media’ to spot agency volume deals.

Only this time it’s worse as there are holding companies’ skirts to hide behind, there’s much talk of ‘privacy issues’, ‘regulatory authorities’, ‘legal niceties’.

Obviously, such things are important but the way these phrases are bandied around is outrageous.

The hope is that clients will lose interest and turn to something else.

But they won’t. These days there are enough well-informed people invested in doing media better. Questions will continue to be asked. Unless the major agencies stop the introspection they’ll eventually self-destruct.

It doesn’t need to be this way.

Clients need agencies more than ever – the world is too complicated not to need specialists.

At a time when it’s easier than ever to get it wrong, they also need agencies to do their best work.

The media agencies have quite enough talented people to do the best for their clients without these people having to spend a second worrying about their holding companies’ demands for ever-higher margins to shore up less successful sibling opcos.

The agencies have lost something along the way; the single-minded focus on doing the best for their clients. And yes they need to demonstrate their value every day to create a world within which they’ll be fairly rewarded.

It was a simple business until it wasn’t and until a few people decided to make money out of complexity.

Something’s been lost, but it’s still out there. Let’s hope we find it before too long.

The media and advertising world is measuring the wrong things.

And – we may be measuring some of the right things whilst fooling ourselves that what we’re measuring means something it doesn’t.

Take a metric like online clicks. On the surface this is a useful number. If someone clicks on something that surely suggests they’re interested in the thing they’ve clicked, they’ve considered it, decided they want to know more about it, so they’ve clicked.

Except we all know there is more to it. Bots click; people click by mistake; fingers slip; the layout of the page is designed to entrap you into clicking on the wrong thing. And so on.

Yet the myth persists. Ask any Editor. Why run fake, sensationalist headlines? Why the listicles? Because of the number of clicks. And clicks, even fake ones, mean prizes, or at any rate ad revenue.

But why? If a large proportion of clicks are fake, why do advertisers persist in believing the metric means anything?

Take a legacy measure; reach. The percentage of people seeing an ad, right? Except that isn’t what’s measured. At best we’re measuring the opportunity to see an ad, whilst in the USA we don’t even get that close given the focus is on measuring the viewing to the programme and not the ad.

It’s taken a new measurement business, Amplified Intelligence to demonstrate that just maybe reach isn’t what people think it is.

To many consumers, ‘advertising’ means any brand communication. It’s all ‘advertising’.

But most measurement conversations ignore those communication channels the industry doesn’t consider to be ‘advertising’.

Things like in-store displays, delivery vehicles, shop-fronts, events, influencers, word-of-mouth. Most of these are from a measurement perspective routinely ignored.

I worked for many years on the Coca-Cola account. Coke had for decades bought the famous illuminated roundel site on Piccadilly Circus. It must have been at least 25 years ago that we were asked to estimate that site’s reach, not just the traffic past the site over time but to include the number of times it had featured on postcards, in scenes in movies, on tourist maps, in books and articles.

It was a good question. How else could Coca-Cola calculate the true worth of that site?

We struggled; we would struggle now.

In all the talk of integrated communications we have made little progress when it comes to metrics. Yes, the within-a-single-medium metrics like BARB are subject to constant review and improvement, but this is akin to whistling an aria in a thunderstorm, it’s satisfying and impressive to those close by, but to anyone any distance away it’s not even noticed.

We argue about the little things. We become immersed in the politics of measurement and forget the question we’re trying to answer. We’re quick to believe the ‘because we’ve always done it this way’ argument, even if the world around us has changed.

We talk so much about integrated communications and yet we still use share-of-voice which by definition is neither accurate (given what’s measured and what’s not) nor relevant (given what’s included and what’s not).

In a 2014 HBR paper he co-authored, Keith Weed, ex-CMO at Unilever said: “We believe that the most important marketing metric will soon change from “share of wallet” or “share of voice” to “share of experience.” ‘Soon’ is overdue.

We need to update the narrative to take account of all interactions between brand and consumer. The IPA’s work on owned media, its value and where and how it fits into plans is a great start, but for channels to fly they need the jet fuel of measurement.

It’s an uncomfortable truth that many of the metrics we use have failed to keep pace with the communication world we live in.

Advertisers need to measure every experience the consumer has with their brands. Advertisers and their advisors talk endlessly about integrated communications. It’s about time more measured it.

Fewer, better, is the idea and so here we go again.

This is the first of the less frequent Cog Blog posts. It takes as inspiration a visit I made to the Byline Festival in Devon in mid-July.

I am a supporter of Byline – an investigative site and newspaper and home to some of the best journalism around.

Before anyone has a go – Byline does not accept advertising so what follows is in no way an ad sales pitch.

The highlight of the festival for me was their Editor-in-Chief, Peter Jukes’ on-stage discussion with the journalist Carole Cadwalladr.

For those unfamiliar with Carole, she is best known for exposing the misdemeanours of Cambridge Analytica, and their use of Facebook data to target messages during the 2016 UK Brexit Referendum campaign.

Since then, Carole has been subjected to all kinds of personal and professional abuse and attacks (in the Courts as well as in social media). These have come from all sorts of people, some of whom (like the ex-editor of ‘The Sunday Times’, a newspaper once renowned under a previous editor, the great Harry Evans for its investigative work) you would like to think would understand the value of open journalism.

The point of this is not to enter into some paeon of praise for Ms Cadwalladr but to point out the single-mindedness of the work she does.

You may not agree with Carole who, alongside others, including in our world Bob Hoffman, is concerned at the detrimental effect that social media forms have on open-minded debate and democracy, but agree or not I think we should listen to what media-people-who-are-not-advertising-media-people have to say.

It is easy for an advertiser to justify spending money with the giant online platforms.

The arguments are clear. Yes, there’s a huge audience (even if not quite as huge as some have claimed – given past boasts of reaching more individuals in some demographics than actually exist); yes, it’s easy to do (give them the money and they’ll sort out the mucky details for you); and yes, there’s peer pressure (‘that’s what my competitors are doing. I can’t afford not to be there’).

What is not quite so easy or comfortable is to ask whether as an advertiser you should be supporting certain channels regardless of the impact such channels have on vulnerable individuals (remember Molly Russell?) and on society as a whole.

When the argument for using this or that channel revolves around support for movements that drive societal good, like sustainability or diversity it’s easy to fall in line.

But what if it’s about supporting those channels who look the other way when it comes to corrupt behaviours; or who ignore abuses of power; or pose a threat to freedom of expression; or whose content promotes lies and falsehoods in order to deceive and mislead?

That’s harder.

I don’t think it’s any longer good enough to say, ‘oh well that’s where the audience is’ (especially if in many cases the audience isn’t even human).

Nor is it acceptable to hide behind the procurement argument (ironically rarely proffered by procurement professionals themselves who tend towards a more holistic view of value): ‘what can you do it’s cheap and we need to satisfy our auditors’.

Nor is it good enough to blame the client. An agency’s job surely is to advise and lead, not to follow instructions blindly. If it were the latter the world would be full of one-second audio commercials and very small posters (‘what do you mean? Look at the audience numbers’).

Great media thinking has always been about putting your client’s messages in those places most likely to drive a return, to which I would add: whilst not supporting fraud, bigotry, hatred and lies.

We have our tools – the research, the technology, the impenetrable systems.

We should add a more holistic view of the media channels we support with our clients’ money.

We should have this debate. Where do we draw the line these days between editorial freedom and responsibility, and advertiser pressure? Far better surely to have a conference about this rather than yet another event on the latest shiny thing.

We don’t have to agree; but we should consider.

We should be more Carole.

Less significant is that the day also marked the tenth anniversary of the Cog Blog.

The first post was on 2^nd July 2013. You can see it here.

Back then, I was rather airily aiming at a post a week. In fact, in that first week, I posted three, leading Derek Jones then at Mediatel to suggest I spread it out a bit. How right he was.

I haven’t managed to keep to the one a week target – my estimate is that over 10 years I’ve posted about 450 times. Missed target or not, the cogs have been whirring.

Reading some of the old posts (they’re all easily found, archived by year at www.bjanda.com/blog) I’m struck by how optimistic they are, and how short. Over time, like my waistline they’ve expanded.

They’ve also got angrier.

When I started my career in the late 1960’s I was very proud to work in advertising. I was, indeed still am, fascinated by how we mix creativity and numbers – to hark back to last week’s post, by magic and logic.

Today I’m more disappointed and frustrated than proud. The majority of people inhabiting what they refer to as the ad business are nothing to do with advertising. Instead, they’re technocrats and sales people more interested in numbers on a spreadsheet than in the ads themselves.

To make it worse these people don’t understand, nor do they care about audiences and how they behave. All they care about is maximising the numbers in the measured audience – even if the numbers are meaningless. Make them bigger, regardless. That’s ignorance masquerading as a policy.

How we got to this state is a long, long story involving technology understood by the few, vested interests, holding companies driving their media arms to deliver ever increasing profits to make up for under-deliveries elsewhere, advertisers who don’t want to admit they’ve been focussed on the wrong thing, a trade press concerned with not upsetting the platforms and an agency sector that shies away from controversy to focus on far more easily supportable, societal arguments.

There are of course many good guys – the strategic planners and thinkers, the fraud researchers, those in the attention measurement game doing all they can to move the industry forward, the indie agencies placing transparency ahead of easy money, advertisers who place creativity ahead of convenience, those always seeking to learn, to do better, and those from my generation raging against the dying of the light.

But we’re not the industry, however much we may think we should be.

Increasingly the debate is less about advertising and more about technology; less about meeting client needs and business objectives and more about selling snake oil.

I must admit I’m finding it increasingly difficult to write a regular weekly post (even if it’s less than weekly in reality) about things I care little about. And which to be honest I don’t always fully understand.

Frankly, there are quite enough people pontificating about things they don’t understand. The world doesn’t need another one. And so I’m going to stop doing it.

I won’t stop the Cog Blog altogether. I still care a lot about the ad industry, and I like to think I still have something to say. It’s just that I won’t be saying it quite as often.

I shall, in the words of one of my favourite authors, Alan Bennett be “keeping on keeping on.” You will still be able to find me on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and on my site. If you subscribe (for free) I’ll still let you know when I post anything of earth-shattering importance.

I’ll still consult, appear on platforms, chair events and work with those who’ll have me.

My hope for the industry has never been that we go back to some golden age (that never really existed) but that we come to our senses and realise we are here to do great work that works for our clients, even, maybe especially if they’re heading in the wrong direction.

We’re here to advise, objectively. Whatever the short-term consequences might be for our own bottom-line.

I am hopeful. Things go around, principles survive and reappear. We realise this more as we get older. In the words of the great Alan Bennett: “At eighty things do not occur, they recur.”

Thanks for reading and au revoir.

One of the best, and most under-rated publications in the ad industry is a booklet produced under the auspices of three trade bodies – the CIPS (procurement professionals), the IPA (agencies) and the ISBA (advertisers). Written by an outstanding agency planner, Marilyn Baxter it’s called ‘Magic and Logic’.

The best ad campaigns have always combined magic and logic. It is not logical to put a guy dressed as a gorilla behind a drumkit if what you’re doing is selling chocolate, but once you take the mental leap that what you’re selling is self-indulgent pleasure it becomes more understandable.

Over 50 years ago the then BMRB came up with the idea of a large-scale UK survey combining claimed product usage and media consumption. It was called the TGI.

I remember discussing this new-fangled tool with the creative founder of the agency I was in at the time. This is brilliant I said – we can target campaigns at people who use Brand A versus Brand B. His response was telling – you don’t want to take all the magic away from advertising on the back of some numbers.

And yet here we are.

Online advertising offers a number of well-known positives. A huge audience, identifiable down to the individual (in theory), the ability for the audience to respond, immediate feedback, and so on.

These positives are real – but like most things there’s a downside. And in this case the downside is both huge, and largely ignored.

Over the last few days, the grown-ups have it seems noticed what’s been going on.

Reporting at Cannes, the US advertisers’ body the ANA highlighted the high proportion of programmatic impressions (21%) that end up on made-for-advertising sites.

This week the Wall Street Journal highlighted Google’s failure to meet its own standards when placing video ads on third-party channels.

And the ad fraud expert Dr Augustine Fou continued his tireless campaign to make advertisers aware of the extent of fraud in online media. As he says:

“As far back as 2015, AppNexus admitted that 92% of the impressions they sold were fraudulent. https://www.adexchanger.com/ad-exchange-news/6-months-after-fraud-cleanup-appnexus-shares-effect-on-its-exchange/ But none of their customers ever got refunds. Ad fraud has been a 90%+ problem since at least 2015.”

For years media departments in ad agencies and the media agencies that emerged from them rightly promoted media planning and buying as a specialism, much needed in an ever-more complicated world.

Agencies were the experts – they were trusted by their clients to be objective when it came to evaluating new research from media vendors. Over time they’ve ceded ground to the platforms’ ambition to deal direct with advertisers. ‘Give us the budget, we’ll plan it, buy it and evaluate the results for you’. And if you believe that I’ve got a bridge to sell you.

Many advertisers have fallen for this – their erstwhile partners the media agencies have shown themselves to be more interested in deals for themselves than in objectivity. Sadly, an element of trust has been shattered.

Ad fraud is invasive – non-specialists at advertisers are being cheated out of significant portions of their budgets, and don’t know who to turn to for objective advice.

Nobody wants to admit that this problem has arisen on their watch, the agency experts who were once relied upon to give their clients objective advice don’t show any appetite for any real investigation into ad fraud, and so the cycle continues round and round, ever downwards.

For this to end, advertisers have to go back to basics. They advertise after all to achieve something. The ‘something’ has to be an identifiable business benefit. Not reach, not impressions, not media metrics. These things are checkpoints along the way but they’re not in themselves the end goal.

My Crater Lake colleague, David Beaton, from the advanced analytics business NavigationME puts it like this:

“Online media planning and buying suffers from badly aligned incentives combined with poor analytics.

The chase for cheap reach served by agencies using reach and other media metrics as a proxy for business success has led to a perfect storm of waste and fraud on a massive scale.

Unless these incentives are addressed, the waste and fraud will continue.

Bots Don’t Buy is a targeting model and system of measurement designed to plan and buy online media in a way that directly impacts client business outcomes.

There is no reason for the waste to continue; the technology and know-how exists to address it. We just need the will to stop pretending media metrics are the same as business success”.

As an industry we’ve created a system that enriches the fraudsters, encourages the funding of ad tech businesses built on sand (now duly collapsing), emboldens the holding companies to prioritise profit over building their clients’ businesses, legitimises media auditing of the wrong things, and misleads advertisers.

‘Magic and Logic’ was published in 2006. It was optimistic, full of promise for a collaborative, quantifiably measured future between businesses and the agencies that serve them.

We’ve fallen way short.

I would be the first to admit that when it comes to the technology this is a topic I know little about. I suppose that there’s the potential for AI to rule the world, to take our jobs and to cast us all into outer darkness, but there’s also the potential for me to run a marathon.

Neither seem very likely to me.

I’m no expert in how the technology works. In that, I like to think I’m aligned with 90% of the ad industry, 80% of the media industry, and 99% of online commentators.

I also know very little (and even that’s an exaggeration) about how broadcast signals are transmitted and received, how streaming actually works and how self-drive hybrid cars operate. I use all of these things quite satisfactorily.

I can see the great potential in AI; but then I witness most days how the reality fails to live up to the promise. I still get letters addressed to ‘The Occupier’; I still spend hours filling out forms in duplicate; I still get frustrated explaining the same thing over and over again to different departments of the same supplier.

Surely in a world ruled by big data and our AI-driven ability to harness it the end-execution should be a little better?

Even in our own little world, and only this week the ANA reported on the waste generated by programmatic buys, focussing in on the creeping insidiousness of made-for-advertising sites, or MFAs.

The ANA found that 15% of participants’ budget and 21% of impressions are accounted for by MFAs.

And that the average advertiser campaign ran on 44,000 sites. I don’t believe there are 44,000 sites that add unique reach, or any valuable frequency against any target market.

And remember – these are ANA advertisers, so the more sophisticated end of the market.

Maybe the ANA will revise its rather confusing and variable position on ad fraud whilst they’re at it. To remind you:

‘Juniper Research (estimates that) $68bn will be lost to ad fraud this year. ($68bn may be at the low end – the ANA in the US have quoted $120bn although they promptly ‘disappeared’ that figure when it started to attract attention)’.

Nick Manning’s The Media Leader column makes the point that the ANA work mirrors the principal findings of ISBA’s 2020 report into much the same thing.

Progress is it seems slow, possibly because the agency experts guiding their clients through this morass whilst avoiding the worst pitfalls are too busy thinking up the latest way to make money from the mess that is online media.

My point is if AI is all-embracing and smart why is the reality often so rubbish? How come we are still wasting millions / billions of our clients’ money by buying ads that reach an audience of bots?

Is AI a great threat to jobs? Will we enter a world within which all ads are written by Chatgpt or the next generation equivalent? Will all media plans and buys be automated, with budgets spent untouched by human hand?

It suits some people, in particular those with systems to sell to talk up the benefits that come from automation. And it suits our trade press to amplify the apocalyptic message – the end of the industry is news after all.

I see AI technology as a fuel to tools, a brilliant way for us to do our jobs better.

Take the creating of an ad campaign. Someone has a genius idea, in all likelihood sparked by a brilliant planner analysing all kinds of data and considering all sorts of insights.

I’ve worked with many great planners. You know how good they are when they say something to which your reaction is ‘yes, of course. That’s obvious.’ Whilst at the same time acknowledging that you, as a mere mortal would never in a million years have thought of that.

The marriage between data and creativity is helped hugely by an ability to analyse loads of stuff, very quickly.

That’s where the genius spark starts. It’s not in itself the genius spark.

I was encouraged to read this today in the WSJ, in which Omnicom discuss their new AI tool (and thanks to Kristin Engard for the post):

“Omnicom frames the move as a way to get smarter answers in less time, with more workers being able to use deeper data analysis — A virtual assistant to help ad agency employees with tasks across the advertising process such as compiling audience insights and building media plans.”

These things are tools. They help us do a better job, in multiple ways. But they’re not the job, at least not yet.

I wish more of us would use them to do a better job because right now we’re screwing things up pretty badly.

I’ve never had any truck with politicians but for once I felt a pang of sympathy. People do rush to criticise without reading the original and do comment from a position of not knowing what’s being suggested.

My start-point was and is that advertisers’ trust in media agencies is not great. Whichever means you use to measure it – by surveys or by tracking the number choosing to do their own thing in-house – there is a genuine question-mark over what value the agencies bring their clients, how they make their money, and how objective their advice is.

And anyone thinking the core transparency discussion is long past are wrong, as Nick Manning and AdAge pointed out this week.

I’ve been out of agencies a long time (best to get that in early) but I do see a lot of them via consultancy assignments and pitches.

And what I see is a sector talking to itself, doing its best to convince itself of its general wonderfulness whilst ignoring the criticisms.

Meantime the larger industry sees a group investing in vendors’ businesses, hiding and manipulating data and avoiding the key issues of the day if said issues are rather inconvenient to their bottom line (think online ad fraud).

In short, a group of market traders not a cerebral group focussed on finding the best solutions for their clients.

This is I admit harsh. There are plenty of smart people in agencies, there are also some agencies, particularly away from the heritage group of holding companies who put their clients front and centre. And away from the agencies the online ad industry in its many facets is certainly not blameless.

My premise was and is that the agencies need a reset. They’re not just media buying businesses (the descriptor most clients still use); they are in theory or could be in practice expert integrated communication planners.

To be a great planner takes a number of skills and abilities including curiosity. You need to be curious about people, why they do as they do, curious about clients’ brands and businesses, curious about the whole world of media and communications, curious to learn.

What you don’t need is a corporate deal maker insisting you put your curiosity and creativity in a box, close it, shove it under the stairs and use ‘X’ over ‘Y’ because of some over-arching commitment.

My suggestion is to establish a framework, largely using existing resources based around encouraging curiosity and learning. To giving these abilities the space to grow and flower.

This framework would consist of a number of courses, awards, conferences, and (yes) exams selected for their ability to encourage a closer relationship with the ad industry as a whole, and to encourage the flowering of an ability to think broadly and beyond the media numbers.

The plan is to go beyond specific media skills’ training. There are after all, as several people have said plenty of courses in how to use Google and Facebook, largely run by Google and Facebook.

In my fantasy world candidates would be awarded credits for participation in a number of pre-approved activities. Enter a paper in the IPA Ad Effectiveness Awards, get credits. Win an award, get more credits. Be published, get credits. Attend an approved industry conference, get credits. Speak at such an event, get more credits.

Complete an approved internal course, get credits. Pass an industry course, get more credits.

And so on.

One comment, from an agency head of planning said that nothing beats on-the-job experience. To me that’s rather arrogant – it may be that the agency doesn’t know absolutely everything about everything.

Of course, experience counts. My plan combines on-the-job experience shared via in-house sharing with learning from organisations and centres of excellence outside the agency.

Who should run such a scheme? I would favour an established, highly respected trade body active across all elements of the ad industry. My choice would be The Advertising Association, with the active support of the IPA and ISBA.

They would come together to publicise the scheme, its objectives and the importance of credits, to embed the scheme within the industry.

One way to kickstart the scheme would be to suggest to clients that they make participation and support, and eventually the awarding of credits a factor in whether agencies were included in pitches.

This is not unknown with such as D&I, Women Owned Businesses and others.

This may all sound a bit draconian but if we’re to raise the standing of media agencies, and to restore trust in the art of planning, as opposed to the science of buying we have to think differently.

To go back to the start, there’s a (quite possibly existential) reputational issue that needs addressing.

This is my attempt to address it.

A recent report from the media consultants, MediaSense concludes that over half of agency staff believe that pitching affects their mental health. This is a story with legs – it includes the magic words ‘pitching’ and ‘mental health’ thus virtually guaranteeing it will be picked up by all sorts of people, including AdAge.

Several agency leaders, notably the Goodstuff Founder Andrew Stephens have called for the pitching process to be rethought. Certainly, the whole thing needs to be better managed – but the people who can make that happen are, ahem, the consultants and the agencies.

I should declare an interest. We do run pitches occasionally. It’s not something BJ&A actively seeks to do, in large part because I believe that there are far too many pitches, and they are often called for the worst of reasons.

Kellogg’s used to give all their brand managers a basic guide to working with ad agencies. The first paragraph said something like: ‘It is not your job to change the ad agency. It is your job to get the best from the ad agency.’

I’ve always lived by that. When asked to run a pitch the first thing we try to do is to talk the client out of it. Why do they want to pitch? What are they hoping to achieve? Has it occurred to them that the issue, whatever it is, could be at their end, not their agency’s? Have they talked openly to their agency’s leaders?

I’m not naïve enough to believe that most pitch consultants will do this. After all, running pitches is not a large part of what we do.

But even when we do them, we are very clear as to the rules of engagement. The consultant’s task, as I see it is to make life hard for the client by ensuring every agency does a wonderful job.

That takes time, so the consultant needs to ensure participants are given the time. It’s no good just agreeing to the client’s timeline and then beating up the agencies to ensure it is met.

The consultant is hired to give proper, best-in-class advice. And that very much includes advising, even pushing back on the timeline.

Consultants should make themselves available to the agencies throughout the process. Try and answer their questions, listen to their concerns, find answers from the client if you need to.

I’ve been in enough pitches as the agency to know how important the role of the consultant can be. I’ve also seen enough terrible examples of how not to do it. ‘Don’t question me’, ‘don’t expect me to revert to the client for you’, ‘just do what you’re told’, ‘keep to the timing’, ‘sorry the rules have changed but no you’re not to know why, nor will you be given any more time.’ I’ve had all of these and more from well-respected (in their own heads at least) pitch consultants.

Too many consultants have never run pitches as an agency, aren’t experienced and are simply following orders.

After the event, the consultant needs to feedback honestly and constructively. Tell the losing agencies why they lost. Telling them the client ‘just wasn’t excited’ by them is neither helpful, nor constructive. It may be part of the truth, but explaining why is always appreciated.

Avoiding feedback is cowardly, and unprofessional.

Agencies can help themselves too. If you’re not given the time to do your best, say so. Loudly, and upfront. Don’t feel you have to pitch everything. After all, if clients run a terrible pitch, odds are they’ll turn out to be a dreadful client.

Last week Brandtech Group acquired Jellyfish. This isn’t the place to comment on the deal, which I do think is an excellent one for both parties, but I was very taken with Nick Emery’s comment on pitching in an interview with The Media Leader:

“We don’t want to be in the business of year-long procurement-led pitches for 120-day payment terms. If you are that kind of client, then don’t bother. I’d much rather be the kind of New Age version of BBH, where you don’t have to pitch if you (don’t) want to.”

I always loved pitches, the drama, the excitement, the teamwork, and yes, the stress.

But I can well see that others feel differently.

It doesn’t sit well for consultants and agencies to complain as if the stress and strain happens in a world where they have no say, and no responsibility.

They can do something about it. Yes, so could clients, but clients hire consultants to run these things for them. The responsibility sits with the consultants, and the agencies themselves. They can encourage and drive change.

But they don’t, and I very much fear they won’t.

The McKinsey piece was entitled ‘Unleashing the Power of Retail Media’, dated May 18^th 2023. I should add that as I don’t subscribe to McKinsey’s reports, I’ve only read the publicly available executive summary. There’s no doubt more detail in the full report.

I agree that retail media is a fast growth, high potential channel. But I wonder about the efficacy of the support on what advertisers are looking for and expect, as quoted by McKinsey.

The report asks advertisers to rank channels (presumably from amongst a pre-coded list of retail media options) that deliver the highest return on advertising spend and then suggests that the best course of action is to ‘know what works and then double down’.

No kidding!

The idea that you should do more of what works is clearly good advice, but asking advertisers to rank channels is flawed especially if, as I suspect might be the case here the answers rely more on gut feel than empirical evidence. Plus, surely respondents would tend to rank whatever they do as best – to suggest otherwise would be to infer that they’ve done the wrong thing which whilst quite probably true would never do.

Elsewhere McKinsey tells us that advertising dollars ‘flow towards transparency and performance’. Up to a point, Lord Copper, and yes you would like to think so. But if advertisers really cared that much about transparency and performance, would they have spent the last decade investing so much in platforms whose data is both unvalidated and hidden from objective investigation?

But again, if you were asked the question I imagine ‘transparency and performance’ would be well up there on the wish list, even if your actions suggested something different.

Last week I cautioned against badly thought-out survey questions leading to misleading conclusions. It’s always a good idea to go back to the source.

When I worked in media agencies, we all wanted to be McKinsey. How, we asked ourselves could they charge so much, and gain such privileged access to the top of organisations?

No doubt they’re geniuses but even geniuses can learn from subject experts, in this case researchers expert in building questionnaires.

Media agencies used to be subject experts. Their leaders were forever popping up in the national press, on broadcast TV, in the trades pontificating about this or that media topic.

Maybe I read the wrong titles, follow the wrong sites and watch the wrong video channels but the current crop of agency leaders seem to be rather more bashful, more wary of upsetting a vendor or ad tech supplier than in impressing with their expertise.

Heaven forbid it’s because there are holding company deals at stake somewhere.

Nick Manning’s Media Leader piece makes the point that “advertising as a basis for the funding of many internet-led businesses, including ad tech, may … prove unsustainable”.

In other words, some people responsible for spending money may have made some bad bets.

Ad spend is not elastic; it doesn’t miraculously expand to fill the options available. Yet many ‘experts’, especially those from outside the industry seem to believe the opposite.

Management consultancies, VC’s, private equity funds do sometimes seem to support ad funded businesses which anyone with a few years in the ad business would tell them won’t work.

Advertising can never fund everything – budgets are finite and as a rule of thumb if a new thing comes along requiring funding from advertising that money will have to come from an existing channel.

One example of this sort of narrow thinking is that the only thing that matters is big numbers.

Some years ago, a well-known media industry investment advisor tried to convince me that embedding a paid-for message within a telco service was a great idea. If I called you, and you didn’t pick up immediately I would be played an audio ad.

Think of the millions of calls not answered immediately, he said. You should be recommending this to all clients, immediately.

My argument, that this would be a massive source of ad invasion and irritation, didn’t wash. Think of the numbers, he kept repeating.

As far as I know it never happened, but I would be prepared to bet that that was nothing to do with the argument that context matters at least as much as gross numbers.

Media professionals are by no means immune from making mistakes; but I like to think that if I was advising someone to invest in a sector in which neither I nor the investor had any direct experience I would have the humility and self-awareness to seek out those with direct experience.

Mind you, where to find them is a whole other question.

Knowing the basics should be fundamental. In our world, where does the data we all take for granted come from? How is it collected? What are the assumptions behind it?

How can anyone advise anyone to do anything without at least a basic understanding of the tools we all use to make recommendations, or spend someone else’s money?

We are all asked to do surveys. All the time. Next time you do one just stop and ask yourself how much thought you’re giving to it; how accurate you’re being; or how easy or clear the questions are to answer.

Remember – someone is taking action, or spending money on the basis of what you say.

Professionally, it’s never a bad idea to ask if it would be possible to complete the questionnaire or task as a respondent. Obviously sometimes it isn’t practical but whenever I have been allowed to do this it is inevitably revealing.

A few years ago, a service appeared that claimed to measure, via an online after-the-event questionnaire, all exposures to every piece of branded communication. Taking a beer brand as an example, the claim was that one study allowed planners to compare the efficacy of beer mats with pump decals, TV commercial, sponsorships, social media, OOH. All on a like-for-like basis. All based around what the respondent claimed to remember.

We asked if everyone at the client, plus the agencies could take the questionnaire. The research supplier wasn’t over-joyed with the notion, but we insisted. Our experience allowed us to put the results into context. In short, and to be polite not to take them too literally.

On the flipside early in my career I sat as an agency representative on the BARB Technical Sub-Committee. For a technical reason to do with boundary changes some panel homes were going to be dropped by BARB. Their data was already being discarded.

We were offered the chance to visit a few of these homes, to meet some ex-BARB panel members. At this stage they were unaware that their responses were no longer included in the study.

What struck me was how incredibly seriously these people took their task. They believed they had a responsibility for shaping TV, for deciding what was recommissioned, what dropped. They were of course to an extent right.

When faced with a bunch of cynical London-based ad people they were shocked to think that we thought they made up the data or didn’t answer the questions they were asked accurately and in a timely fashion.

It may be considered nerdy by some to worry about audience measurement data, or brand metrics but I don’t see how agencies can do their job properly without understanding where the basics come from, and what they mean.

I also think advertisers should, prior to spending any money insist that the people they’re spending it with have at least some degree of understanding of the data they’re using to guide their decisions.

After all, financial advisors have to take regular exams to update and keep their qualifications. Why aren’t agency media people responsible for investing large sums of money subject to the same scrutiny?

We could create a system where different activities, like taking an exam, completing a course, attending a conference all generate points towards a qualification. The points would lapse after so many years, meaning you need to keep up-to-date.

An agency would only qualify to handle a client’s business if they could show they have an aggregate number of points amongst their teams. If they so wish, agencies can be approved to run regular internal courses thus making the whole thing easier to participate in.

Right now what we’re doing in spending our clients’ money is in essence educated guessing, what we think likely to work best. In fact, it’s not even that educated as a lot of the time we don’t really pay much attention to the source of the data we’re using.

The fact that clients’ trust in agencies has declined is well-known. The growth of in-house teams, and the direct sales efforts of the major vendors threaten agencies’ very existence.

A scheme to ensure a level of understanding in the tools we use would help give clients’ back their confidence in the professional capabilities of media agencies.

Raising professional standards in understanding would impact all aspects of the media industry positively.

Probably both are true, to a greater or lesser extent.

Last week Channel 4 in the UK screened an excellent documentary called ‘Mad Women’. This took as its premise the rise of women, particularly in creative roles in what used to be male-dominated ad agencies. The programme started in the 1970’s and ran through to the present day.

Setting aside the whole point of the piece, the rise to prominence of ad women, as a by-product the programme re-established that ads could be fun. The old Ad Association finding that more people preferred the ads to the programmes was wheeled out, but regardless of that, and of the undeniable fact that there was a load of dross along with the occasional sparks of brilliance, there were some great ads.

Furthermore, campaigns did effect change. Dove’s ‘Curves’ campaign (aka ‘The Campaign for Real Beauty’) did change the way women were portrayed – at least some of the time.

There were more modern examples of women leading the conversation on display too. Maltesers for one.

And Dove has continued to set a high bar with its ‘self-esteem’ work.

I watch films like this and feel proud that the marketing industry spends on such themes, and that the ad business can still produce emotional, stirring films.

The Channel 4 film mainly featured creatives, although a good case could be made for a sister-episode on the media agency world.

Although a ‘women in media’ discussion could build a strong story around the rise of women to leadership positions in media agencies, it would struggle to make the point that there has been a parallel change in the output that the public sees.

This is obvious, consumers don’t see media plans they see ads, but there is still a point to be made, even if it’s less about the rise of women and more to do with the way media agencies are funded.

Our excessive use of social media – the communication channel where ads are most disliked and resented by those exposed to them – could be moderated by an honest assessment of the available research by the media agency world.

Agencies are there to advise clients, to offer their best, unbiased, objective advice.

Instead, they go with the flow, support the easier option. They don’t push the unpopular line, even if it’s supported by the evidence. Why else would they continue to ignore ad fraud? Why else promote social media channels who make up audience data?

Media people have drifted away from the ad business. They’ve drifted away from ads.

Look at the holding companies. Did WPP start Mindshare, or acquire The Media Business (from which emerged MediaCom) to improve the advertising? They did not.

Holding company media operations are about one thing and one thing only – money.

It’s an open secret that it’s the likes of Zenith and Starcom that keep Publicis profitable. That GroupM makes far higher margins than any other WPP opco. That OMG in effect underwrites the Omnicom creative agencies.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with making money, or high margins but where I part company with my friends in the holding company media operations is that in my world you do a great job for your client, justify a high fee, and invest in your people.

For this I am called naïve – but the evidence is out there that clients will pay higher fees if they can be convinced that they achieve greater real value for money.

We are just rubbish at making that case, so we carry on charging lower fees in the sure-fire knowledge that we can make up the shortfall elsewhere.

After all, it’s a lot easier to say ‘we’ll charge you less’ than to explain that quality costs money.

Despite the hit from the transparency movement, the emergence of adtech has saved the agencies’ financial bacon and delivered a whole new area of complexity where most clients know little – including how to pay for what they get.

So the large agencies cozy up to the adtech businesses, and continue to make money from any number of sources besides and beyond the end client, whilst running the business on a mix of cheap juniors and staff ‘borrowed’ from the likes of Google.

There are exceptions amongst the independent media specialists like the7stars, Craft and December 19 but the industry ultimately is judged by the actions of the largest.

And there are pockets of excellence within the networks too. But as a wise consultant one told me – it’s all about the showgirls attracting you into the casino. The real business is done in the windowless back office away from the prying eyes of customers.

Awards, books, conference speeches aside, at its core the media agency business is not about clients and ads and is about technology, hidden deals and margin.

I find that dishonest. And sad.

But then I am ‘of a certain age’.

A role overseeing the overseers can end up focusing on the many noble causes everyone can agree on. It may not please everyone, but it can avoid upset by keeping away from anything too controversial.

The WFA has published its Global Media Charter 2023, building on the 2018 edition from which various in-market cross-media measurement initiatives including ISBA’s Origin emerged.

There are many good things about this new version, and a lot of people did a lot of work but (you just knew there had to be a ‘but’) a major issue has been avoided.

Before getting to what’s not there, credit where it’s due. The GMC addresses a number of highly pertinent topics:

• Competition & Plurality
• Measurement & Accountability
• Responsibility & Society
• Sustainability & Planet
• People & Partners

Each topic area has identified ‘champions’ responsible for delivering to the policy as outlined and agreed.

All fine and dandy. Who doesn’t want a sustainable planet? Or a responsible society? But there’s an omission.

We’re talking about the ‘F’ word – fraud.

Let me take you back to the great transparency scandal of March 2015. This started, Cog Blog readers will remember, when Jon Mandel, MediaCom’s ex-CEO told the ANA that agencies didn’t always return all discounts and rebates to their clients, and that deals were struck before plans were written. Buys drove plans in other words.  

Cue outrage, shock and horror amongst the US advertiser community.

Advertisers were caught on the hop. Their contracts were too loose, too ambiguous, too easy for certain agencies who chose to do so to hide revenues.

The WFA could and should have got ahead of this.

Back to today. The elephant in the room facing advertisers today is the colossal amount of fraud that has permeated the online ad world, and especially those campaigns bought programmatically with little oversight from agency buyers.

We can argue why this lack of oversight happens but what is simply unarguable is that the amount of money wasted by advertisers to enrich fraudsters is huge.

How huge we can also argue, but even the ANA, who seem to studiously avoid the topic to the extent of removing very large estimates from their own website would have little problem with an annual estimate of ‘over US$70 billion’.

As with Mandel, those in the know, know this is a major problem.

Here’s the ex-ISBA Media Director, Bob Wootton in his regular Media Leader column a few days ago discussing the implications of AI (the italics are Bob’s): “Expect all the crooks and bad actors already active in online advertising — about which we continue to do little — to be very active indeed in the new spaces”.

Or, again from the Media Leader a headline that CTV ad fraud costs advertisers up to $8m a month. This from a report by the Video Advertising Bureau who whilst admitting the problem seem to underplay its extent, based on the US$70 billion annual loss quoted earlier.

Dr Augustine Fou, the independent fraud detection expert who has done more to raise awareness of fraud issues than anyone, had this to say: “This (the claim that there are limited opportunities for fraud within CTV) is only true if ad buyers bought CTV ads directly from those media sellers. Everything else in programmatic channels is bad guys pretending to be those premium CTV channels and the media sellers cannot prevent any of it themselves.”

Dr Fou went on to make some not particularly flattering remarks about the VAB’s report. I’m of an age that would file their findings under ‘Mandy Rice-Davies’, but that’s probably just me.

By the way, if you don’t follow Dr Fou, you should. He’s generous in his sharing of data and explanations around fraud. Here’s an example of his latest thinking on focussing on humans.

So why isn’t the WFA helping members address fraud? Could it perhaps be because:

• Advertiser marketing and media teams have been caught out for years, and don’t want to shine a light on past failings. The reality is that the fraudsters have been winning, against everyone for ages. It must be better to act later than never.
• Large, well-funded fraud detection businesses are supported by the biggest network media agencies in order to demonstrate that fraud is a non-issue that they’re on top of.
• Shamefully most on the buy side have no interest in uncovering the true extent of ad fraud.
• Even if they wanted to, agency teams are understaffed and underqualified to do anything except rely on programmatic systems to place online activity.
• As long as nobody looks too carefully at the make-up of impressions the notional CPM delivered is very low, satisfying procurement teams and (again, underqualified) auditors.
• As bots don’t buy stuff, this looking the other way and relying on fake numbers will eventually come to light.

The WFA’s Media Charter praises ISBA’s work with PwC on how money flows around the online supply chain. This has indeed been pragmatic, involving and helpful.

As far as I can see the WFA makes no mention as to how advertisers can get to grips with ad fraud. That’s a mistake that the two Measurement and Accountability ‘Champions’ (Reckitt’s Sameer Amin and PespsiCo’s Atin Kulkarni) should be addressing.

They may want to give Dr Fou a call.

The Media Leader picked up on the same issue, although Nick Manning’s piece there identified a different underlying cause. Money.

I think both have a point. But there’s more to it.

Although it is fashionable to blame burnout, stress, working late and the rest on the industry’s ills, it was ever thus. It always used to be a badge of honour to be noticed staying later and getting in earlier than anyone else, and whilst it was neither clever nor necessary it was a thing; it did happen.

I suspect (but can’t prove it) that if there was a way of measuring the time spent actually working, as opposed to travelling, socialising, generally fannying about, today’s admen work no harder, and no less hard than their predecessors.

What is true, thank goodness is that we are certainly more aware than we used to be of the impact long hours at work, or the stresses caused by the threat of losing an account has on overall wellbeing and mental health. But when all’s said and done, I’m not convinced that the ad world is all that different from other service industries.

As to money, the industry has never been able to compete with what it would consider its competitive set. Management consultancies as one example used to pay a starting salary in my day around double that paid by the agencies.

Agencies are not massively profitable enterprises for a host of reasons, but first, second and third amongst them is the sad fact that many, many client boards don’t see the value in the work that we do.

We’ve been complaining about access to the C-Suite for years and have not advanced our cause one jot. We now have the tools we need; we just don’t use them.

We need to change that, so much is clear, but underneath it all there are far too many agencies and far too little work. In a buyer’s market, especially when the thing being bought is a vaguely defined commodity, like impressions or views, as opposed to priceless creativity, prices will drop.

Management consultancies, of whom there are comparably few compared to even media agencies pay to attract the best. We don’t.

In the past we got by on the basis that advertising was a fun, creative way to earn a living.

Agencies used to spend time going around the universities, presenting at careers fairs, promoting the industry. I may very well be wrong but I’m not sure they do that so much these days.

I think the decline in the attractiveness of the industry starts with the word ‘creative’.

‘The Guardian’ piece at the start of this post quoted four campaigns. In chronological order they were: Levi’s Launderette (1985); Guinness Surfer (1998) and Cadbury’s Gorilla (2007). The fourth, John Lewis is current, although for how much longer given their change in creative direction is questionable.

John Lewis aside the latest in ‘The Guardian’s’ hall of fame is 16 years old.

The latest public musings from Levi’s had their CMO talking of the brand’s priority to be always on, in effect placing quantity (of audience) over quality (of message).

Graduates used to want to join the ad world because of the ads. Yes, the money was important but the focus within the industry on creativity and originality of thought over academic qualifications was appealing to many.

Today the focus is more (to quote Sir Martin Sorrell) on mathsmen over madmen.

We want creators of spreadsheets, social media obsessives, interpreters of acronyms, masters in understanding the numbers, over having and honing the skills to unlock the desires, wants and needs of real people.

In 1947 Bill Bernbach wrote a letter to his agency colleagues.

It started: ‘Our agency is getting big. That’s something to be happy about. But it’s something to be worried about too…’.

It ended: ‘The danger lies in the temptation to buy routinised men who have a formula for advertising.’

People are leaving, or not joining the ad industry because it’s no longer about magic.

The rest is noise.

The channels concerned may not all be paid advertising per se, although of course many are. We can all quote examples of a base TV campaign using OOH or radio to extend activity over time; of video extending onto social; of print newspaper or magazine activity being supported by branded content in the form of advertorials or something similar.

Not all combinations involve paid for ads. Remember those ‘as seen on TV’ starbursts? Or the shop window displays riffing off of a TV execution. Or a TV ad music track morphing into a song released as a single and acting as a reminder every time it’s played. Or the PR story woven using the thread created by an online sensation.

Combinations work best, they always have and always will.

As media people we over-obsess about reach, but the more compelling reason for combinations has always been about appealing to different criteria, the rational working alongside the emotional, the engaged with the fleeting.

We all know that media audience measurement is paid for in the main by the vendors, the channels. The vendors couldn’t care less about combinations; the agencies and the advertisers care – but not enough to initiate, at least not until recently.

Although they appear to care, media agencies’ true love has from their inception been buying. Buying’s fun, it’s negotiation, it’s alpha, it’s about power (and vendor funded trips).

To trade both sides need a currency.

Agencies may talk a good game when it comes to planning but they need their clients to push them towards any form of truly cross-media initiative.

The agency community (and I wouldn’t limit this to media agencies) has failed to convince their advertisers of the true value they bring to the business.

So, given that identifying and delivering real business value is tough, easier by far to stick to deals. Easily measured, easily demonstrated, easy to justify and so often entirely irrelevant to the true task in hand.

Buying remains important but my sense is it is recognised by more advertisers as an executional centre-of-excellence, not as the be-all-and-end-all.

One reason is the (lack of) transparency. It would be wrong to presume that this debate ended with the Jon Mandel case. Ad tech has introduced a whole new realm of jargon, complexity and deal opportunities.

To paraphrase the great Irwin Gotlieb: where there’s confusion there’s margin.

However – it’s not all doom and gloom, deals and hidden revenues.

The other week the UK’s largest independent media agency the7stars hosted an interesting debate on ‘The New Effectiveness Normal’. It was subtitled ‘Making the business case for advertising…’

Two things struck me. First, the place was packed – with clients and I guess vendors. Second the audience asked great questions, they were engaged and keen to learn from the presenters.

This for an event featuring market modelling and economic forecasting.

I’m sure the7stars aren’t the only agency doing things like this, although they’re the only ones to have been kind enough to invite me. Plus, for their whole existence they have stood up for true transparency over any form of money-making deals with vendors.  Providing thinking and services around ‘making the business case’ fits well within their offering.

Not so with every other agency.

I do think the plates are shifting; and in such circumstances the audience measurement world needs to take stock.

This shift is happening for multiple reasons – the growth of the giant platforms, the focus on safe content, the ability to understand factors like attention paid, the failure to fit everything into a joint industry structure, the rise of ad fraud, the loss of trust in agencies.

Whatever the reason the net is the growing significance of and involvement from advertisers in media affairs, including audience measurement.

ISBA is more of a force and a positive influence (on many levels, not just this one) than I can remember in 50+ years in the business. More and more advertisers are hiring media (and related) specialists in-house. There’s more of a focus on true accountability.

If we’re serious about accountability we need a framework to assess combinations. And audience measurement plays a fundamental role in this.

Rethinking doesn’t mean dumping what we have; rather it means broadening the discussion, being more open-minded as to the options.

That’s the big picture behind ISBA’s Origin initiative, the wide acceptance of a measurement funding levy, and a boom in market modelling. There’s a desire from advertisers to learn more in order to help get the balance right, a realisation that what’s needed is a means to provide assistance to plan across all channels.

Those channels and vendors who believe in sticking with a buying and selling model will do what they feel most comfortable doing.

What they do will always have its place, but they’ll be playing in an ever-shrinking market as the phrase ‘integrated communications’ moves beyond a catchphrase in agency pitch decks to a principle driving budget allocation.

This is a little like Miss World contestants calling for World Peace. Or politicians calling for An End to Poverty.

We can agree that these are all Good Things as long as someone else does the work and it doesn’t inconvenience me too much.

There’s a myth that dots were painlessly joined in the old full-service agency era. As someone still walking and talking who remembers those days, I can assure you the painless bit is largely a myth.

Certainly, popping into an adjacent office was easier than setting up a Zoom call, or hopping in a taxi, but dot joining was always more about a frame of mind than the practicalities of sitting in the same space.

If you wanted to do it, you did it. If you didn’t, you didn’t.

To quote from the great Dave Trott in this week’s ‘Campaign’: “Real creativity came from account handling, the planning department, the media department and the creative department all working together….we don’t do that (today) because thinking now just means following a trend.”

I spent 14 years of my life working for Leo Burnett, back in the days when it was an agency 100% owned by its staff.

We were in a perfect position to join the dots, at least those within our remit.

Eventually I reached a level where I was allowed out to attend global meetings in Chicago to discuss matters of great import.

Like developing and offering ICS: ‘integrated communication services’. This was our version of dot joining. (Don’t laugh, the Y&R version was something to do with a whole egg…).

It was at one of these gatherings that I learned a lesson in how networks work.

People attending these things take on one of three personas.

The corporate bully, whose authority comes not from his/her particular knowledge or expertise but from the fact he/she works in a large (often HQ) office.

The silent expert, probably from a small office who almost certainly has valuable experience to bring to the discussion, but who won’t speak out for fear of being mocked by the bully.

The smart-arse loudmouth who thinks he/she knows the answer to everything, who almost certainly knows less than the silent expert but who goes for it anyway if only to goad the corporate bully.

I was without question in this last group. Probably still am.

When it came to dot-joining the small Leo Burnett offices were genius. They had to do everything in-house, and collectively to survive against their larger local competitors. If they didn’t work out how to join the dots they would fail.

Many of my counterparts in Chicago, like so many HQ staff the world over, were corporate bullies. Personally, they were and are delightful people. But professionally they had titles to justify, departments to protect, budgets to fight for, internal arguments about status to win.

They weren’t going to join up any dots for anyone unless they designed the dots, held the crayon and wrote the instructions.

To be successful in the dot joining business everybody concerned needs to want to do it, to believe in it and to be prepared to work hard to deliver to it.

If you work for a large organisation which has been offering multiple services over decades, and whose management suddenly starts talking about joined-up thinking, almost certainly as a precursor to job cuts (fewer people to think disjointed thoughts), you’ll fail.

If joining the dots is another way of saying certain people have to give up status in the name of collaboration, you’ll fail.

If you can see that there is too much siloed thinking, that there’s a value to the client in collaboration, and that that value has the potential to lead to higher fees, you’ll succeed.

The client wants and expects a finished jigsaw, as per the picture on the front of the box.

More often than not what he actually gets is a box full of pieces that don’t fit together and were shoved into the box at random when a load of other jigsaws fell on the floor.

Best to go with those with the picture, not with the guys forcing pieces together with a hammer.

You’ll be pleased to know that in the doom and gloom context, this week’s post is a positive ray of sunshine (no, not really).

Today’s text is: whatever happened to media agencies as a driver of industry-wide debate?

There are so many things going on that need not a knee-jerk sound-bite but a professional, informed and clear point of view to help advertisers plot their way through the mess.

I never see media agency leaders in the national press, on mainstream TV, even on broad business sites. Maybe I consume the wrong things.

Other disciplines seem to do this rather better – you can’t move for planners, futurologists, trade body leaders, even bloggers and podcasters popping up here and there, but with so many of today’s hot topics being to do with how and where money is spent the absence of our top agencies’ bosses is noticeable.

When the mighty do come down to walk amongst us they rarely stray far from their comfort zone.

Most interviews with media agency CEOs are sycophantic, managed by in-house PRs and don’t deviate from speaking about the general wonderfulness of their agency. Frankly, beyond their own staff it’s hard to know who cares. Still – as long as the agency enters the awards run by the trades, and takes ad space in those year-end ego-massaging lists what’s the harm?

This never used to be the extent of agency comment (here I go again). Maybe today’s cohort are just more fearful of their corporate bosses, or of daring to criticise the massive vendors, in which case that’s rather sad.

What does the media agency community think of what’s happening at Twitter? In this particular case we do sort-of have an idea. AdAge reported that WPP were considering using Twitter again.

10 years ago WPP announced a partnership with Twitter: “A global strategic partnership that will greatly expand collaboration between the two organisations. Covering data and analytics … the agreement spans several WPP units – including GroupM … and … Kantar.”

Surely it would be worth asking GroupM or Kantar Media, with unique access to all that data to comment on the impact the current ownership is having on the platform?

Maybe the ‘global strategic partnership’ was short-lived.

Sometimes agency leaders do break cover to comment on what they see as the issues of the moment.

One senior media agency figure was attracting attention the other day from the smarty-arse brigade (of which I’m a fully paid up member) for boasting on LinkedIn that an ad she had placed had reached “1.3bn impressions today alone. And we’re not done yet…”

As Dr Augustine Fou commented: “How was the 1.3bn impressions achieved in ONE DAY??” I, and I am sure Dr Fou have a pretty good idea.

What good does it do to quote fake numbers to your client, let alone boast about such meaningless dross in public?

If you feel the urge, why not instead comment on the need to clean up the data emerging from behind walled gardens?

Or, if you’re felling strong what about the goings on at Fox News and the implications for advertisers?

Or whether the Lineker affair here has brought the commercialisation of the BBC closer, and if so what are the implications for the current commercial media landscape?

Or should advertisers worry about the context in which their ads appear? Does it matter if they are accused of fuelling hate? Or should advertising and editorial retain their distance, even online?

Or why should advertisers advertise on social media at all? After all, the editorial free-for-all on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok and the rest are often scary places for a brand to venture. And even when they do go there no-one likes the ads, even if they notice them which often they don’t.

These are nuanced and difficult topics – which is why the opinions of those who are paid to advise their clients on anything and everything to do with the media world are potentially so valuable.

Advertisers are often criticised by their agencies for only caring about the numbers, about procurement, about auditors.

This is inevitable if the agencies don’t give them any other means to judge them.

Media agencies need to regain advertisers’ trust. One way to do that is to be seen to add value – real value – to the business.

Yes, but 1.3bn impressions? *Smirks*. You can’t argue with the numbers.

Even if they’re made-up, unverifiable, full of fraud and nothing to do with business success?

It’s really rather pathetic.

The whole speech / article struck me as odd, not so much resetting as regressing, at least as far as the media components are concerned.

I should say at this point that it is no great exaggeration to state that I owe my career in large part to Procter and Gamble. I worked on the business in the UK, and then globally at Leo Burnett; the CEO at Aegis who subsequently hired me was ex-P&G and my experience certainly did me no harm. They taught me more than any other advertiser with whom I’ve worked.

When Burnett first won the business, from what was then Y&R, in the early 1980’s, I remember having a drink with the other Procter agency Media Directors. As the new boy I said I found the whole business overwhelming, weird even.

Procter had their own language of acronyms, their own TV deals, their own rules and guidelines. I admit I struggled in the early weeks.

John Perriss, the Saatchi Media Director described them to me as the ‘best client in the world’. To paraphrase him,: ‘They believe in advertising, they’re fair, they’re highly professional and ethical; they believe in paying their agencies top dollar for the best people. They spend a load; they pay on time. They’re loyal to their agencies. They’re the best’.

I remember thinking John had drunk too much of the Kool-Aid.

I learnt; he was 100% right.

There was and is something else about Procter. They saw themselves then and I suspect they still see themselves as leaders of the industry, as having a responsibility to speak up for advertisers.

They never used to talk publicly, but their support of ISBA, and the various industry bodies and JICs was impressive if understandably self-interested. P&G got what P&G needed because P&G turned up.

Nowadays they talk a lot more in public – which is a good thing – and Marc Pritchard is much in demand on platforms, understandably.

You just know there’s a BUT coming…

I have a sense that today they talk more and do less.

In 2017, at a similar event, Pritchard made what Mark Ritson called ‘The most important marketing speech of recent times.’ The Cog Blog summarised it here.

There was much talk of insisting on Facebook etc introducing objective measurement and verification. Of keeping to MRC standards. Of cutting out the inefficiency of all those middlemen involved in online buying.

Procter introduced a boycott of some of the social media platforms soon after. Most shrugged and just carried on with business as usual. I don’t think that boycott is still in place.

Today, what are the biggest issues facing the advertising media business? Fraud, certainly. Hate speech? Lack of editorial control over online media platforms? Lack of truthfulness? Political interference in investigative reporting?

How many of these issues does Marc cover in his 2023 speech?

As far as I can tell (I wasn’t there and have only read the article) the answer is none.

Instead, he talks of understanding consumers more, increasing reach, reducing excessive frequency, ensuring more of a focus on advertising effectiveness, and working more productively.

None of these things are unimportant, but are they really the most important issues of the day? They sound a bit 1980s to me, updated with the latest in personalisation, creative diversity, and a few attention metrics.

The ad business is facing many huge issues. How we tackle them is a subject for much debate and discussion. The blurring of the line between interference in editorial matters, and supporting responsible journalism (well done GroupM for their Back to News initiative) is but one example.

Ad fraud, which remains rampant throughout the programmatic ecosystem and appears to be largely ignored by the ANA, whose latest pronouncements couldn’t even agree on an estimate of the size of the problem, remains a massive drain on marketing budgets.

These are the sorts of issues where an advertiser like P&G can truly provide leadership. Not everyone will agree with whatever they say, but just by speaking out they would aid discussion and debate.

And that would be a great thing; if rather more controversial than maximising reach.

This is the sort of rubbish that gives genuine research a bad name, and whilst you may think a few idiots sounding off on Twitter really doesn’t matter much, lies and misinformation are so often amplified. Just repeating them gives them credibility. Frequency works.

Look at the current controversy over Fox News in the US, with even Rupert Murdoch admitting some of his presenters endorsed what they knew were lies concerning the result of the 2020 US election. Why did they say things on-air that they knew and admitted privately were untrue? To placate their core audience.

We’ve arrived at a strange moment when a news network chooses to replay the biased opinions of elements of its audience back at it, as exposing that audience to a balanced view might risk some of them deserting the channel.

Some people will only accept their own truths.

Fox is certainly not unique. Lies and misinformation gain credence because they’re on the telly. The medium enhances the message.

On the other hand, paying insufficient attention to what people believe and do is an important counter to relying purely on the data (or indeed the AI source material).

We need to get out more, to look about us more.

Take our current obsession with the extreme targeting of ads. Many have bought into the narrative that every ad can and must be personalised for it to work optimally.

I think this is hogwash. First, as Paul Feldwick’s excellent book points out, brands become famous in part through messaging that is shared, through the sort of short-handing that emerges from, or creates a common experience.

Next, personalisation is not quite as brilliant as we might like to believe. Look around you.

I get mailers all the time addressed to ‘The Occupier’; letters that start ‘Dear Sir or Madam’; online notifications to do something I am clearly not going to do (like claim my prize at my local Walmart).

Last week I bought a pair of shoes online. So why am I still receiving messages to buy another pair of the exact same shoes?

Yes, I’ve heard of retargeting; and spam; and lists, but really…is that the best you can do? You can’t even get my gender and country of residence right.

We should pay more attention to our own behaviours and the behaviours of those around us and marry those insights with those emerging from data.

For example, I know perfectly well that social media platforms reach a lot of people. I also know that online ads on social media drive me nuts. They get in my way, they stop me doing stuff, they are intrusive in the worst possible way. Yes, I’m ‘reached’ but I resent it.

I also know that I am not alone in thinking this (I met this bloke in a pub …). Proper, grown-up research by a proper grown-up research company, Kantar supports my own feeling. Check out their Dimension studies if you doubt me.

Attention studies from Lumen, and Amplified Intelligence show that people simply don’t engage with social media ads. They spend the minimum time they can with them. Surely if they liked them, got something from them they would spend longer engaging with the content?

Yes, yes, but think of the numbers. I would say certainly think of the numbers, then apply some common sense, based on your own life-experiences to temper what the data tells you.

In golf it’s often said that it’s not the how it’s the how many. This expression is used to describe someone hitting bad shot after bad shot and yet somehow getting the ball in the hole in a respectable number.

Media has become like golf. We only care about the how many, not the how.

Anyone who plays golf will know you can fluke it once or twice but eventually you need the skill of the how to set alongside the bald facts in the how many.

Back in the day (old git alert) buying campaigns on TV was not easy but it was one dimensional.

TV was a seller’s dream. A limited supply meeting ever-increasing demand within a monopoly (ITV back then also sold Channel 4). Revenues grew way ahead of any inflation despite what was referred to at the time as a ‘catastrophic ratings decline’. There was a whiff of arrogance.

Sales Directors sailed past in their limos whilst advertisers waited for the bus (and in case you think that’s a bit colourful I witnessed that exact thing at the annual TV Conference in Copenhagen in 1987).

Regardless of the behaviours of certain larger-than-life ITV Sales Directors advertisers kept coming back for more. Why? Because it worked.

ITV had laid the groundwork, brilliantly. They ensured audiences were well measured, so you could buy with confidence. They invested in a comprehensive research programme into consumer purchases, called the Television Consumer Audit, or TCA, and used it to demonstrate effect to even the most cynical of advertisers.

As an agency you bought ratings for a price. You made sure you got what you paid for. Auditors ensured you paid the right price for whatever it was.

TV was a bought medium, one dimensional. Within this world ITV ruled – the Big 5 ITV Companies controlled every aspect from deciding on what shows were made for network distribution and by whom, and when they would be scheduled. Independent producers didn’t get a look in. This was a chumocracy, par excellence.

Today, we talk, accurately of video not TV. Legacy broadcasters have a fight on their hands. They are still amongst the most effective of advertising channels, but they no longer take the money as a matter of course. Money follows audience (unless you’re in a monopoly when money flows in despite audiences) even when the way that ‘audience’ is defined is questionable.

Planning is at a premium. Concepts like brand safety, verification, context, sustainability, attention, sales outcomes are all out there and are being discussed.

Within this world broadcasters still offer advertisers great benefits. They’re the premium, the quality channel in a world where ‘premium’ is worth a lot. No-one worries about brand safety, or verification on TV; context is out there and can be recognised and / or acted upon.

‘Premium’ is a planning conceit; it needs definition, a shape in order to be recognised. To stand out from the online platforms, from the fraudsters and their bots.

Today’s media battles are fought by planners, not buyers. Buyers buy plans; planners don’t post-rationalise buys. I know that’s not as black and white as I’ve painted it, but it’s a darn site better than it used to be.

The planner’s world is a cross-media one – with advertising as one technique to consider alongside other communication channels. Within advertising there’s every channel you’ve ever heard of and some you haven’t. Within channels there are vehicles. Within vehicles there are buying opportunities for the buyer to unearth.

At the top of that pyramid sits the advertiser with decisions to make. Decisions that need maps, guidance, or as we refer to it ‘research’.

Research that needs to be controlled and paid for by the beneficiary of objectivity in planning. That beneficiary is the advertiser; the benefit a more effective use of his budgets.

The focus has shifted from buyer to planner, from channel to advertiser. Many would say that’s where it should have been all along.

This switch in focus, from buyer to planner to advertiser is behind Origin and other related WFA-driven programmes. From the outside, ISBA seems to be driving Origin along single-mindedly, hiring well and setting up the mechanisms to fund their work in part via an advertiser levy.

The broadcasters, not just in the UK should support such an initiative. They need to be on the inside, promoting their values of quality and ensuring those qualities are embedded in the programme. Their hesitation driven by concerns over the online giants is understandable, but better to be on the inside influencing outcomes, not howling at the moon on the outside.

Remember when the online evangelists told us TV was dying; and Tess Alps made her famous remark that far from dying TV was having babies?

The babies are now grown-ups. Time to move on, to make their mark.

Right up there near the top of the league table of vacuous statements is the mantra that we ‘need to move from outputs to outcomes’. I think I first heard it used (by the client) at a global Coca-Cola meeting in the mid 1990’s; I thought then it was profound.

Now, 30-odd years later I find it less profound and more trite – given that we have made such little progress towards the goal.

Only last week Kelly Abcarian, NBCU’s EVP, Measurement and Impact had this to say: “Advertisers don’t just want to know the audience they have reached. They want to understand the impact of their investment”.

Anything that puts more information in the hands of planners is good, but surely what advertisers really want to understand is the effect of their spend on their business.

This is so obvious, and so often ignored. Probably because it’s too difficult.

Standing back for a moment, it is remarkable that so many advertisers commit such huge sums of money without fully considering the real-world consequences.

Would they commit to a new plant without first considering every angle, every consequence? Of course not. And yet ad spends are signed off on targets related to audience reached, not business gained.

The move to online has only made things worse. Now it’s not audience reached, but metrics bought. The scourge of ad fraud, a topic many seem to not want to talk about, and don’t want to look into too deeply in case someone has to admit some responsibility for wasting money, impacts everything.

Like many who write blogs, or opinion pieces I frequently get told I’m ‘anti-digital’. Apart from this being about as meaningful as saying I’m anti-air, it is clearly rubbish given where you’re reading or accessing this blog.

What I am against is wasting money and attracting budgets via false pretences.

What I’m all for is accountability – not the sort that says ‘here are your campaign metrics as measured by us and verified by no-one’. Nor the sort that says last touch attribution is all that matters; or that believes that clicks are any meaningful measure of anything.

These assumptions, which most in the industry know are based on at best very little, are dangerous. Money gets allocated on the back of them.

And once that happens the conclusion is drawn that advertising doesn’t work as well as it used to or should. Maybe because the purchasing power of bots is, shall we say ‘limited’.

We need to stand back more often, outside of the bubble we’ve created.

There are plenty of clever people around who claim to be able to measure the true business impact of advertising.

How good they are, the pros and cons of the different approaches are topics for another day, but to start with we need to convince our clients to spend a little more on measuring the effect on their  business of their marketing and advertising efforts, and less on worrying over metrics inflated by fraud.

This series of three posts started with a discussion with Bob Hoffman over the changing times we live in.

It’s easy to hark back to a non-existent golden age. As Bob says, most ads back then were rubbish, but occasionally a gem shone through.

What was true back then was a greater focus on and appreciation of creativity. Sometimes this worked its way through into the gems, often it didn’t.

Media was about cost and basic audiences. There were exceptions but looking back there were client-driven examples of taking the thinking on, beyond the basics. P&G as one example had their ‘strategic minima’, levels below which it simply wasn’t worth advertising. Kellogg’s had their global norms; McDonald’s their inter-media comparisons. I never worked on Mars or Unilever but I bet they had their base principles too, created out of real-world experiences of what worked for them.

These people worried about value, of course but it was relevant value.

This is what we need to regain. An understanding of what works, and what doesn’t. An appreciation that when advertisers spend money they expect, quite understandably to sell more beans (as I said in the second in this series).

The clever people and their models need to be celebrated, and their work brought far more front and central.

We all (agencies, consultants, auditors) need to promote a culture amongst our clients that media metrics, be they GRPs, reach, frequency, quality indices, attention scores, whatever are but a means to an end. They’re stepping stones along the path to success.

They’re not the end in themselves.

It’s about time we focussed on measuring ‘the end’.

I think the ad business has a problem. Furthermore, it is in large part self-inflicted.

Things started to go wrong when we put the media chaps in charge (before reaching for your angry crayon, could I ask you to look up my resume).

Media chaps like nothing more than big audience numbers acquired cheaply. The more audience the better; the cheaper the better.

This is an argument that’s easy to understand and many from media auditors through to procurement managers have enhanced their careers from understanding it.

You could certainly make the case that way back when in the offline days, taking TV as an example, the only metrics worth worrying about were ratings bought and price paid.

Back then, if you wanted to sell beans, you made a commercial extolling the virtues of your beans, bunged it on TV, spent an hour or two listening to the agency boasting about how it had just bought the cheapest campaign in the history of campaigns, and watched sales of beans explode off the shelves.

The issue back then was the commercial. What to say about beans? How to say it? Where to film it?

The media piece was less controversial and more to do with ensuring value for money.

Today? Well, it’s a tad more complicated. You still want to sell beans to people. You still know a bit about who buys them, and who might be persuaded to buy them. Certainly you have many more options when it comes to delivering the message but the basics remain. It’s the execution that’s changed.

You still need what today we have to refer to as ‘content’.

This could be a commercial. Or an influencer reclining on a sun lounger whilst doing everything except eat beans. Or a Tik Tok film putting bean-eating to music. Or a YouTube video showing how to open and heat a can of beans. Or any combination of the above, and more.

You could of course write this content yourself using ChatGPT. By the time I’ve finished typing this sentence you’ll be able to make a film using ChatGPT. You probably already can and I just don’t know about it.

You could place your masterpiece programmatically against an audience defined as heavy eaters of beans who also like toast and a fried egg. You could personalise the cans. You could ensure that the only people to see your content are called Brian and live in South West London.

A few things are then likely to happen. First, no-one you know will ever see or more to the point remember your content. No-one will have heard of your beans and those that have will have done so only because they keep deleting ever-more desperate messages to sign-up to our ‘film yourself eating our beans, place it on Instagram and win a million’ competition.

Few will buy them.

On the plus side we managed to buy gazillions of … something. We optimised impressions, we maximised coverage, we capped frequency. We know this because the nice people from whom we bought the ad space and time told us so.

Fraud? We used our own proprietary system to stop that happening. Yes, we developed it all ourselves. No, I don’t know how it works (but then, if I had someone explain it nor would you). But it’s brilliant.

Attention paid? We built that in at the planning stage. You must remember the slide in the presentation.

Regardless, even better than some spurious attention metric, a majority of Brians living in South West London answered positively to a social media poll: ‘Do you ever fancy beans?’

The sample? Oh, more than enough.

How did we find them? We have our ways. Proprietary ways. Blah blah tracking.

Sadly, someone somewhere will eventually notice that sales of beans have tanked. Questions will be asked. Answers based on spurious metrics of online impressions won’t impress.

Advertising doesn’t work; budgets will be cut. Agencies will get fired.

Now I know this is silly. No-one can be this daft (although Heinz gave it a good go many years ago stopping all advertising and putting their faith in promotions and other BTL communication), and nothing’s ever black or white, but the main point stands.

Advertising is becoming less liked, eventually it will work less well because it’s less liked. This is more of an issue online than offline, but as advertisers follow audiences it’s online revenues that are growing.

So, the bigger share of the cake is working less well.

That only ends one way; and it’s not with a bigger cake.

To be continued..

In a world of holding company blandness we need more contrarians.

Bob and I are of a similar vintage; we grew up (on different sides of the Atlantic) during an era when advertising was driven by original ideas, generated by ad agencies run by people who believed, who knew that their ideas contributed to their clients’ successes.

The ads ruled, agency principals would resign business rather than pass through poor work. In my case the legendary Norman Berry once fired a client for daring to question his judgement on a professional trade magazine ad.

Yes, they sometimes went to extremes, but the reputation of their agencies mattered and what made those reputations were the ads.

Back then clients hired agencies because they (the client) couldn’t do what the agencies did. These clients didn’t want a nodding dog, nor did they want a glorified note taker nor a numerate technocrat.

They wanted ideas, great ideas beautifully executed by people who knew how to deliver.

They were right to want these things and to believe in their agency’s ability.

It’s often forgotten that there were brave clients behind those great ads. Imagine selling the Sony Board on spending tens of millions throwing hundreds of thousands of coloured balls down a San Francisco hill in order to sell your TVs. All the time knowing it was one take or bust.

Today’s marketing geniuses would be cutting that ad into pieces, personalising each one.

Bob was a writer and creative director; I was a media planner and geek. One of my bosses once described me as being a media guy who ‘cared about the creative work’. I took that as a compliment, and a sign that he’d been mixing with the wrong type of media person; I wasn’t that unusual. Some of us preferred ads to deals.

I knew full well that I couldn’t do what the creatives did, but then again, they were hopeless at audience measurement.

We worked together to deliver something that worked.

Sometimes.

It would be quite wrong to look back on some sort of golden age where everything we did was genius. Of course, it wasn’t.

Bob’s valedictory blog makes the point that: “During my many years in the business, advertising was overwhelmingly crap. There were, however, instances of excellence among the dross … there were moments when video, audio, print, and poster advertising strived to provide new and stimulating ideas to the world. I don’t think any serious person today considers advertising anything much more than a constant annoyance”.

And it was fun. Today it really isn’t. And that shows in the work.

Bob has stopped his blog because, in his own words: “(… in 2022) the big news in the advertising world was not about anything remotely interesting. It was about some of the world’s biggest assholes — Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk. Writing about advertising is one thing. Writing about creeps like that is quite another”.

As an antidote, Bob told a David Ogilvy tale, which he was then kind enough to send me in the original from ‘Confessions of an Advertising Man’:

“I was once invited to a corporate meeting, to compete for a major account. When I entered the board room, the chairman said this:

“Mr Ogilvy, we are interviewing several agencies. You have exactly fifteen minutes to plead your case. Then I will ring this bell and the next agency waiting outside will follow you.

“I asked: How many people will be involved in the decision?

“The chairman replied: The twelve members of the Committee here today”.

“I responded: Ring the bell. And rose from my chair”.

Ring the bell; or to bastardise another line from Ogilvy, this time from an ad that certainly did run: ‘You can hear the clock ticking’.

To be continued..

As The Media Leader reports: “HR leaders across the industry have advised that skill shortages have been most acute at entry-level and at mid-level (people 3-5 years into their careers)”.

Certain conversations stay with you down the years. When I was in my early 20’s I somehow managed to get myself an introduction to a well-known advertising luminary of the time. I was excited, and nervous to meet him (I’m going to keep his name to myself). He sat me down in his office and asked me what he could do for me.

I said I wanted advice on getting started in an ad agency.

He told me not to go anywhere near agencies (he was working for one of the largest); they were doomed and wouldn’t exist in a few years.

I thanked him for his time, went home, decided to think for myself and ignored him.

Some years later my parents were at a dinner party. My mother was placed next to a well-known ad sales director (well-known to me; my mother had no idea who he was).

When it was established that this guy knew her son, my mother asked for his view on my career, such as it was at that time. What can I say, she was my mother.

He’s doing fine, said the ad director but he needs to get out of the research and planning side. There’s no future in it. He said this TO MY MOTHER!

You can imagine the phone call early the following morning.

Decades later I was on a platform at a conference on a panel with several other media / ad people.

Would we, we were asked by the moderator encourage our children to go into a career in media agencies.

Aside from the fact that both my daughters are well established in their careers, and neither are in an agency I said I would. I was the only person on that panel who was positive.

There are a mass of reasons to avoid media agencies. Lack of trust, historic obsession with buying, too close a relationship with certain vendors, failure to stand up to their clients’ irrational views on certain media channels, being disintermediated, threatened by specialist agencies, not getting on the front foot with fraud. And so on.

I do think that advertising per se faces an existential threat; or rather if things continue it faces a pared-back role in the face of short-termism, political interference and of course fraud.

Plus there are problems in agency revenues being hit by direct selling specifically by online channels; in advertising still being seen as a cost rather than an investment, and so on.

Advertising can be a force for good in business, aside from the fact that it can add value by transforming a product into a brand. I believe that to do those things we need the best people in the industry.

We shouldn’t pull the drawbridge up behind us; rather we should encourage, advise and persuade the best to join / stay in the industry.

We should celebrate our many successes and seek to elevate our industry amongst the broader business community by moving outside our own (very little) bubble.

We should be positive but in no way complacent; looking to move forward and improve what we do and how we do it.

I would love to think that the young me of today would follow his instincts and (like the real young me of so long ago) ignore the doomsayer old gits.

To my fellow old gits of today I would only say: play it forward.

For those not fully up-to-speed with this issue, this post is here to provide a cynical (and I suppose I should make clear not a literally accurate) point-of-view.

For a far more sensible, extensive, balanced evaluation of what’s going on read this from the guys at asi.

If you think the current situation warrants a wry smile, carry on.

The provider of the prime measurement service to the US broadcast industry is Nielsen. I believe it’s been Nielsen since before the invention of the television. Some say Nielsen was standing there and someone invented TV around it. It’s always been Nielsen. I think it must be the law.

Although Nielsen has the wherewithal to report otherwise the US industry talks almost only of programme ratings. No-one directly references the audience to commercials. These are nasty interruptive things (NITs) that get in the way of the art that fills American airwaves. Inconveniently these NITs pay for everything and so their presence has to be acknowledged, albeit with the sort of sneer a certain class of Brit reserves for the word ‘trade’.

Broadcast television is the only thing that works for US advertisers. This has been true since the dawn of time. Anyone who thinks otherwise is deluded.

That said, there is concern around the rise of strange organisations like Google, Facebook and TikTok. These things are evil, and fraudulent, the work of the devil and no advertiser in their right mind would ever spend any money with them (actually that bit isn’t quite so crazy).

Advertisers want big audiences. On TV. The bigger the better, as long as they’re on TV. If you’re an advertiser and believe you may want something else, targeted messages, say, you’ve been attending too many conferences and your brain has become warped. This is a curable condition. Just pop along to your nearest upfront and you’ll feel better soon.

Agencies want what advertisers want and do what advertisers do. If they depart from this way of thinking they’re wrong and will soon find out why via a review.

The US view is that the rest of the world knows nothing about advertising, media, audience measurement or indeed research in general. The rest of the world is mistaken.

The US media industry can appropriate descriptors for its organisations, regardless of those descriptors meaning something else, somewhere / everywhere else (a precedent was set with The World Series). When the US broadcast industry calls something a Joint Industry Committee or JIC then that is what it is. Established bodies in overseas (aka less sophisticated) markets, like the UK’s BARB which for many decades has thought itself to be a JIC needs to reconsider. It is clearly no such thing.

The US media industry is focused 1000% on providing value to advertisers. Value is defined by big numbers (like 1000%). If you believe that there is value to be had in concepts like contextual relevance, or attention paid to what’s on the screen, or to understanding audience behaviours you’re misguided. Or a socialist. Probably both.

Buyers buy big numbers. Editorial context doesn’t matter. Nor does behaviour. Nor do end-business-results. These things over-complicate – they get in the way of delivering the big numbers by making the big numbers smaller. And that’s a bad thing (see above).

Every now and again the US media industry starts a new body to demonstrate commitment to accuracy, and innovation. Their representatives are sent out into the world like missionaries, to convert the heathens.

The heathens (aside from the odd cynical blogger) are unfailingly polite to the missionaries. They nod a lot. And they don’t change a thing. The heathens know better.

Sometimes there’s talk of alternative currencies. New methods are talked about. Advertisers express concern using words like ‘transparency’ and ‘verifiable’. Agencies consider. Everyone knows you can’t have more than one true currency, whatever happens around the margins. The currency continues.

US multinationals’ marketing and media directors are brilliant speakers, with massive budgets. They are as a result listened to, and their thoughts largely ignored. Indeed, by their actions or lack thereof they eventually ignore themselves.

Life goes merrily along. Buyers buy and sellers sell. Programmes get made; detergent gets sold.

Until one day it doesn’t.

But I can offer hope. Here’s my 2022 list of eight. Are there still grounds for hope?

1. We get back to simplicity, to being creative.

Started to happen and needs to continue. The good work by the attention guys, Karen Nelson-Field’s Amplified Intelligence and Mike Follett’s Lumen among them has brought the importance of how audiences consume channels, as well as how many of them do the consuming, into focus.

It’s an important first step in the battle against the ‘biggest number wins whatever else’ brigade.

Sometimes the most creative wins; and if we can quantify that with some easy-to-understand metrics, so much the better.

• Less prattle, more precision.

It’s sad how many conferences (and many trade papers) are still full of people selling, not shedding light. Many conference organisers pull off the impressive trick of being paid twice. Once by those buying a slot to speak, once by an audience thinking they’re hearing from the best as opposed to from those with the deepest pockets.

Sometimes these are the same people; often they’re not.

In the week after Jeremy Bullmore’s death we should all take the time to read, and learn from truly the best.

You could do far worse than make a resolution to starting your day with a Bullmore. Here’s how.

• Less self-interest, more collaboration to deliver business goals.

Positive signs as that once-endangered species the agency planner regains some primacy over their cost-at-all-costs colleagues.

There are even rumours that FB, Google et al are rethinking ‘attribution’ into something more sensible and aligned with business goals (not just their business goals).

I would extend this to the market research business. We need less research done to feed some meaningless internal dashboard; and more research feeding into models seeking to explain business results.

• If you’ve got something to say, say it.

I may be optimistic, but I see more agency people more prepared to break cover. Maybe it’s because their clients are becoming more vocal, more critical of the state of the online media world (in particular).

It was 4 years ago that Mat Baxter got into trouble with his employers at IPG for daring to criticise Facebook (IPG was an early stage investor in Facebook).

I’m not sure that would happen today although those hiding behind social-media pseudonyms may not agree with me.

• Let’s focus on what truly matters, even if it doesn’t involve a trip to Cannes or Las Vegas.

I think we’re failing here, and in one area quite spectacularly. Fraud is the biggest problem we face as an industry, for dozens of reasons, and yet the agencies, their advertisers, the trade bodies all look the other way and focus on diversity and sustainability.

These are of course important societal issues and well done everyone for highlighting the issues, but on a pure money-at-risk basis fraud is the 800-pound gorilla, the existential threat that no-one wants to talk about.

I’m hoping more client CEO’s and journalists (whose jobs are ultimately at risk) enter the discussion, take action and make 2023 a year of progress against the fraudsters.

• More truly international advertisers committing to doing it differently.

Suitably vague, but I’ll claim progress. ISBA’s Origin is to be praised; advertisers have become involved in audience measurement and that’s a good thing for all sorts of reasons, not least because those who pay should play an active role in decisions made around how their money is spent.

ISBA has moved Origin along, and have attracted a top talent in Tom George.

The broadcasters, whose lack of involvement is frankly baffling need to get with the programme.

2023 will be a year of solid achievement for ISBA and Origin.

• Tactics aren’t the same as a strategy.

They’re not. Still.

Maybe in 2023 some salespeople and trade journos could go on a course to learn the difference.

In 2023 we are all going to have a tough time. Ad revenues will struggle. If we’ve failed to convince with the ‘investment not a cost’ message in the good times, it’s hard to see how we’ll make that stick in a recession.

I will make one prediction: advertisers will fall out-of-love with social media platforms and will rediscover the benefits of media forms comparatively free of fraud and comparatively free from hate.

In other words, context will matter even more. Programmatic providers should take note, adjust and tweak.

Ad spend will increasingly follow what works, not unverifiable numbers.

Belatedly – Happy New Year.

Once upon a time there were two children, a brother and sister called Pronsel and Gratel. They lived with their parents in a little village on the edge of a forest.

The brother and sister were devoted to one another and rarely ventured out unless together.

They lived an idyllic childhood, playing freely in the meadows around their house. They were well-known in the village too and were frequently to be found in the local shops and in their neighbours’ houses.

Their parents only imposed one rule. The children were not to venture into the forest. This was the Forest So-Chal, it was deep, dark, and although there were paths and even some signposts it was all too easy to get lost.

There were rumours of wolves, and even talk of a witch.

This witch, so the story went, used to live in the village where she ran a sweet shop. But things had turned ugly when the sweet shop diversified and started creating and selling spells.

The villagers, wary of the effects such things may have on them and their children, objected, and eventually drove her out.

Now she lived in the forest in a house made, it was said of sweets.

One day, Pronsel and Gratel’s parents had to go to the nearby town on business. This was nothing unusual – they often left their children alone to play. They had each other, they knew their neighbours and everyone in the village knew them.

But on this day the children decided it was time for an adventure. They were going to venture into Forest So-Chal and find the house of sweets.

They were though sensible children. So, they took with them various coloured ribbons. They would tie these to trees and signposts on their way in, and thus be able to find their way out again.

They set off; and all went to plan. They found the sweet house easily – it was even signposted – and the witch turned out to be a perfectly pleasant old lady who was delighted to have visitors.

They gorged themselves on sweets, homemade cake and fizzy drinks. These things were carefully rationed at home, so this was a real treat!

Eventually it came time to set off home, and that’s when things started to go rather wrong.

First, the children seemed to have lost their sense of direction. Once they left the sweet house nothing looked familiar, nothing was where it should have been.

Second, they had no memory of their careful preparation. They couldn’t find any ribbons, the paths just seemed to go around in circles, and the signposts, which they thought were clear enough on the way in were incomprehensible.

Was it possible that the legends of spells and potions were true?

Pronsel and Gratel started to worry. It was getting dark, they had no idea where they were and Google Maps hadn’t yet been invented.

There has to be a happy ending, surely? Well, there is. The villagers had noticed the children’s absence, guessed where they had gone and set up a search party.

This search party relied on tried and tested techniques; the villagers were roped together with the backstop roped to the village tree.

They took a megaphone and shouted for the children, who eventually heard them and thus were saved.

The children weren’t even scolded by their parents, who were simply pleased to have them home.

P&G (it’s getting tedious typing their names in full every time) had learned their lesson.

They grew up, became worthy councillors and introduced improvements to the Forest So-Chal, making it safe for all and protecting its wildlife.

And what happened to the witch, and the sweet house?

Visit your local high street and pick up a newspaper. Look around you. You’ll find out.

The Cog Blog will be back (for its 10th year) early in 2023. In the meantime thanks for reading and indulging my many rants, and may I wish you a Happy Christmas and a wonderful Festive Season.

It is a strong line. Truth, when well-expressed has considerable power. But in the media world we naturally know better. We prefer to play by a different set of rules.

The truth is what you make it; say it often enough, and loudly enough and it becomes so.

I sometimes think that in the commercial end of the media business we relish misunderstanding. Truth often goes hand-in-hand with simplicity, and to paraphrase the great Irwin Gotlieb (and not for the first time) ‘In confusion lies margin’. If an industry can have a single positioning statement, there is the traditional media man’s riposte to McCanns.

Keeping it simple in media is not always popular. How much better to shout about ambitions for our business that everyone wants to achieve. To campaign for outcomes which we can all get wholeheartedly behind.

Take a few of the great media debates of our time. Diversity. Sustainability. Disassociating advertising from harmful content.

All of these are worthy, important topics. Making progress in all three is extremely hard, and highly desirable, and kudos to the likes of the Conscious Advertising Network and to any number of committed individuals for the work they do. Their achievements are impressive.

But if I may raise a tentative hand in the air, these are all societal problems. They need solving, in all walks of life.

The ambitions we have in these fields are easy to agree with, even if they may be extremely hard to achieve. No-one will stand against you; everyone will cheer you on.

Earlier this week ‘The Media Leader’, which by the way is fast establishing itself as a must-read featuring a list of regular columnists covering an array of topics that put their competitors to shame, carried a piece on ad fraud by Nick Swimer.

Nick is a Partner at Reed Smith, the law firm where he specialises in broadcasting law.

The essence of the piece was to ask: ‘Why aren’t advertisers shouting about ad fraud’?

It is by any objective measure a bizarre state of affairs.

We are in a recession; marketing budgets are being cut; and according to Nick’s piece, quoting Juniper Research $68bn will be lost to ad fraud this year. ($68bn may be at the low end – the ANA in the US have quoted $120bn although they promptly ‘disappeared’ that figure when it started to attract attention).

$68bn is a lot not to worry over-much about.

ISBA’s work through PWC demonstrated how even top-end, sophisticated clients’ ads appeared on an average of over 40,000 websites. Mostly non-premium. Many selected to the benefit of fraudsters.

Why?

I find it hard to understand how any media agency professional, or client marketer for that matter can possibly condone such activity.

Agency: ‘Yes, we know we have told you that reach is key. That accountability and measurement are essential. That context counts. That understanding audience behaviour is a cornerstone in everything we do. But we believe your interests are best served by leaving media placements up to a programmatic system we don’t control or fully understand, and which will place your ads on this very beautiful site selling Nepalese Prayer Flags (a real example surfaced by the PwC work).’

Wherever you look online advertising is questionable. From audience measures that are not verified. To the platforms’ failure to control or edit hateful content. To a misappropriation of ad language (attribution measures that are nothing of the sort, metrics that mirror those used elsewhere whilst meaning something different). To the disintermediation of agencies. To promoting gross numbers to non-specialists.

Why don’t the agencies, those professional advisors tell the truth? Shout it from the rooftops: fraud is rife, we can’t control it and we may as well take that fact into account in how we spend your money.

Audience measurement in online is questionable and shouldn’t be compared with data from the independent verifiable systems.

Why not put as much effort into delivering the best advice as you do into standing up for sustainability or a diverse workforce?

Why not?

Because it’s hard and because the unfortunate, unpalatable fact is we’re all to blame. We’re all complicit.

This whole thing will come crashing down when the non-specialist grown-ups in the C-Suite start to ask the necessary, the awkward questions on the effectiveness of marketing spend.

The McCann line was often mocked by those working there, bastardised to ‘Truth Well Old.’

Given the way that old media ideas keep being reinvented, even if they’re mistranslated and twisted out of shape, Truth Well Old might not be a bad ambition.

There is nothing wrong with opinions, even uninformed ones such as those held by me on the England football team’s formations. But – to paraphrase Bill Bernbach – an opinion only counts for something when it costs you money. 

Which brings me on to the strange case of Elon Musk and Twitter. 

I profess to knowing little about Twitter, how it works, how it is moderated (is it moderated?), what its strange hold is over people, even why so many get so agitated on there. But I do know one thing about it – pretty well the whole shebang is funded by advertising and is consequently free to users. 

One of the many other things I know little about is Elon Musk. I know he is a brilliant engineer, knows a lot about batteries and makes over-priced cars. 

Nowhere have I picked up on his being an expert in advertising. Or even that he is remotely interested in the subject. In fact, just the opposite – I do not recall ever seeing any Tesla advertising anywhere and indeed I seem to remember that Mr Musk was dismissive of what advertising might do to help him sell cars. 

Not an ad fan, in other words. 

If he had been, or even if he had been remotely interested, he would have known that Twitter is unexceptional as an advertising medium. 

I suspect that Mr Musk’s reasoning on Twitter and advertising went something like this (if that is he even gave the subject a moment’s thought). 

‘Twitter reaches a lot of people. Twitter is therefore desirable to advertisers. The End.’ 

Some of us know better. 

First, Twitter does not reach a lot of people – comparably speaking. I am indebted to Rob Norman, ex GroupM and resident genius on anything to do with online media forms for pointing out in ‘The New York Times’ that Twitter’s 2021 revenue was one twentieth Meta’s and one fiftieth Alphabet’s. And money follows audience as we all know. 

By the way Rob’s piece, not at all surprisingly is excellent. But then he is a bona fide expert. 

As Rob points out Twitter does not provide a safe environment for brands. There are too many fights; too much controversy; too much hate. 

These are not words with which most advertisers wish their brands to be associated. 

Advertisers do not much like risk when it comes to the content surrounding their messages. 

And they especially do not like risk when the upside is so low. After all you can buy the Twitter audience perfectly well in other places, and with less risk. 

It is genuinely a mystery to me why so many people buy advertising-dependent or advertising-related businesses without talking to a few people who understand the ad business. 

And then profess amazement and shock when it all goes wrong. 

So, here is a free lesson. It is not only about size, and quality counts. 

Experts get a bad press. The UK Government Minister Michael Gove will have his Brexit referendum remark that ‘the British people have had quite enough of experts’ live on long after he is gone. 

In my youth the definition of an expert, ‘X’ = the unknown, ‘Spurt’ = a little drip under pressure, was guaranteed a laugh at conferences (we had lower standards in platform humour back then). 

And yet we can all agree on two things. Elon Musk bought Twitter without an expert plan; and advertisers are about to hand him his coat. 

One of my favourite quotes comes (of course) from Jeremy Bullmore: “People build brands the way birds build nests. Through the straw and scraps they chance upon.” Note, it is people who build brands.

The other week I was robbed. This has led me to spending more time than I would like with banks, phone companies and insurers. One has been outstanding, two truly dreadful.

The dreadful ones have failed to communicate internally, leading me to having to explain what happened over and over. They have also failed to answer mails, have cut me off when on the phone, and have sent me contradictory letters from unidentified ‘team members’ with no means to respond to them.

None of this is unusual, I hear the same thing over and over. Unresponsive, uncaring, ill-informed responses to life’s little crises.

And yet the same organisations spend millions advertising their friendly teams, their willingness to help.

And then they go and outsource their customer-facing roles either to a chatbot that struggles to answer the inanest query, or to a bored individual who could not care less as to your plight and whose sole objective is to pass you along to someone else.

Even less understandable, hugely expensive brand campaigns do not seem to exist outside their designed-for channel. Are company owned websites consistent with the brand’s advertised persona? Do retail outlets mirror the same organisation’s video commercials? Do the trucks moving product around the country speak to the same brand values as the advertising?

Yes of course some do, but most, by far do not.

It is worth calling these things out. For decades I have been a loyal BMW customer. Last year I decided to look further afield. I read reviews, answered ads, responded to websites, and visited car showrooms. Most of these last were unremittingly awful. Yes, they were bright, full of shiny cars and some even had comfortable chairs, but none had anything to do with the expensive ad campaigns favoured by the sector.

BMW themselves were not expecting me at the dealership (the same one I have bought from in the past). The salesman couldn’t have been more bored; wasn’t well informed as to his products; and didn’t follow-up.

I bought a different marque, selling them my BMW in part-exchange.

6 months later BMW asked if I would consider selling them my second hand car.

3 months after that the BMW finance team approached me offering a new finance package.

3 months after that and I am still receiving mails asking me to bring the car in for a service.

I know perfectly well that there are manufacturers and there are dealers. But to the consumer they are one and the same, joined at the hip. Good work by one is easily undone by shoddy work by the other.

I realise that concepts like lifetime value have their critics, but regardless I like to think I was a valuable customer to BMW – one that their incompetent and fragmented communications strategy has played its part in losing.

Who will take internal responsibility for losing me? Will anyone even know? The marketing team will say they drove me to the dealership, so they did their job. The dealer will say the product range did not meet my needs. So not their problem. The used-sales, finance and service people will say, ‘who are you and how can I help.’

We have to do better. Online campaigns are not just performance marketing, they are advertising. Point-of-sale is not just retail, it is advertising. In store display is not just merchandising, it is advertising. Emails are not just direct communication, they are advertising. Chat bots are not just algorithms, they are advertising. Call centre staff are not just frontline representatives, they are advertising.

Everything that communicates with the consumer or prospect is advertising.

My Crater Lake colleagues at MESH Experience, almost alone amongst research agencies tracks exposure against all touchpoints thus providing the evidence to those smart enough to know it’s important to quantify these things. They’ve also authored an excellent IPA initiative designed to highlight the role and value of owned media.

Our Crater Lake colleagues at Navigation have developed ways of isolating the effect of all channels. It is all advertising, so best to quantify how it all works.

Next time you feel moved to complain about a company’s treatment of you find out the name of the CMO and copy him or her in. They should be pleased to hear from real people.

Obviously there will be mistakes, people have bad days, messages go astray but surely, we should aim high. And we should praise those who get it right.

And so, for my part, well played More Than Insurance. And boo to NatWest and Vodafone.

I make no apology for revisiting material I shared when we last met in person in 2019. We are not progressing sufficiently in addressing the big issues, and we need to ensure we protect the consensual principles we have applied to the majority of industry audience measurement for decades. 

I felt that then, I feel it now. 

That is not to suggest that the JICs should have carte blanche to stagnate (not that they are doing so; well done to BARB for adding Netflix), but it does mean that we should not take for granted the benefits that come from all sides of the industry sitting down together to solve common problems. 

The phrase ‘an existential threat’ is not one I use lightly, but the largest, most influential media players on the planet – the online platforms – no longer have common cause. 

This is simply a reality. The arguments around Google trying to join BARB if only BARB would bend to Google’s will, have long gone. 

The notion of creating an online JIC to which Google, Facebook et al could all sign up to an agreed set of measurement standards looks a way off (at best), although the fact that many of the major online players have signed up to ISBA’s Origin programme is undoubtably a sign of progress.  

Meantime advertisers and their agencies still need to plan, still need to buy, and still need to evaluate effect. 

Measurement of audiences is a cornerstone of these activities. It is not the whole edifice, despite what some may believe, but it is vital.  

Edifices without cornerstones tend not to stand up for long. 

If the industry cannot find solutions, then the various players will find their own. The endpoint of which is multiple currencies, a concept that we have lived through before, that wastes time and focuses effort and money in the wrong place. 

A famous UK Media Director, Rodney Harris once said: “Media research is not designed to find out the truth. It is a treaty between interested parties”​. 

If you cannot sign a treaty the consequences that follow are not appealing. 

Natural tensions between buyer and seller, buyer and planner, planner and advertiser have historically always been solved peacefully. Techniques were found, systems improved, compromises made. 

But now we are into what is much more a political and financial discussion, with technique and measurement standards pushed to one side. 

There remains one faction of the media industry focussed on accuracy and doing things right, but unfortunately this is the faction from whom ad revenue is drifting away.  

The new giants could not give a fig for accuracy – if you doubt me how come Facebook manages (and not just once) to ‘reach’ more people in a particular demographic than exist in living breathing form? And then to try to explain that this is perfectly normal and justifiable. 

Online consensus groups do occasionally pop up. I am grateful to Bob Hoffman, whose new book ‘Adscam’ points out the following. 

“In April 2017 … a group of big-time advertisers, publishers, agencies, and media announced a coalition (The Coalition for Better Ads) to ‘rid the internet of annoying ads’.  

“In 2011 … the IAB, the ANA and the 4As (announced an initiative) called ‘Making Measurement Make Sense’.” 

I may very well read the wrong trades, but I heard little either at the time or more recently from either.  

As Bob puts it: “It is now five years since the establishment of the Coalition for Better Ads. Have they rid the internet of annoying ads? Try not to laugh.” 

It may seem ‘angels-on-the-head-of-a-pin’ stuff to be concerned about arcane audience measurement techniques but remember that the most effective way to drive eventual change is by starting a topic far away from the frontline. 

As the Chinese proverb has it: ‘The flapping of the wings of a butterfly can be felt on the other side of the world.’ 

Dismiss the technical experts, ignore their advice, their worries, and concerns and before you know it, we all have a problem. 

No common standards of measurement, means less accuracy in evaluating true effect, leading on to no justifiable business reason to build brands, and every reason to focus 100% on performance metrics. 

This is not a happy place for the industry to be headed.  

This is a shame – audience measurement (in one form or another) forms the bedrock of the media business, the foundation on which plans are built, and buys are made.  

Worryingly the principles on which the various systems have been built over a considerable period are coming into question like never before. 

The concern is that whilst the technocrats squabble over the detail the real argument is happening elsewhere and is concerned less with technique and more with politics, structure, and the search for ever larger numbers, however meaningless. 

We are genuinely in danger of weakening the bedrock, and once you do that the likelihood is that the whole house will come tumbling down. 

It might be worthwhile starting at the beginning. 

Why measure audiences at all? It may seem an obvious question but in the modern era of platforms and big data (is that still a thing?) we can allegedly quantify everything without going to the trouble of measuring it. 

If you can claim, with a straight face that your platform reaches more of a certain demographic than actually exists in living breathing form (a particular specialism of Facebook), and if buyers are happy to continue to buy impressions allegedly made against these non-existent people, then why bother? 

As we all know, audience measurement creates the currency used to buy and sell space and time. 

The provision of a currency is hugely important, and it is a credit to the measurement community that its accuracy is not questioned. I doubt that there are many advertisers or their agencies seriously questioning BARB data. 

BARB just is – and well done to all involved to have reached that status. 

That they have done so is due to a lot of behind-the-scenes work, strengthening the bedrock where necessary, so that it’s able to take the strain imposed upon it by new developments in the marketplace. 

BARB is on firm ground in any technical debate. 

But the participants in the new debate are not technicians, they are investors, moneymen who see advertising dollars blindly following size. 

They demand ever bigger numbers to feed the beast. If the audience is not there, then make it look as if it is. Matters of research propriety will soon be forgotten as the platforms deliver ever more impressions, ever higher reach. 

And therein lies the genius idea. 

Take 100 advertisers from 20 years ago and ask them to define ‘impressions’. Or ‘reach.’ Few would have been able to do so. 

So why not use the same words? 

No-one that matters will spot the difference when online terms are set against conventional measurement norms. 

Once you have got away with misusing words you can do what you like. 

Sell more ‘impressions,’ no-one knows what they are anyway, but we can see you more of them for less. 

Are they human ‘impressions?’ Well, who knows and anyway (runs the online evangelists’ argument) TV commercials sometimes play to an empty room. 

In olden times everyone accepted TV ratings as an approximation of the truth. It was close, the gap between ratings as reported and reality was there, but it was narrow. 

Yes, when the ads came on people left the room; yes, they looked away; yes, they ate, yes, they chatted. But not in massive, wholly distracted numbers. 

When ratings data were used in econometric models, it was with confidence. The data were consistent and accepted, the correlation was there. Advertising, done well, worked.  

The gap between the measurement and real life was not too wide. 

But now it is a gaping chasm. 

Dr Augustine Fou reports that in the world of programmatic buying somewhere between 1% and 4% of online clicks come from humans. 

But hey, the impressions were cheap. Hurrah for cheap media! 

We need to start to change this narrative. 

Advertisers need to ask the right questions of their agencies (who are in no way going to want to initiate this conversation). 

They need to understand that the same word used in different media contexts does not necessarily mean the same thing. 

They need to understand the size of the gap that’s opened up between what they are buying and what they think they are buying. 

If they do not do this, they will have some exceedingly tough questions to answer.  

Including how come we bought more impressions than we did back in the olden days, but our advertising seemed to work back then? 

Only yesterday the BBC reported a slow-down in online ad spend. 

An economic slowdown is upon us, yes. But maybe these ads are not working so well, and it has just taken us a while to work that out. 

Those spending the money are going to have to accept the truth that, in the words of my Crater Lake analytics colleague David Beaton, ‘Bots Don’t Buy.’ 

The problem is that whilst we can all agree that something must be done, actually doing something is not so straight-forward.

It’s also easy to fall into the trap of trivialising such a tragedy – and yet it’s only by taking lots of what may appear to be small steps that we get anywhere.

As I pointed out last week, I am these days just a commentator, a blogger. For change to truly occur we need far more influential people than me to come forward. This is one situation when President Roosevelt’s foreign policy mantra ‘Speak softly and carry a big stick’ wins over ‘shout loudly and wave your arms around’.

The first thing we could all do is ensure everyone knows what words mean. What should be simple concepts, like ‘viewer’, ‘reach’, ‘impressions’ are not always quite what they seem.

If you work in media in any capacity, agency, sales, client specialist, auditor, research company you know this is true. So why not admit it? Why not talk about it? Why not do something about it?

When your client or boss makes the point that ‘media’ is simply about buying the most impressions for the least money why not point out that an impression isn’t an impression isn’t an impression?

Make the point relevant to his or her world.

Say you work on a car account. In the 1980’s Citroen ran a superb series of ads for their iconic 2CV.

Here’s one:

A car isn’t a car isn’t a car.

Let’s make sure that our clients understand that a view on Facebook isn’t the same as a view on broadcast TV.

That’s not to suggest one is worthless and one invaluable; both have their place. It’s just not the same place.

Next, we have to accept that media is a numbers game. Some of us like to think that there’s room for creativity, for emotion, for standing out from the crowd.

There is room for all these things – if there wasn’t everything would be done by computer and algorithms and we would have to invent a new word, like ‘programmatic’…

Oh, hang on a second.

Programmatic or not, tools are only there to be used by someone to achieve an end. They’re not an end in themselves.

There is room for creativity thank goodness, but how much more powerful the argument to sell creativity if there are numbers to back you up.

One comment to last week’s post came from Jon Waite at Havas.

Havas it seems are launching a new tool (Meaningful Social Matrix, or MSM) across 9 markets to encourage their planners to consider factors other than sheer numbers in their construction of plans.

They’re using the Conscious Ad Network’s framework to score social media vendors across a range of criteria, including ad fraud, brand safety, viewability, DE&I, sustainable development, informed consent, hate speech, children’s wellbeing, disinformation / misinformation, news / journalism protection.

Havas has also been active, as have others like OMG in understanding and embracing the importance of attention.

I’m sure other networks are doing similar things, but the issue is not the cleverness of the tools but whether or not the tools are used.

For them to be used the principles behind them need to be accepted by clients.

For them to be accepted they need to be understood.

For them to be understood we need to educate.

It may seem a long way from arguing about the meaning of words to bringing pressure to bear on the platforms to stop carrying images that cause such distress but small steps, people, small steps.

In the overall scheme of things what we do in creating and placing ad campaigns hardly registers. It is not particularly important, no-one dies. 

Except in 2017 someone did. 

Molly Russell was 14 when she took her own life. Last month an inquest found that Molly “died from an act of self-harm while suffering from depression and the negative effects of online content.” 

It seems trite, inappropriate for an advertising commentator to write about such a horrendous episode.  

But our world does intersect with reality; that is true even with something as terrible as this. 

The coroner said Molly’s death was in part at least down to ‘the negative effects of online content.’ 

Molly’s father, Ian Russell accused Meta (Instagram was where the online content in question appeared) of guiding his daughter on a ‘demented trail of life sucking content.’ 

By that he meant content related to suicide, depression, self-harm, and anxiety. 

Meta’s head of health and wellbeing policy, Elizabeth Lagone described the content seen by Molly as ‘safe’ because it adhered to content guidelines in place at the time. She later rowed back on this and apologised. 

Many advertisers go to great lengths to do and to be seen to do ‘the right thing.’ 

They invest in greener packaging, they support recycling programmes, they change their ingredients to remove harmful elements, they reduce salt and sugar content, they fund grassroots fitness initiatives, and so on. 

But when it comes to where they advertise, as opposed to what they advertise they look the other way. 

I have written here several times about the need to consider context as well as cost-per-thousand. 

I have argued that editorial freedom is important and pulling ads because you do not happen to agree with a political point-of-view is dangerous. 

But the lines are blurring, and no more so than in social media.  

Social media consists of platforms. The word is important – the likes of Facebook do not accept any but the smallest responsibility for the content that appears. 

They are not, in their view, publishers. They do not edit. 

They grudgingly produce ‘guidelines’ designed to weed out the worst, illegal excesses. Some would rather not even go that far. 

Freedom of speech does not, as the cliché has it permit you to run into a crowded theatre and yell fire. 

There must be some responsibility, and where a line is crossed (as happened here in newspapers with phone hacking) there must be consequences. 

My friends at MediaVillage in the US tell me that these days at the large majority of the top 200 advertisers in the USA, media investments report into procurement, and on to the CFO, or direct to the CEO. 

Cost is paramount; cost trumps context; cost even trumps effectiveness. 

So, if your brand could advertise cheaply on a channel promoting insurrection or violence, is that OK? If it’s cheap and there’s an audience, it seems so. 

The best procurement people don’t think like this, understanding that not paying attention to media placements can damage a brand’s reputation at a cost far beyond any cheap cpm savings, but the best are rare. 

What is so weird is that this obsession with cost-per-thousand is based upon dubious, unverified audience numbers provided by those doing the selling. So, the cpm is not even accurate. 

Would a CFO, or procurement chief sanction an investment in new plant without a thorough understanding that the data on which his or her decision is based is robust? Or without checks that the machinery being installed was safe? 

This caution, this best-practice does not apparently come into play when it comes to any assessment of online advertising. 

There is no clearer case that in this digital age, and despite access to data and cases proving the exact opposite, advertising is seen more as a cost than an investment. 

Reformulating products, investing in recyclable packaging are not cheap things to do. 

Yet they are undertaken as an investment because consumers will punish those who choose cheapness over (say) sustainability. 

It is about time the same principles of safety and responsibility were applied to media choices. 

Advertisers wield huge power over the likes of Facebook – a lot more than they do over newspapers. 

A 14-year-old girl died at the very least in part because of images she saw on social media. No doubt others have been affected, have died, or will die.  

It is not good enough for advertisers to plead that this has nothing to do with them. 

They should make it clear that they will not support any channel, any platform without being assured that the necessary steps are in place to protect the audience. And as a minor add-on, to measure its size – unequivocally and accurately. 

This blog is I know read by many advertisers and their professional advisors in media agencies. I hope they will reflect on what happened to Molly Russell, and to the many other Molly Russell’s around the world. 

We may not be responsible for society’s evils, but all of us surely should do what we can to address them. 

The media side of the ad industry has always been good at talking to itself (the same applies to planners, creatives, and account men but they can speak for, as well as to themselves). 

Not only do we talk to ourselves at conferences, within social media and especially in blog posts but we do so in a language all our own. 

You could argue this is the same the world over. Try buying a car, employing builders, changing your mobile phone – all these are activities plagued by the over-use of terms and words that mean little to those outside the magic circle. 

But the fact that others do it is no excuse. 

One of the major shifts over the last ten years or so is the growing involvement of advertisers in media decision making. 

There are loads of reasons for this, ranging from: ‘they should always have paid more attention to how such huge amounts of money were being spent anyway,’ right through to direct selling by the giant platforms that disintermediate (sorry) the agencies. 

Those of us involved within the media business have long wanted increased engagement from our clients. We used to talk about being excluded from the top table, and how our skills and thus contribution to the whole ad process were ignored.  

Indeed, this sense of grievance was one large factor in media agencies emerging in the first place. 

Now we have what we wanted. Clients are tuned in and are paying attention – or certainly a lot more attention than they used to. This has though coincided with life becoming a lot more complicated. 

No-one doubts the power and influence of the likes of Google and Facebook, but the downside of the emergence of such channels is a lack of perspective. 

The media world used to run on verifiable data and numbers. Whatever your criticisms of BARB, TGI and the rest the data per se was checked and verified to within an inch of its life. 

The gap between a number of ratings and the number actually seeing an ad was comparatively narrow. 

Now, with no clarity over what is a viewer, or an impression, with online bots and ad fraud everywhere you look, that gap has widened. 

In other words, where there was some clarity now there’s confusion. 

Meanwhile the experts (in agencies specifically) speak of concepts they most likely picked up at a conference or trade show without spending the time fully understanding the background.  

Politicians call this TLDNR – too long, did not read. 

Twitter (SETR) becomes the font of all knowledge and wisdom, to be endlessly quoted, filleted, recycled. As the Publicis strategist Keerti Nair put it so well on Twitter: 

To help clients make money we need to enter their world, speak their language, and ensure we are understood. 

It may have been the case that confusion increased margin; but we need to get real and recognise that to help business we must communicate better and banish confusion. In truth it was ever thus; it was just that our own self-importance and faux cleverness got in the way. 

Help people make money, and we will make money. 

Take the time to write a shorter letter, as someone (not Irwin) once said. 

There has been much ‘end of an era’ talk in the UK this last week for obvious reasons. We also have a new Government which from early evidence seems to believe in ideological change-for-change’s sake, whatever the evidence from the past. 

Strangely, debunking history never goes out of fashion whatever the facts (‘ah yes, but that time was different for all sorts of underlying reasons’). We are simply not good at absorbing lessons. 

We do what suits our agenda at the time, regardless. 

And so, to media measurement, via the death of a monarch and a change in Government. 

This week asi, who for the last 30+ years have put on the best audience measurement conference around, and who via their Founder Mike Sainsbury have led the media measurement debate issued the latest in their podcast series. 

This episode features Richard Marks, asi’s Research Director interviewing George Ivie, CEO of the Media Ratings Council in the USA. 

For those of you unfamiliar with the MRC’s work, it is the body responsible for the setting of standards in audience measurement across all media types in the US. MRC accreditation is much sought after, and the organisation is well known, influential and respected. 

Richard’s interview with George is well worth a listen. 

At one stage George discusses the current topic of the day in the States, alternative currencies. 

He makes the point that none of the pretenders to Nielsen’s throne are yet to apply for MRC accreditation, although all are busy out selling their wares to the market. 

In other words, they are selling something that may or may not be found to be accurate, transparent, and verifiable. 

I would urge buyers or potential buyers of these services to apply caution.  

George makes the point that he does not see the MRC having a global role, as defined by telling others how to run their measurement services. ‘Caution’ is therefore about as far as I will go in commenting on a market where my own hands-on experience is almost 30 years old. 

That said I would make the following points. 

• The JIC system which applies almost everywhere except the US has brought stability to media measurement. 
• Once you step outside the JICs you enter a world of confusion, where vendors measure what they want, how they want, and if they don’t like the results they obfuscate and change them (see Facebook’s wobbling about on audience data). 
• They can do this as their data is neither verified, nor examined. 
• If you have multiple currencies, you introduce a new dynamic into media trading. Instead of discussing what works, what doesn’t, how to use the medium in question, and what price to pay instead you argue about the accuracy of the currency. 

• Advertisers certainly, and media agencies virtually certainly are ill-equipped for this debate. Why? Because someone else (the appropriate JIC) has taken care of the stability of the currency. The end user should be pleased he or she does not have to worry about it. 

To those who make the point that in the US any JIC would amount to a restraint on free-market trading and would thus be deemed to be illegal I would suggest you look to amend the law as it relates to media measurement. 

It cannot be sensible to introduce inefficiencies, confusion, and time-wasting within a market by hiding behind a law that I cannot imagine was ever created with this end in mind. 

And to those in other markets looking on to learn as the US, hardly a beacon of leadership in media measurement over the years slides into organisational chaos be careful what you wish for. 

To learn more about this issue, and to have your say the asi International Audio and Video Measurement Conference takes place in Nice, France from 2^nd to 4^th November. 

Or, to put it another way, change happens slowly, then all at once.

It’s a leap from Hemingway to audience measurement but what we are witnessing is the acceleration of change following decades of not very much happening at all.

We have become used to a system of collaboration. In the UK, and in almost every significant ad market bar the USA this happens via the JIC model.

Everyone agrees on the principles, then a research agency is hired to deliver.

Take BARB, and its UK predecessor, JICTAR. The BBC and the commercial broadcasters had and still have different priorities from TV audience measurement. One cares about advertisers, the other couldn’t care less.

Yet on certain key principles – like what defines a viewer – both sides come together to agree.

Consequently we have a system built around a rock.

The issue is not the rock, but how to build around it; we worry about technique, not the structure.

This is all fine as long as everyone involved plays the game and can agree on the principles. But as soon as someone questions the rock all bets on the surrounding’s structural integrity are off.

This is where we are now.

The erosion started slowly – when some of the UK’s largest newspapers refused to publish independently collected sales numbers.

No-one much noticed or cared. Newspapers are a thing of the past, all anyone cares about is online impressions and clicks went the (deeply fallacious) argument.

But now things are speeding up.

The major online platforms argue, with some merit that the way in which video content on their platforms is viewed is different from large screen TV, whether broadcast or not.

Further they’re different from each other, YouTube does not equal TikTok.

If people view these things differently it stands to reason that what counts as a viewer should also vary.

So why should FB, Google and the rest join the BARB club and abide by its rules; and why should BARB change its rules to accommodate those whose commercial success depends in part upon them proving that they’re an equivalent home for TV budgets?

There was a moment when there was talk of a JIC for online audience measurement; but the idea never really caught on and so we are now in a situation where everyone publishes their own numbers, which are not as a matter of course independently verified.

The result is un-managed chaos and far too much time spent trying to fit together that which was never designed to fit together.

I see measurement of effect as a pyramid. At the bottom is measuring how many people had an opportunity to see the material within which my ad appeared.

Then we go up, stage by stage to the pinnacle which measures how many people saw my specific ad and then took action that commercially benefits the brand.

We’re largely still stuck in the weeds at the bottom, or maybe one or two up from the bottom of the pyramid.

Collaboration between video channels at a measurement currency level, at the bottom of the pyramid has unsurprisingly proved impossible; so it becomes essential we do everything we can to move the debate up several levels.

This advance needs to be advertiser driven – which is why I am a fan of ISBA’s Origin initiative. Personally, I like the approach ISBA is taking, but even if you quibble with the technical detail, the vision of a commercial media industry where measurement is informed by advertiser needs seems to me unarguable.

The alternative is to witness a collapse of collaboration in audience measurement.

To end up with competing systems that are not comparable, and which hinder planning. To have an industry driven not by a striving to understand overall outcomes and effect but by narrow, parochial measurements designed to do one thing – the one thing in question being that of greatest perceived commercial benefit to the sponsor of the research.

To spend time arguing the toss on why my measure beats your measure as opposed to working out how best to use this or that channel to my brand’s best advantage.

The signs are that this is the way the US is going with multiple currencies. In my view this is a mistake.

I believe collaboration beats self-interest.

The other week I read somewhere about ‘a crisis in reach.’ There is no crisis in reach (if the media numbers bother you that much just go and buy a national OOH campaign), what there is on the other hand is a crisis in understanding what exactly the word ‘reach’ means.  

At risk of turning this blog into the Ladybird Book of Media Planning, let’s go back to basics.  

Reach is the % of the target estimated to have had an opportunity to see the campaign or ad at least once. It isn’t a hard concept to grasp. 

What is hard, and what is therefore duly ignored is the notion that it really is not wise to compare apples to oranges. 

Ask yourself, or indeed your favourite sale rep the following. 

‘You say I will reach 80% of my target with this video campaign. Can you explain what you mean by ‘reach?’ 

‘Ah, so 80% will see my ad. How long for?’ 

‘And if in my judgement 2 seconds is insufficient to get my message across, what proportion saw, say 10 seconds? 

‘And when you say ‘see’ what exactly do you mean? Is it they see the programme or block in which the ad appears, or the ad itself?’ 

‘And does the number refer to the device, or the person using the device?’ 

The point is that the answers depend on where you are in the world (our US friends still largely speak of programme performance not ad break, or ad performance) and of course which particular channel is being used. 

This goes back to the issue of definition. What is a viewer, and what criteria do you need to satisfy in order to qualify as one? 

Advertisers really don’t care about reach, impressions, ratings except as staging posts along the way to sales. If ‘x’ reach leads to ‘y’ sales then great, but what matters at the end of the day is the ‘y’ sales. 

Further it may very well be that less reach, however defined but made up of exposures in quality environments that are not just ‘seen’ but noticed, is what really matters. 

I know it can be tedious delving back in history to make a point but when the great Mike Yershon sold his client Fiat on only advertising in centre breaks, in ITV’s main news and only ever first in break, ‘reach’ was not the only concept on his mind. 

Mike and others like him knew well, rigorous research evidence or not, that noticeability counted and whilst it is easy to say if no-one has the opportunity to see the ad then by definition no-one could notice it, that assumes we cannot keep two concepts in our heads at the same time. 

In a forthcoming asi podcast interview, my Crater Lake colleague David Beaton, from the advanced analytics business Navigation makes this point very well.  

David suggests that quality of exposure matters a lot when it comes to assessing eventual outcomes. 

Paul Feldwick in his excellent book ‘Why Does The Pedlar Sing?’ does much the same when he refers to the power of fame. 

You get to be famous by being noticed. Not (just) by reaching some poorly defined media metric that is only there to help inform what is at the end of the day a refined guess, an estimate. 

Media metrics like reach are a staging post along the way, a means to an end. Not the end in itself. 

‘Truth’ is an increasingly elastic concept, with anyone putting the counter argument being seen as straight wrong. Discourse, exchanges of views, civilised argument and debate are all in short supply.

In the UK we are currently witnessing the spectacle of the governing party, the Conservatives choosing a new leader to replace Boris Johnson. The person selected by around 160,000 Conservative Party members will become the next Prime Minister.

This process involves what seem like endless hustings hosted by this or that broadcaster and featuring the two candidates performing in front of those with a vote (remember the voters in this case are a slither of the population and are by no means representative).

The candidates play to the gallery, going for instant applause over any discussion around detailed policy intentions.

One guaranteed crowd pleaser is to blame the media – for pretty well anything, and certainly for the downfall of the current PM.

The same ‘blame the media’ phenomenon was seen in the US during the last election cycle at Trump rallies.

Never mind that much of the time the media were reporting on certain behaviours.

This is not a political blog but this ‘shoot the messenger’ thinking is dangerous. Omar Oakes summed it up well in his Mediatel Media Leaders column this week.

The question is what can, or indeed should the commercial side of the media industry do about it, if indeed anything?

I commented on Oakes’ piece at the time and make no apology for making the same points again here.

I see two courses of action, one regulatory, one commercial.

On the regulatory front letting the Conservative Governments of Cameron and May get away with cancelling Leveson 2 without so much as even a minor fuss was a mistake.

Leveson 2 was the recommended follow-up to Lord Leveson’s enquiry into phone hacking to fuel stories in our newspapers.

Part Two was planned to address the oh-so-cosy relationship between newspapers, politicians, and the police. It was quietly dropped following pressure from key newspaper proprietors.

Advertising trade bodies and lobby groups should call for it to be resurrected as a way of rebuilding confidence in an independent, free press.

Commercially, today’s sales directors really have zero influence over their papers’ editorial policy.

It was not always so. Harold Evans, the legendary Editor of ‘The Sunday Times’ (pre-Murdoch) famously consulted his Sales Director before embarking on his landmark thalidomide campaign.

He (Evans) would no doubt have done what he did anyway (and his Sales Director encouraged him to do what he saw as the ‘right thing’ in any case), but the point is he did think it important to consult.

What about the influence today of advertisers, and pressure groups like Stop Funding Hate?

Advertisers buy audiences. They are or should be agnostic editorially. Would you prefer a newspaper edited by Paul Dacre or Procter and Gamble? The very fact that I am asking that question should make the point.

Advertisers define the audiences they want to reach in a number of ways as we all know.

What if certain beliefs, even political beliefs were an audience determinator?

What if political persuasion was a demographic? What if TGI’s lifestyle questions included statements on topics like immigration, or even Brexit? What if you could buy campaigns against a target of committed remainers, or leavers?

It is not correct to say these views have no impact on purchasing. It would be interesting to ask James Dyson (a famously committed Brexiter) whether his views impacted sales.

Why would the Dyson people want to target committed remainers with their ads?

What if a newspaper’s more extreme editorial views had commercial consequences?

It’s an interesting question that I have posed before here in 2017.

But here’s the thing. The Cog Blog is non-commercial, I don’t charge anything for it as it gives me the freedom to be, to paraphrase Bob Hoffman ‘an indiscriminate insulter’.

But I do look at the number of people accessing the posts – this varies by a factor of 10, even 20.

And this one, on advertisers and editorial was way down the league table. For such an important topic, this surprised me.

In the last five years the issue has become more extreme.

We should not ignore this matter. We are due a debate.

March’s Part One (here) was about respect for others’ expertise, and recognising that no-one, not even you, can be expert in everything. 

June’s Part Two (here) was about curiosity. 

This time the theme is collaboration, and the benefits of working together.  

I spent a large chunk of my career at Leo Burnett. At the time Burnett was an independent company, owned by its employees. This was of course way before Publicis bought the agency.  

There existed a strong culture which incidentally continues to this day amongst Burnett alumni. Leo himself fostered this – when I joined, I remember being shown a speech he made called: ‘When to take my name off the door’, which was all about respecting each other and the work we all did. 

Burnett (the man) was a great one for aphorisms. One that stuck with me was: ‘No one of us is better than all of us.’ 

As the ad business started to fragment into different specialisms, leading eventually to the emergence of the media agency sector, so collaboration became less a ‘nice to have’ and more a necessity. 

Leo Burnett (the agency) was one amongst many to realise that as the marketing budget was larger than the ad budget, expanding the service offering into areas like packaging and in-store was a promising idea. This was called ICS, Integrated Communication Services (I probably got that wrong – someone will correct me). 

I was part of the team that presented ICS to Cathay Pacific, a client known to be both loyal and innovative. We used seatback anti-macassars as one example of an owned medium that would benefit from inclusion in our integrated plan. 

We were asked for our experience delivering designs on anti-macassars. Had we ever worked with suppliers of these things before? We hadn’t. We tended towards the arrogant in such matters of detail. 

I see the anti-macassar story as being less about an opportunity and more about a land-grab. Let’s say Burnett had been awarded the anti-macassar brief and we had messed up (quite possible given our distinct lack of specialist knowledge), then the client’s trust in the agency would have been eroded. 

Trust is an invaluable commodity, why would you risk it by taking on something about which you clearly know little?  

Why spoil the ship for a ha’porth of tar? 

If on the other hand, we had contacted Cathay’s anti-macassar supplier and found a way of working with them to incorporate our big advertising idea into their product then not only would the client have benefited but the agency’s status as a trusted and collaborative partner would have been enhanced. 

The best ideas can come from anywhere, including media vendors. I sometimes invited creative teams to present certain campaigns to key vendors. There are rules to doing this. 

Pick the client and be sure that you can deliver. We had a wonderful client in Perrier who were always up for innovative ways of using media channels. There is nothing worse than talking big to a vendor, then expecting them to spend time on an idea that never had any chance of going anywhere. 

Trying and failing is fine; talking your influence up and then never taking the idea forward is insulting. 

At the end of the day no-one knows more about a media vehicle than those selling it; use their expertise and share the credit. 

Even today too many buyers seek confrontation and delight in displays of one-upmanship. 

The best know that ‘no one of us is as good as all of us’ and live by that mantra. 

The best clients know this too and encourage a sharing culture amongst their agencies. The worst foster a culture of anxiety fuelled by threats of reviews. 

Being less confrontational and more collaborative is good for business. Everyone’s business. 

I confess to being a fan of Origin, ISBA’s cross-media audience measurement initiative. I believe advertisers’ active involvement in measuring audiences is a good thing – in fact I would go further and say it’s essential. I also think ISBA are leading, clearing the path for others to follow. Before getting into why, it’s important to state that I am not an ISBA member; I’m not involved in Origin in any professional capacity; and I have no inside track. What follows are my thoughts, and mine alone on how such a service might develop.

My only qualifications for even commenting are, first I have been around long enough to remember the launch of several major audience measurement initiatives (including BARB and the TGI) as a user; and I happened to be on stage at the annual asi event in Prague three years ago when Phil Smith, ISBA’s DG launched Origin.

As I was on stage, I had a microphone and so when Phil asked for ideas on funding (as, to be fair I knew he would) I set the hare running on the idea of a levy.

Why do I think Origin is a good idea? Some context might help.

In the UK (and in many other markets) we benefit from a joint industry committee or JIC system of audience measurement. This means that advertisers, media agencies and vendors all sit around and agree what to do. I’ve sat on several of these JICs, and they are rigorous affairs.

At the end, the vendor pays most of the bill.

This is fine with intra-media measurement. In the case of what we used to call TV, it’s right that BARB (to take the UK example) should be paid for by the broadcasters; advertisers and their agencies in effect pay to access and use the data of greatest relevance to them.

Life gets complicated when TV becomes video, and ‘broadcasters’ include the online platforms.

An advertiser needs to consider video in the round – and yet BARB is incomplete. The broadcasters, who fund BARB will only let the online players in if they agree to abide by the established measurement rules; the online players feel that the rules weren’t ever designed with them in mind.

There is a bigger, hairier problem too.

Since the start of JICTAR, and its modern successor BARB the advertising focus has been around providing a currency to guide the purchasing of this or that TV channel / programme / spot. TV was TV;

If we are starting to consider FB and YouTube along with TV, we might at the same time want to question how to evaluate other forms of communication, like PR, experiential or sponsorships alongside advertising.

Within advertising, you still need to think about allocating budget to out-of-home, cinema, online, social, audio, video and so on. How best to do that?

Yes, we have TGI (now over 50 years old) and Touchpoints, but they’re limited in scope.

Wouldn’t it be helpful if the industry had help with measures or guidelines to help these comms planning decisions? The question is who should pay for research that spans channels? A superJIC, involving all vendors would be (to be polite) a nightmare.

The principle should surely be that the end beneficiary should pay. Who benefits from better and unbiased planning decisions? The advertiser.

The case exists for the advertiser to underwrite the service. But how?

I see several benefits to the idea of a levy.

First, we have a UK precedent. The UK advertising industry is self-regulating. This is a far better idea than being Government regulated. Who benefits? The advertiser. Who pays? The advertiser. How? Via a levy – the ASBOF levy.

A levy soon becomes automatic, a part of the furniture. It’s a cost of doing business. It’s secure – there is no need to go through a funding argument every few years, instead the argument is about what research to do and how best to do it.

A levy involves many funders. No-one party dominates; the industry gets what’s decided by the industry to be best for the industry.

A levy involves a small % of a large sum (gross UK ad spend) thus generating a large amount.

Advertisers should be at the forefront of audience measurement; it is after all the means that determines how their money is spent. Those of us close to the issue have argued for that for decades.

Their involvement takes the debate beyond currencies, whilst maintaining the currencies’ primacy within media forms.

This opens the way to think about different channels (I mean advertising versus PR as well as video versus audio and ITV versus YouTube). In due course it can include concepts like attention measures and other techniques to help us understand how consumers consume media – singly and in combination, and what works and what does not.

 Origin should involve all major media vendors. To choose to be excluded means you miss the opportunity to shape how your medium should be planned. Instead, you limit yourself to worrying about how it should be bought.

I hope Origin will be a long-term project, involving every stakeholder.

To those who see Origin as a way of helping FB and Google attain measurement respectability (as if their revenues suggest they need that), I have one question: How do you eat an elephant? The answer (of course): One small bite at a time.

I fear this will be a disaster for all but the technocrats who finally get a platform to discuss their theories around angels and pins. For the rest of us (especially those of us who remember the painful debates in the US around readership measurement methodologies that led to different vendors using different techniques to measure allegedly the same thing) it will add little to improving the craft of advertising. 

Is it any wonder that advertisers look on the media measurement industry with a mix of disdain and incredulity; and stay well clear. Better for them to shake their heads in amazement and go off and establish their own measurement framework (as the WFA, ANA and ISBA are doing) – based on telling them what they need to know not what vendors choose to tell them. 

There are examples of measurement businesses claiming to have the answer to the tricky questions advertisers would indeed like answering. 

Take the thorny matter of ‘attribution’. 

My LinkedIn feed has for some time contained an ad for a business that claims to have sorted out ‘attribution’. It features a guy explaining how things really work to an incredulous interviewer. 

I admit I haven’t watched it beyond reading the blurb beneath the video and I’m certainly not going to promote the business concerned by mentioning them here, but it does rather remind me of the online media guru at Havas a few years ago sitting me down and starting our meeting with the words ‘let me explain to you how advertising works’.   

If you want to understand attribution you need to explain how to measure the impact that offline media forms, like TV, audio, OOH, cinema have on online activities. And vice-versa. 

You need to explain ad fraud numbers, and bots and how you’re accounting for them. 

What is misleading is to limit your explanation to optimising likes, retweets and the rest as if these things exist in a sealed vacuum uncontaminated by anything in the outside world. 

This isn’t ‘attribution’, this is a con. 

Same with ‘cross-media’. When most people speak of cross-media in the trade press or from conference platforms what many mean is cross-video, or cross-platform. 

How to improve a metric by optimising video spend across video channels. 

This may be very desirable, but it isn’t cross-media. 

To my mind any definition of cross-media starts with an appreciation that it is possible to communicate a commercial message by means outside of advertising. Point-of-sale, websites, retail, PR, experiential, sponsorships, influencers and so on, all might very well have a role to play. 

If I was a marketing director, I would want a way of assessing these channels individually and in combination. 

Then if I settle on advertising as a channel, I want to understand how video works with audio, with OOH, with social and so on. 

Then, certainly within video it’s great to have access to systems like CFlight. 

It’s like a ladder going up into the clouds. We’re on a low rung, and whilst we’re not going to get any higher without the low rungs the climb towards what we really need to know is long and arduous. 

To suggest that the low rung is anything other than a perfectly helpful step along the way is misleading. 

Why does any of this matter? It matters because we should not be conning our customers – we tried that for years when it came to explaining how agencies got paid. That didn’t end well (not that it’s ended yet). 

We should be honest with our measurements, explain what we can and can’t do, what the limitations are and how we seek to overcome them. 

We should stop hiding behind words like ‘attribution’ and ‘cross-media’ as if they were some sort of holy grail, hiding in plain sight just waiting to be discovered.  

They’re not, it’s complicated and to pretend otherwise diminishes us all. 

Take the simplest thing. We speak of digital media. This means next-to-nothing. Pretty well all media forms are digital, in that they are distributed digitally. It’s akin to describing media forms as being ‘paper’ in the sense that back in the day many were distributed and displayed using paper. 

The great Tess Alps has argued against the use of the word ‘digital’ for years and still we do it, when in fact what we mean is ‘online’ (and even that’s a bit of an all-purpose non-descriptor when you think about it). 

But digital, online, whatever, this is a misuse of language which may be inaccurate and irritating but by and large is harmless. 

Other ‘misuses’ are more damaging and, worse are sometimes used deliberately to mislead. 

Back in the day we used to talk a lot about TVRs, TV ratings, until we went all American and imported the descriptor GRPs. Everyone knew what GRPs were, and if you didn’t you could ask 100 people and get the same description. 

Whether we thought GRPs were a relevant or irrelevant measure of anything, we all knew what the expression meant. 

Now try the same 100-person test with the word ‘viewer’. What is a viewer? How long do they have to view to qualify? It all depends on who you ask. 

How can this be? Surely someone who views something for a pre-determined amount of time is a viewer? How can multiple descriptions of the same concept use the same word without causing confusion? 

How to compare those who ‘view’ TV with those who ‘view’ a Facebook video, when the two use different definitions of what constitutes a viewer? 

The issue of course is the ‘pre-determined’ bit. The common-sense solution would be for an august body to rule on this. 

But what if not all parties agree to the recommendation of the august body? What if one party works out that the independent body’s recommendations mean that it loses a rather sizeable proportion of what it refers to as ‘viewers’. 

Years ago, we used ‘average issue readership’ as a measure of print exposure. The august body in question, JICNARS (a joint industry body but funded in large part by the publishers) decreed this to be the currency. 

Yet nobody advertises in an average issue. And certainly, nobody advertises on an average page within an average issue. Why not measure readership by day of the week? Readership of a specific section? Sport, say, or reviews? 

Because the numbers would reduce. Never mind that they might tell planners and advertisers something useful, because the numbers would be smaller, we would immediately reduce spend levels.  

It was clearly beyond us to explain to our clients that nothing had changed – all that was happening was that we were measuring more accurately. 

When the UK TV measurement system changed from diaries to people meters the sales side of the industry, which had argued in meeting after meeting, for years, against progress came close to having a collective heart attack. The numbers would change – ad revenues would collapse. 

Somehow, we managed to explain, and the feared ad revenue collapse didn’t happen. 

If the sales directors of the time had been responsible for digging ditches, we would never have progressed from teaspoons to shovels to mechanical diggers. 

This absurd notion that nobody in advertising can manage to look beyond the largest number is what’s behind the multiple currency debate going on in the US.  

Multiple currencies would be a backward step – even in a geography alone amongst major ad markets that has always avoided quoting audiences to ads, or ad breaks, relying instead on programme averages. 

Why do the Americans put up with this inaccuracy, this irrelevance? Because the numbers produced are bigger. God forbid we may prefer accuracy and relevance over size.  

If size is all that matters, we may as well pack up now and leave the business to the algorithms, and the optimisers. 

The result of multiple currencies will be more people spending more time arguing over the minutiae of currency A over currency B and less time discussing how this or that channel can best be used to the advertiser’s benefit. 

More work for the technocrats; more confusion; less benefit to the advertisers. 

And ultimately less effective advertising. 

Only this week we had the latest from the World Federation of Advertisers (the WFA) claiming that 80% of advertisers use in-house marketing services of one sort or another, and that 75% are only ‘somewhat satisfied’ or less with their current agency roster. 

It would be interesting to see the % who were ‘somewhat satisfied’ – after all that’s still ‘satisfied’ even if less than ideal. 

If 80% of respondents are using in-house expertise it’s hardly surprising that 75% are only ‘somewhat satisfied’ with their agencies. Presumably one follows the other; if you were fully happy with your agencies’ services you would be less likely to invest in in-house resource. 

However august the organization commissioning studies like this, those writing the reports and the press releases don’t it seems have either the time or the inclination to research the background. They’re not old gits like me, in other words. 

But us old gits have our uses. We know for instance that clients have always done some marketing stuff in-house. Typically, this has involved media in some shape or form. 

When it comes to creative work, it’s hard to define neatly and concisely what makes advertising work so that it can be replicated at will. 

Creatively it’s easy to demonstrate that in-housing more often than not doesn’t produce great work.  

But media is different. It’s numbers, so surely the more I get for less, the better? 

Pre-online channels ‘doing’ media in-house wasn’t quite so simple. Take buying TV. You needed BARB, BARB was expensive to buy and analysing it was both expensive and needed some skill and knowledge. 

This has all changed. The likes of FB and Google can give data away to anyone they like. 

Second, FB et al have impressive client-facing teams that disintermediate the agencies. 

It’s up to the in-house team to use the data, but far more importantly it’s also up to them to carry out whatever validation they believe to be necessary. 

And in truth the degree of validation is nil, nada, zilch. ‘Trust me, I’m a platform’ pretty well sums it up. 

And so, we have a situation where a massive % of total adspend goes to media forms whose principles of measurement are untouched by any form of independent evaluation or audit. 

As long as some humungous number is produced, preferably even more humungous than last time everyone’s happy. 

What about bots? What about the lack of correlation between likes and outcomes? What about changes in definitions of what constitutes a viewer leading to apples being compared with oranges? 

These are details, dismissed by the true believers as too technical to worry about. Well, of course they are when the option is to admit that you’ve been wasting money for years chasing rainbows. 

With some in-house media teams not even reporting to the CMO, the lack of real accountability is indeed startling. 

Advertisers have convinced themselves that the numbers given them by those doing the selling are correct and valuable. 

The fact is they’re neither. 

The emperor has no clothes, and nobody is too keen to be the first to point this out. Or rather, there are people pointing it out from stages around the world, but none of the speechifiers are it seems doing much about it if ad revenues on the platforms is any indication. 

Advertisers need in-house experts with the nous to use their agencies to advise them (as Nick Manning’s excellent piece suggests). Agencies have the skills, but what they’re too often missing is the backbone to tell the client that what they’ve been doing is wrong. 

Which is what they would do if they were true advisors or consultants as opposed to reactive executors. 

This whole situation is a mess and is what happens when you have unvalidated data being treated by those non-specialists receiving it as gospel truth. 

The advertisers’ trade body in the UK, ISBA is acting to deliver on the promise of Origin, the cross-media planning initiative by hiring the ex-agency leader, Tom George as CEO. 

This isn’t the non-sequitur it might appear to be. 

Once advertisers are in a position to compare exposure data on a like-for-like basis across channels then life will become simpler. Plans can be constructed on a firmer, more professional footing, and buys can be made that deliver the plans. 

Responsibility and accountability for online spend needs to be with the CMO; and agencies’ honest advice on planning needs to be encouraged. 

Happy days. Easy peasy. 

It’s all true.

Back in the day, when I suppose I might have been persuaded to journey down to the South of France, Cannes was a creative festival, for creative people to celebrate their craft (and yes to give themselves awards, nothing wrong with that).

Clients certainly didn’t go, and as for media people, well we had our own events, one up the road in Monte Carlo, why would we want to gate-crash someone else’s party?

And even if you could make the case for agency media folk turning up to drink overpriced wine at someone else’s expense (something we were after all very good at) and to wallow in creative excellence, then you certainly couldn’t make any kind of case for media salespeople, let alone (gasp!) researchers.

Let me be clear. I didn’t go so my thoughts are influenced by the posts and reports I’ve read, nothing more.

But with that said, I’m just not sure what Cannes is anymore. I thought it was about the whole industry coming together to celebrate creativity – and if that is honestly the case, then great. But it seems to have become a festival for the ad business (in the broadest possible sense) to sell to itself whilst not tackling the huge issues the industry faces.

Take the disrupters. You can imagine the planning discussion. Let’s get Gary Vee. He’ll draw the crowds especially if he can be persuaded to turn up with some influencer (how is Paris Hilton still a thing?). He’ll get the agency guys frothing, he’ll generate headlines and clicks and next year delegates will come in even greater numbers to howl at some new disrupter.

How about Dorries – she’ll sell tickets; or Trump? Or Musk?

Why does any of this matter? Why not put Gary Vee on a platform; why not hold sessions featuring researchers explaining how to be creative; why not structure awards to guarantee participation and presence.

On one level it doesn’t matter at all. If these guys think it’s worthwhile going along and filling the Cannes coffers, then why not?

But on the other hand, I do think it matters. It distracts from the real and huge issues facing the industry. Just yesterday the UK Government floated the idea that companies should cut back on their marketing spend in order to cut consumer prices.

How can that be OK? How have we failed so badly to convince policy makers of the economic benefits of marketing?

What about ad fraud? What’s the industry doing? The ANA in the US don’t seem to know whether this is a $60bn or a $120bn problem.

Seems to me that both are pretty large numbers and that the problem is worth a cursory discussion with senior clients, surely?

What about audience measurement? There’s considerable turmoil in this particular neck of the woods and far from being a niche topic certain reported moves threaten many facets of the business. The asi Conference will no doubt tackle the issues in detail when it meets just down the coast in Nice in a few months.

But I am sure the agencies and advertisers crowding the Croisette won’t come to Nice to listen, learn and make sure their views are heard (‘we would love to, but we have no budget’ will be the refrain. I wonder what happened to the budget?).

To take one topic: why should any single view on the future direction of the business go unchallenged? If someone wants to invite Vaynerchuck then he should be free to make his case, after all he has stuff to sell just like everyone else, but his worldview shouldn’t go unchallenged.

I think Bob Hoffman, Dave Trott, John Hegarty should have been invited to debate Gary.

Augustine Fou should have been there to highlight the mess we’re in, to challenge the online media giants on fraud and to point out some unpalatable facts to the assembled clients.

The audience measurement issues could be aired and the way ahead debated. Then the specialists can get to work via events like the asi.

I think there’s a need for the industry to come together, to discuss and debate what are truly global issues. Currently we sort-of do this piecemeal, by market.

I would like to think Cannes can become the place for our brightest to meet to discuss and debate the global issues facing us all. Without distractions, although I may be persuaded to allow vendor stalls.

I might even buy a ticket.

March’s Part One (here) was about respect for others’ expertise, and recognising that no-one, not even you, can be expert in everything.

This time the theme is curiosity, and the benefits of being curious.

Be curious about your particular specialism – take the time and trouble to discover what others are doing or saying about the latest trend, the newest techniques. This applies even, in fact especially if their views differ from yours.

So far, so obvious.

Adrian Vickers, one of the founders of that great agency AMV once said that one of the best things about being in advertising was the freedom to be able to suggest anything, however random, to the client who trusts you, without having to take the ultimate responsibility for actually making the decision to do it.

Yes, we are all accountable, yes, we all have bonuses and PRIP schemes, but those things are really about justifying or being penalised when something you do doesn’t come off. That’s different from actually deciding to do the thing in the first place.

The point is: more you know, the more relevant your off-the-wall ideas.

Mark Palmer, in a comment on last week’s post on the new breed of media entrepreneurs put this very well. He suggested that one reason for these guys’ successes is: “All of them … lean forward and are bothered about understanding their client’s business”.

We’re in the privileged position of being asked for our opinion and advice. We’re listened to because we have views considered to be of value.

How can that be if you haven’t bothered to find out all that you can about what it is the client does, what makes his business tick or stumble, and what constitutes the art of the possible?

McDonald’s always used to insist that their agency teams spent time working in a restaurant (they may very well still do this; I hope they do). For those in management, the time was a week; for the direct client team it was four weeks. No-one in the restaurant besides the Manager knew what we were there to do, nor did we tell them; we were simply short-term help.

It was a brilliant way to learn not only how hard staff work, and what they think about their jobs, but also the practicalities (and I speak from experience). You wouldn’t be quite so quick to suggest multiple Happy Meal promotions if you’ve spent time working out where to store the bits and pieces, and how long it takes to box a set.

The art of the possible is also about ambition. Procter and Gamble once asked Carat to put together a team (we weren’t then a P&G agency) to come to their European HQ to present to them on what we saw as the key trends impacting the media business over the coming years.

‘We’ve enjoyed a competitive advantage in media over the last 30 years; how do we maintain that for the next 30?’ was the modest brief.

After the presentation we went to lunch. Tell me, said the senior P&G guy, what are the implications for us of these new satellite channels? I remember wittering on about media stuff, when to consider this or that channel, how to measure audiences, and concerns over what we would now call brand safety.

No, said the client, what I meant was how do we rent one? What programmes should we make or commission? Should we resurrect P&G Productions? What would the commercial model look like?

My understanding of their ambition was all wrong.

The lesson is to understand the client’s business; take every chance to spend time with them, doing what they do away from talking about the minutiae of media and marketing.

Be curious – your clients deserve it, and your career will thank you for it.

If you were working for huge brands the choice really came down to which holding company you, or rather your Board favoured.

Back then most found it hard to tell their Zenith from their Mindshare, their OMD from their Carat. Take the logo off the new business pitch slides and you honestly couldn’t tell one from the other.

Yes there were a few independents – the7stars were one of the first, emerging as a breakaway from Carat with the then-startling idea that transparency in dealings was a good thing, but for many they really weren’t an alternative to the big guys. Back then they were a real challenger brand, appealing to certain types of advertiser.

Total Media, started by another big agency guy, Mike Sell had been around for many years by 2010 – but Mike’s original proposition was a little different. He brought big agency experience to bear on small accounts. I know that’s different now – but back then Mike found a niche, exploited it brilliantly and built upon it.

Those that came after Total saw their ambition as providing an alternative for the large clients; maybe domestic over international but certainly large over small.

To build a career then you spent time at one of the big agencies. And they were, well, big.

I recall an interview with someone who was joining one of the Omnicom media agencies. He was asked about the appeal of Omnicom over, say WPP or Publicis. ‘You get the opportunity to be truly entrepreneurial’ he said. I remember thinking: you’re working for one of the two largest marketing services groups in the world. They didn’t get there by allowing people to behave in a truly entrepreneurial fashion. If you really want to be entrepreneurial then go off and do it for yourself.

And that’s what’s happened over time. Look at the talent who have chosen to leave the large companies to build their own businesses.

I’ve mentioned the7stars founded by Carat luminaries Jenny Biggam, Mark Jarvis, Colin Mills and Gareth Jones. Nowadays they’re rather the ‘grande dame’ of the indie world. They pioneered; and were joined by now-established players like Goodstuff and December19, although Goodstuff has now met itself coming back, selling to a new breed of holding company in Stagwell.

There are those who’ve made their name in the holding companies, like Danny Donovan ex IPG and WPP, taking the leap and backing himself launching his own business, Build Media. The interesting thing about Danny compared with, say Andrew Stephens and Ben Hayes at Goodstuff or the7stars’ guys is that he is, not to get too personal a tad more mature.

Yet Danny sees an opportunity in a new breed of media agency and is out to exploit it. I know Danny (he’ll be commenting on this before it hits the newsstands), and I have little doubt that he’ll succeed. It will be fun watching him.

Much the same could be said of Pedro Avery, ex Havas now making waves with Henry Dalglish and Graeme Douglas at Bicycle, and Sally Weavers and team at Craft.

These opportunities have come about for a number of reasons. There are many more media channels than there used to be, which impacts and automates the buying task; and the modern agency has to have expertise in all sorts of commercial uses of media channels, from partnerships to experiential, from influencers to extensions designed to build customer experiences.

Consequently, planning is finally coming into its own. How different from the days when you had to be big to get the deals which the plans were then massaged to fit; when every agency was judged against some auditor’s crass average; when advertisers were encouraged to know the cost of everything and the value of nothing.

Now skilful media thinking is coming into its own. No more ‘bish-bosh look at my deal’, now it’s about using commercial channels to enhance your client’s brand, about lateral and creative thinking, about data and analytics, about true accountability not some score against a pool.

I think it’s great – more power to the new breed of entrepreneurs’ elbows.

Surely there are agencies with access to evidence and data? How come their expertise is not being accessed as frequently as it could be?

Maybe the influencer market is too small for anyone to bother much about?

The issue of influencers and their pay (and thus the size of the market) is in the news here as the whole matter is the subject of a recommendation from MPs to the UK Government that an investigation is held into what are referred to by ‘The Guardian’ as ‘inconsistent pay rates and evidence of a racial pay gap’.

The influencer market is estimated (in ‘The Guardian’ piece) to be worth $6bn in 2020, rising to $24.1bn by 2025. So, not small potatoes and well worth the bother.

It seems though that when it comes to direct relationship between brand and influencer the choice of individual and the details of any deal are frequently handled in-house as opposed to by the client’s media or creative agency.

Despite what you may read, in-housing is nothing new. Many advertisers (P&G, Unilever, Mars, Diageo to name but a few) have been handling certain media functions for decades.

But there is no question the in-housing trend has accelerated, both in terms of number of advertisers investing in specialists, and the functions their teams deliver.

Some of this makes a lot of sense. In the case of performance marketing of a typical fast-moving consumer goods brand, linking the advertiser’s proprietary first-party data with social media outputs, and adjusting as you go along is, at least in theory made smoother if the whole exercise is done within the advertiser.

Setting corporate policy on such sensitive issues as diversity, inclusiveness and social responsibility and linking such policies to media activities is hard for any third party to do.

None of this is to suggest the agency can’t contribute – it can and it should by using its collective experience supported by research and insights to offer informed impartial advice.

However, ‘impartial advice’ is something agencies put at risk when they chose to make money doing agency deals with media vendors. After all, if you’re risking impartiality in your media selection by acting in a non-transparent manner why should anything you advise be trusted?

To add to the perfect storm of declining agency influence, the giant social media platforms have built impressive direct-to-client sales operations. They’ve in effect disintermediated the agencies – although they make all the right noises to convince the agencies to think otherwise.

The extent of the work done in-house by the advertiser is correlated with trust. It’s not black and white – having a team responsible for how the money is spent and ensuring the company’s corporate reputation is at the very least protected makes perfect sense and should happen anyway.

But there are borderline tasks when the thought must occur – I’d be better off doing this myself rather than risk getting into a fight over trust and transparency.

The best in-housing teams work with their agency partners. They recognise that the agency has experience outside of their own narrow sector, and the resources that can be brought to bear where necessary to enhance client performance through partnership

The trust and transparency debate was downplayed by the largest agencies when it first appeared. ‘Nothing to see here’ was a recurring theme.

Some of us though recognised that you reap what you sow; and that trust once lost is mighty hard to regain.

There is a logic behind this – although maybe it’s not quite the game-changer that the trade press here see it as being. Gideon Spanier in ‘Campaign’ called it: “..one of the most significant moves in the media agency sector in five years and probably much longer”.

The logic is that brands are unquestionably looking to plan across brand-building and performance activities. Many traditional media agencies are great at the former and frankly not that great at the latter. Working consistently across the two is a challenge.

Essence is without doubt a strong performance media agency. Of course that’s not all the agency does, but that is at its heart.

MediaCom on the other hand is … well, big. It’s actually rather hard to summarise what sets the agency apart from other similarly big competitors.

The other GroupM agencies seem more differentiated. Mindshare has always been good at complicated international clients. That’s the business’ heritage, the agency did after all emerge from two strong full-service network agencies in JWT and Ogilvy.

Wavemaker (the agency formally known as MEC) has always been strong on total comms, and integrated messaging. Back in the day the then MEC was one of my first clients when I set up BJ&A, with a brief to advise on how they might differentiate the agency from its larger sibling Mindshare.

Wavemaker has found its niche, has put smart tools in place and does what it does well.

So, on one level putting Essence and MediaCom together certainly creates a difference.

On another level a cynic (good day to you) might argue that WPP and GroupM have worked out that they really don’t need four agency networks. After all, two or three seems to be quite sufficient for the competition. And they’ve been here before with Maxus.

Why not close one via a merger, save costs, dress it all up as a brilliant scheme to deliver performance and brand skills in the same shop and trumpet something about meeting client needs.

What strikes me as odd is that presumably Mindshare and Wavemaker clients have the same need to balance brand and performance. Are these two better at this than MediaCom and thus able to cope on their own without the need to call on Essence?

And if that’s not the case, what are they supposed to do now? Essence is no more as a standalone unit and is thus presumably unavailable.

Maybe Mindshare and Wavemaker have managed to develop these performance skills themselves in-house. If so, then how come MediaCom hasn’t been able to do so?

Given that GroupM units have traditionally fought like rats in a sack for their own independence over their siblings it doesn’t sound terribly likely that there’s suddenly been an outbreak of peace and love between Essence and MediaCom.

I buy the client need but this merger doesn’t feel to me like it’s all about meeting client needs.

Rather it looks more like a cost saving venture dressed up as something rather more noble.

Surely Essence could have carved out its own niche which it then offered in various hues to all three GroupM siblings. Wouldn’t an Essence-Inside model share expertise, tools and so on amongst all three traditional media agencies within the GroupM family?

Wouldn’t all three have been strengthened to the greater benefit of GroupM / WPP?

The merger of Essence and MediaCom has been beautifully packaged and sold. The idea has been bought hook line and sinker by the press, but I can’t help thinking that there’s more to it than meets the eye.

But then this is the COG Blog – Cynical Old Git.

There were also always exceptions. If a major event deemed to be of national importance – like a huge sporting event – was shown simultaneously across both BBC and ITV, the BBC always won the larger share of the audience.

Same content but one channel considered for whatever deep-seated reason to be more ‘appropriate’ than the other.

I’ve been thinking about this channel versus content balance a lot this week as yet another new TV channel burst upon our screens. This is TalkTV, owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News UK and a stablemate of TalkRadio which launched on April 22.

The launch of the new channel (which for much of its off-prime time on air screens simultaneous videocasts of the radio show) was dominated by a new, original show Piers Morgan Uncensored, featuring the man himself interviewing Donald Trump.

For readers unaware of Morgan he used to be a showbiz writer on News UK title ‘The Sun’, edited ‘The News of the World’ at 29, before moving on to become Editor of rival tabloid ‘The Mirror’. He moved to the US to take over Larry King’s old gig at CNN before the show was cancelled as a result of poor ratings.

In more recent times he co-presented a mainstream breakfast TV show, Good Morning Britain on ITV before storming off set as a result of a perceived insult and leaving the show.

He’s what we would call Marmite – some love him, others loathe him (who said ad slogans never enter the lingua franca any more).

Anyway, Piers signs with Murdoch as the face of his new TV channel, a venture that it’s boss Rebekah Brooks had already declared to be a commercial non-starter before Murdoch’s initiative; and persuades his old friend President Trump to be interviewed on opening night.

Whether you see this a major editorial coup, or a rather sad locking of horns by two ancient stags is up to you.  

One of the joys of Twitter is that we can all rant on with our expert opinions on stuff about which we know very little. Sometimes Twitter, and my particular expertise touch.

One of the subjects I do know a little about is audience measurement – and once Piers and the Donald had done their stuff Twitter became a veritable online ASI meeting. Who knew so many knew so much about ratings?

My favourite was the guy who had a go at me about audience numbers (I had suggested that actually most people do use the BBC and do, in general, like it). His view is that all audience numbers are nonsense and that we should be paying attention to the ‘real information collected by people like Sky and Netflix’.

But let’s set all the technical stuff (like who’s telling the truth and who isn’t) aside and focus on what was said by the main players.

Morgan announced an audience of between 300 and 320,000 for his Trump interview. This he claimed beat BBC News and indeed everyone else.

Of course it didn’t, what he meant was his show performed credibly against the BBC News channel; it was way, way behind the numbers delivered by the main evening news on either BBC or ITV.

Without Trump subsequent Piers Morgan Uncensored shows have struggled and seem to have settled at about 60K – 65K.

Piers has of course now rubbished all audience data and instead quotes a worldwide online reach over 50 million. Yes, quite.

Back in the real world, Morgan’s presenting partner from his days on Good Morning Britain, Susanna Reid secured a live interview with Boris Johnson which is said to have reached a live audience of around 1.3 million.

Let’s assume that Johnson equals Trump; Reid equals Morgan (big assumptions I know). But the fact is Reid and GMB delivered an audience 4 times larger than Morgan and TalkTV.

Which only goes to show the importance of channel plus presenter. If as a presenter you go elsewhere you don’t take all your audience with you.

Habit plays an important part in many people’s (real people as opposed to anal advertising types or Twitter experts) consumption of media.

For many, breakfast TV equals Good Morning Britain; morning radio equals the Today programme or their favourite music; newspapers equals the same one (when they buy one); even posters – many people travel roughly the same routes each time.

Yes of course drama is different; yes people carry on watching their favourite formats even if it switches channel. But I suspect news is pretty habitual.

Piers Morgan is a big name but in part he’s a big name because of where he’s appeared. He’s helped the channels he’s been on; and they’ve helped him.

Even stars (especially stars..?) can get ahead of themselves.

And other stuff that bugs me.

Will Netflix Take Ads?

Yes, and this should be of zero surprise to anyone.

Expect Netflix’s model to be imaginative and different to the traditional TV networks. Watch out for:

• Fewer ads per hour, sold at a premium
• A fresh look at audience measurement probably featuring some attention metric
• Ads limited to before and after shows
• Flexible sponsorship opportunities
• More product placement in Netflix productions
• An ad-free premium service – which will be an issue as the very audience that a scheme like that is likely to attract will be the audience advertisers most want to reach.

Will streaming services lose subscribers?

Yes, but not necessarily equally or proportionately. There is some evidence (from Kantar’s Dimension study) that subscribers to multiple streaming services will hang on to the ones they most value (not necessarily those they watch most frequently) and jettison the rest when money gets tight.

This is different to assessing each individually on the value for money each provides.

Expect offers, free trials and imaginative coupling with other company assets.

Is editorial context a thing for advertisers?

If we set aside the obvious desire to avoid unfortunate and avoidable juxtapositions with terrible images and stories, by and large no.

Advertisers may jump up and down when it comes to such as data privacy abuses by the online platforms, but they still spend money with them.

Look what happened when some of the world’s biggest advertisers boycotted Facebook a little while ago? FB shrugged, made a sad face and carried on doing much what they were before.

The boycotters soon came back.

What about political context?

Good for headlines but a slippery slope. Advertisers should be, and very largely are about reaching audiences. If audiences decide to gravitate towards certain newspapers or TV broadcasters, then advertisers of course will look at reaching them there.

Pressuring editors is not something advertisers should be engaged with – although of course if advertisers decide they don’t want to talk to an audience holding a particular political view espoused by certain media owners or commentators then that’s equally their prerogative.

Should advertisers be involved in audience measurement?

Absolutely they should.

At the end of the day it’s their money, they benefit from it being spent as widely as possible, and ultimately they’re responsible for measuring any effect generated.

And should they pay?

The beneficiaries of any measurement system should pay the bulk of any cost. So, yes.

There’s a strong case for an ASBOF-style levy, as is being explored by ISBA’s Project Origin. Levies allow you to share the cost widely, they become woven into the whole ad buying system, and they soon become accepted as an automatic process.

As they become established they help secure the measurement system and allow for visionary planning of activity.  

You don’t hear many complaining or even questioning the self-regulatory system funded through the ASBOF levy.

But what about the currencies?

What about them? They’re fine, they can always be improved and there are perfectly good mechanisms and processes for improving them.

Advertisers’ concerns are with inter-media choices – the choices between advertising and PR, or video and audio. The currencies are about intra-media – this package of OOH sites versus that package.

Is ‘attention’ the saviour of audience measurement?

No of course not. You may as well ask ‘is a potato the saviour of all meals?’

Attention is important, we should measure it and include it as a crucial element in media decisions. Much kudos to Karen Nelson-Field, and Mike Follet and others for doing what they do, and doing it so well.

But you can make a great meal without potatoes, even if adding potatoes will no doubt make it even better. And potatoes on their own, although lovely soon pall.

Are there too many new business pitches?

There are too many badly conceived and run new business pitches.

Pitches are expensive (look at the time spent by the client team, let alone the agencies), and rarely lead to a better outcome.

What they often do lead to is a cheaper outcome, swiftly followed by a realisation at the winning agency that it can’t deliver to its promises and can’t maintain the promised resource for the fee. So, the agency reduces resources, cuts back on service, upsets the client and round we go again.

Still, keeps the trade press in business I suppose.

What will Elon Musk do with Twitter?

Who knows? Certainly not me, and quite possibly not him.

To understand the importance of what’s happening needs us to take several steps back. What’s audience measurement for? What exactly do we need to know? Who benefits?

I think this is really about the growing importance of planning. Up until recently media agencies and those who sell to them had one thing to worry about – what to pay for whatever it was you had decided to buy.

This may be unfair – after all agencies and vendors have extensive resources tied up in research designed to help them decide what channels are best suited for their clients’ needs – but let’s be honest. The game has for an age been all about buying, and justification. Not planning and buying.

The focus has traditionally been on what many, me included see as a too comfortable relationship between buyer and seller. Don’t rock the boat, don’t ask awkward questions.

But this all changed with the Mandel affair. Once Jon threw a rock into the still pool of that comfortable relationship life changed.

First the ripples hit the whole topic of rebates. Buyers had to accept an era of transparency or literally lose business. Margins fell and trade press headlines around Agency X declaring war on Channel Y stopped as the realisation dawned that Agency X had always really been playing war games with someone else’s money.

It also became obvious to everyone in the cosy old world that money was drifting away from them towards the online giants. In fact, not so much drifting as flooding.

Meanwhile the old guard continued to do what old guards always do – stick their fingers in their ears and hope the problem goes away.

Keep talking about buying mechanisms, shares and so on even if the caravan has moved on.

Now the Mandel ripples have hit measurement.

What we need, what we’ve needed for literally decades has been a measurement infrastructure to support planning.

For agencies to do what they often argue (particularly in public) they have been doing all along needs them to plan first, and then buy the plan.

And how should they do that?

They need to convince their clients that planning is something worth paying for; then they need the confidence to deliver those plans – a confidence that comes from knowing there is a research foundation in place on which they can build.

You still need the currencies, the BARBs, PAMCOs and the rest. It’s just that way back when, in an era of limited supply and excessive demand, when buying was all that mattered that may have been all you needed.

Planning stuff was for new business pitches, and conference speeches. The ‘real world’ as those charming ex-buying chiefs would remind us all was about the price you paid (and the margin the agency could make to fund all ‘your flowery planning stuff’).

‘Planning’ was front of house, window dressing to distract from the real business going on in the back office.

Slowly, but relentlessly we are waking up to the importance of being able to explain how to balance advertising with events with sponsorships with PR.

To split ad budgets between online platforms, TV (in its many forms), print, OOH, DM, audio and the rest.

This is why ISBA’s Origin initiative is so important, and why how it’s funded is key. Advertisers should always have been at the forefront of these matters; the fact they weren’t for so long is their failing but better late than never. Far better.

It never made any sense to write a plan, then buy something different to justify the agency’s upfront commitment.

We need the measurement experts to help us throughout the new flow: build the plan, justify the plan, buy the plan.

Not just with the last bit.

I am, as those who read The Cog Blog regularly know, a fan of keeping things simple. I believe that life is complicated enough without us adding to it by using long words where shorter ones will do, or inventing technologies that nobody except those doing the inventing want or need.

Let’s immediately break the shorter words principle by saying it’s with some trepidation that I meander into the world of attribution and modelling.

You’ll notice I write ‘world’ in the singular.

Advertisers advertise in order to sell more or sell the same amount at a higher price. In effect to make more money.

Everything else is geared around that aim. A ‘feel good’ banking ad? Designed to make you feel better about the bank of course, but with the desired end goal being that you’ll open an account or save more.

A charity ad created to tug on your heartstrings? Done to persuade you to give, or give more.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong with this and yes it is obvious – but mysteriously we often forget it.

We’ve convinced ourselves, or been convinced that actually the end point is reach. Or frequency. Or GRPs. Or clicks. Or likes.

Whereas a moment’s thought makes you realise that these are at best mere staging posts, steps along the way to selling more stuff.

And that when it comes to clicks there are bad players corrupting the data we get to see.

The bit of the advertising industry that has always interested me is those brave men and women who spend their time trying to understand why things work, and thus how to make them work better.

The problem we all have is that to understand we need confidence in the data going into the models. Garbage in, garbage out as someone said.

If bots infect click data then click data becomes pretty meaningless as an indicator of what’s working. It may not matter (actually it does) if all you’re interested in is clicks (like someone selling advertising on an online channel), but with respect if that’s the case you’re looking in the wrong place.

All of this can be summarised in the title of an excellent piece of work by my Crater Lake colleague David Beaton called Bots Don’t Buy.

David’s premise is simple. If you want to understand what drives people to buy stuff look at the people doing the buying, not the ‘people’ doing the clicking.

Because some of those ‘people’ aren’t people.

There is another principle at play here too.

If you really want to understand how things work you have to look at every influence.

So, yes online advertising works, but it usually works better in combination with other media forms.

It stands to reason that any model seeking to explain effect, and what drives it has to take in data from all channels used (something else the Crater Lake approach does). That’s online and offline, so that advertisers can be properly advised on the best balance between channels for their business.

It’s why Crater Lake takes in data from MESH Experience in David’s modelling, given that MESH collects real-time data on all consumer touchpoints.

It’s why I wrote ‘world’ in the singular. Attribution and modelling may be presented by those digital experts who think advertising was only invented when they came along, as different things, but actually they’re part of the same thing and should be treated as such.

Keeping it simple: to understand what works means you have to consider every option. Media forms work together; and bots don’t buy stuff.

“To understand is to know what to do”. As my old mate Wittgenstein put it.

From time to time through 2022 I’m going to do my best to share some lessons learned. I’ll try to stick to one per post, and to illustrate with examples.

First up – I’m not a genius who can do everything. Nor are you.

It’s amazing, in fact it’s rather depressing to listen to people preach about something they know little about.

For example, I’m a poor judge of creative work. Certainly, I like some stuff more than others, and of course I can argue for what I like but that’s different from saying I’m a great arbiter of what is creatively excellent.

I learned this the hard way at Leo Burnett. We decided to run a competition to encourage new creative talent into the agency. We did this via a series of ads in the newly launched ‘Independent’. Anyone could apply, the winner (or winners, as it turned out we decided on two) were hired, initially for a guaranteed 6 months but with the chance of a permanent role if things worked out.

To enter you had to answer a series of questions filched from the famous JWT Copy Test.

I don’t remember if we used my favourite question from that: ‘Describe a piece of toast to a Martian’ but we did have our own version: ‘You’re on the phone to the past with limited time, describe TV to William Shakespeare’.

As I had been involved from the start and had convinced the newspaper to run the ads for a pittance, I was on the judging panel.

What I learned very quickly was that there was unanimity (or very close to it) amongst the creative teams on the panel when it came to selecting a short-list and choosing a winner.

The outlier was me. Once I had tried to argue for a couple of the entries I fancied and been convinced I was wrong I just went with the flow.

You might say I should have stood up for what I believed in, but the truth of it was that they knew what they were talking about, and I really didn’t.

More recently I have found myself on social media arguing about the BBC. I’m a fan of the BBC (maybe less so of BBC News but that’s a separate issue). I’m also a fan of audience measurement and of research.

So when I read that some bloke who clearly knows little claims that ‘nobody watches the BBC’ or ‘nobody likes the BBC’ (usually just above the earlier entry on their timeline going on about the wonders of ‘Line of Duty’ or how David Attenborough’s programmes are spectacular) then I feel it necessary to correct them with the facts.

I know quite a lot about a narrow thing. I know a little about related things. And I know sod all about a lot of things.

Respect others’ expertise. Learn from it and from them.

PS – If you can stomach me wittering on for even longer about how I started, and the lessons I’ve learned along the way you may be interested in this podcast interview with me hosted by Leaf. It’s 45 minutes but so well edited that it seems shorter!

ISBA is, along with its sister organisations the WFA and the ANA driving a cross-media measurement initiative. Origin is the UK version of this although the key principles apply equally elsewhere.

I think this represents an important crossroad in the history of media measurement. In the past, audience measurement was a) driven by the media vendors, who paid the majority of the bill and b) focussed on intra-media matters such as the relative size of the audience to particular vehicles.

As such, audience measures were very largely about the determination of value. In ad circles that meant buying.

This was, and is a neat system, that’s still of great benefit today. All sides agree on how to measure audiences; all sides are thus free to argue about how best to spend the budget within the medium without concerning themselves over-much with the merits or otherwise of competing research methodologies (and yes, I know what’s happening in the US at the moment, but the point still holds).

Now we’re finally moving on to compliment these buying measures with measures designed to help us understand how media forms work in combination.

Audience measurement was not and never has been about communications planning. Yes, BARB and the others provide important and verifiable building blocks in the construction of the plan but they’re of little help when it comes to planning decisions.

How to decide what budget to allocate between video and audio? Between OOH and YouTube? And far more significantly between advertising and PR, or in-store and sponsorships?

These are matters of little concern to vendors who have prioritised growing their slice of the cake over baking a larger cake in the first place. You can’t blame them for that – why should a TV broadcaster fund a system which may end up costing them ad revenue?

They are matters of concern to agencies – but again agencies’ focus has been on buying over planning, as we all know. This is changing as choices proliferate and more media becomes biddable.

These planning questions matter to advertisers. Insights can help guide and justify decisions on the big questions. The data generated can feed into own systems, the proprietary models that combine advertiser data with exposure adjusted for quality.

I don’t have any inside knowledge on the vision for Origin, or on its roadmap but if you’re about to eat an elephant it really does make an awful lot of sense to tackle it one small bite at a time.

Phil Smith, ISBA’s DG used to be a client of mine and I can tell you he’s very good at elephant-carving.

It makes sense to tackle the whole consolidate-video-viewing question first. How to combine FB video with YouTube with TikTok with streaming with linear TV (et al) is important.

But it’s an amuse-bouche, not the whole meal.

This longer-term, big-picture vision is why a levy is the best funding mechanism out there. Set up a system where a tiny % of every budget goes into a pot that funds Origin and you’ve in effect established a sustainable R&D fund to benefit all ISBA members.

Origin can initiate planning-focussed projects without constantly having to go through the nightmare of funding each in turn.

Establish an oversight Board to approve projects, and an operations team to deliver to them, supported by external experts and a research agency roster.

Some of my audience measurement friends argue that advertisers’ effectiveness models are by their very nature proprietary and thus not fertile ground for any industry initiative. I think that’s incorrect.

You still need the planning bricks. The parallel would be the outstanding work done by Peter Field and Les Binet over the years using IPA Ad Effectiveness (and other similar studies’) data.

No-one takes Peter’s and Les’ aggregated findings and leaves it at that. That work informs and fuels proprietary work appropriate to each specific advertiser.

Origin is a big idea and represents a major opportunity for the industry. It places advertisers at the heart of thinking around the future of audience measurement, it encourages research agencies to think outside the intra-media currency box, it helps vendors contextualise their offering, it genuinely moves the game on.

It won’t be easy, it will be politically fraught, the funding needs to be right, but in an era defined by planning driving trading, and not the other way around, Origin has the potential to be at the heart of a significant shift in understanding how commercial communication works, and how it can be made to work better.

One of the comments I received came from Jon Waite, ex Dentsu Aegis now at Havas. Jon made the excellent point that if he doesn’t understand something he always (in his words) plays the village idiot and asks. Others should thank him for asking.

A few years ago at an asi Conference, Richard Marks asked Steve Wilcox what he meant by ‘regression from the mean’. There must have been 300-odd people in that room, and by my estimate at least 290 of them offered a silent ‘thank you’ to Richard.

It’s not the easiest thing to speak up. You may think you’re signposting your ignorance, that you look stupid, that you really should know the answer given your experience or seniority.

All of these feelings are understandable, but they need correcting. We’re never going to get anywhere if those making the decisions genuinely don’t have at least some understanding of the basis on which the recommendation to do this or that have been made.

One of my earliest lessons, from one Bernard Bennett (there may be one or two readers who remember him) at Southern TV was: if you don’t know, ask.

I used to go along to friendly, unthreatening gatherings like the MRG, and make myself stand up and ask questions. It wasn’t I admit easy, but it got easier.

Later, when I had accumulated some experience, I used to welcome people asking me things. It’s flattering to be asked; I genuinely never thought ‘what an idiot, how on earth did he get there without knowing that?’

You learn from others after all.

One lesson is never to pontificate on something you don’t understand.

Once I did a presentation to a client about some media measurement issue, and to make it appear a lot more complicated than it really was (‘in confusion lies margin’) I cut and pasted an impressive looking formula from a learned article on whatever the topic was.

I remember my line well – and this was 40-odd years ago. ‘We’ve looked into this and come up with this formula which I’m sure you’ll be pleased to know I don’t intend taking you through today.’

The client’s response is also seared into my memory. It was something like: ‘I did my PHD on something similar to this, I would actually really like you to walk me through it.’

Of course I couldn’t and the humiliation lingers.

This sense of embarrassment and shame seems to vanish when it comes to those who fill my timelines on social media. It’s extraordinary how many a) international trade experts, b) epidemiologists and c) geopolitical strategists connected to me.

Even more impressive is these skills seem to reside in the same people.

I know nothing about these three topics, so I read what I can from those who (genuinely) do. I may, having read up on the topic express an opinion but I don’t pretend it’s anything more than that.

But I do know quite a lot about some things, including advertising, media and audience measurement. So it is with confidence that I say that most people who post on these things know nothing about them (probably because their brains are full given their expertise on trade deals, epidemiology and geopolitics).

If you doubt me read the comments from those who love GBNews and who express their love by denigrating rival channels’ viewing figures. Or those who confuse sales with readership. Or how we can fund the BBC with advertising, or – oh don’t get me started..!

There are of course many people who do know a great deal about these things, but that population, although large makes up a very small proportion of the comments I see.

We’ve got used to valuing everyone’s thoughts equally, however uninformed they may be.

We’ve forgotten the value in learning; and we’ve fallen back into believing that asking someone something is an indicator of weakness or stupidity, to be mocked.

And so we avoid it. No-one likes to be mocked. Surely it’s better for the self-esteem to shout louder, to stare down those who doubt you, to intimidate.

To cut and paste the formula.

No, it isn’t. It really isn’t.

Ask away, curiosity is a sign of strength. And bullshitters get caught out, eventually.

I honestly don’t believe I’m alone in thinking ‘what on earth was all that about?’ when reading certain pronouncements from the adtech industry. I don’t think I’m particularly dumb, but I really struggle to understand what the end-benefit is from so many of these tools and systems. And by end-benefit I mean benefit to the end client – the advertiser.

There are two things about most adtech that irrationally annoy me. First, that they attach the word ‘ad’ to what they do. These systems may be connected to advertising in that they measure something to do with audiences – numbers, or behaviours.

But they have nothing to do with the ad business – the business of producing commercial messages that persuade real people to do real things.

As I said, quite possibly irrational.

The second less irrational element is how complicated the purveyors of these things make them sound.

Don’t get me wrong – in many cases what they do is clever beyond my understanding, but true brilliance lies in making the complicated appear simple.

At Aegis and subsequently at Carat I had the great pleasure to work with Jeremy Swinfen Green. Jeremy was a digital expert before such people existed. I’m sure he remains supreme at what he does, but back then in the 1990’s he wasn’t far off being unique.

Jeremy was particularly good at making things sound simple (he had to be with me around, let’s be honest).

One story he used to tell to illustrate the commercial power of the internet was around a guy in the middle of nowhere, with just a phone line, a neighbour and a hunger for a pizza.

Imagine, Jeremy would say, this guy could go online, search for pizza delivery companies within a 5-mile radius, download their menus looking for his favourite pepperoni, compare ingredients and prices, waiting times, delivery costs, read the reviews, download his credit card details, and order his pizza.

Or he could ask his neighbour for his recommendation, phone the pizza guys and place his order.

The point is that just because you can doesn’t mean you should.

I’m from an era when media in agencies was of little interest to advertisers. We can all moan on about irresponsible clients not caring how their money was being spent, and we can draw straight lines between then and the transparency wars of today.

But we rarely ask ourselves why clients didn’t engage.

One reason was that we were so terribly boring. We talked in a language only we understood. We confused.

You might ask why, and the best answer I can give you came from Irwin Gotlieb, Global CEO at GroupM. To paraphrase from the wisdom of Irwin: ‘In confusion lies margin.’

That policy did indeed work for a good while but look where it led us. To a place where media agencies are not trusted by their clients, where clients would rather handle their own negotiations than risk being fleeced and where our obsession with meaningless metrics like clicks, impressions and the rest has driven creativity into the background at the same time we convince ourselves ‘we’re being accountable’.

And – worst of all – to a place where consumers actively dislike ads, especially online ads.

I’m with Bob Hoffman in loathing how tracking is used and what it’s done to the industry.

But what is far more important than what Bob and I think is what consumers think.

The proponents of online tracking talk a lot about relevance, but there’s a fine line between relevance and stalking. We cross that line far too often.

If advertisers knew the half of what goes on in adtech, how much fraud exists, how disliked excessive frequency and retargeting is amongst their customers they would spend an awful lot less.

Just as well for the adtech business that we don’t understand it, isn’t it? And that we’ve come too far to admit it by asking the right, the simple questions.

The trouble is, history tells us that eventually the paying customer asks enough of the right questions to understand enough about what’s going on to work out what to do.

And what to do involves ensuring that value is added, at a price worth paying.

If you truly add value, then say so, clearly and simply.

Talking in tongues doesn’t work. Take it from an old, oft-bitten git.

The long-term argument is a simple one. People’s perceptions of brands matter. How we see and think about brands is impacted by how the brand talks to us, and how everybody and everything associated with it behaves. And that perception carries through into how we buy stuff in the short-term.

Brands are magical, products are not. And people will pay for and are loyal to magic.

One of my favourite brands is Yorkshire Tea. Why? Does it taste better than other teas? I like it but then I like tea and if faced with a blind taste test I doubt I could pick it. Is it cheaper than the others? I have no idea but I’m sure you can find cheaper. Do I like the packaging? It’s certainly more interesting than most and it’s distinctive.

If I go in for some internal examination of why I like Yorkshire Tea I conclude that really what I like is how the brand communicates. The TV ads with professional Yorkshireman Sean Bean are fun and make me chuckle. Their social media presence is to-the-point, blunt, no-nonsense, wry. Very on-brand, very Yorkshire. They’re consistent and consistently good.

I also love the idea that there may be people who believe we grow tea in Yorkshire.  

I know nothing about the product that makes me buy it over others, but I like the brand. And that’s down to the ads and the consistency in the communication. So I buy it. Every week.

If Yorkshire Tea followed me around the supermarket yelling ‘Buy my tea’ in my ear at every opportunity (the closest I can get to how so much online advertising makes me feel) I would buy literally any other brand first.

But my friends at Yorkshire Tea (as I feel about them, quite irrationally) wouldn’t do that (or so I like to think). They might offer me a promotion to double-lock my loyalty, but if they did so I feel sure it would be done in a way consistent with every other element of the brand’s communication.

The brilliant UK cook and food campaigner Jack Monroe has recently taken on the inequities of how inflation is measured here. Her point is that real-world increases in food prices suffered by the most disadvantaged are buried in a catch-all inflation number that is made up of a number of items of absolute irrelevance to them.

In other words, their inflation is a lot worse than the headline numbers would have us believe, and as so much policy is driven by the catch-all number the situation for the poorest members of society gets downplayed and continues to worsen.

As a part of her campaign, Jack’s created ‘The Vimes Boot Index’ after the Terry Pratchett ‘Discworld’ character Sam Vimes.

The principle is that if you can only afford £10 for a pair of boots, then over the course of say 5 years you’ll need as many as 10 pairs of boots, as they’ll keep falling apart. If on the other hand you can afford £100 for a pair, they’ll last you longer than 5 years, so in the long run the £100 pair are the better buy.

Jack’s point is that the people with the greatest need of boots can’t afford the £100. They have no option but to keep buying the £10 versions so the cost to them in the long-run is higher.

I’m in no way suggesting that the niche travails of those of us privileged to work in the ad industry are even in the same league of seriousness when it comes to the real-life problems faced by those with the least.

But there is a lesson here. We can afford the more expensive boots. We have the luxury of being able to pay for quality that lasts.

It’s about time we did.

In his excellent book ‘Why Does The Pedlar Sing?’ Paul Feldwick quotes Martin Boase, Founder of BMP, a wonderful agency that metamorphosed into today’s Adam and Eve DDB.

Paul has Boase saying: “We believe that if you’re going to invite yourself into someone’s living room for 30-seconds you have a duty not to bore them or insult them by shouting at them. On the other hand, if you can make them smile, or show them something interesting or enjoyable – if you’re a charming guest – then they may like you a bit better, and then they may be a little more likely to buy your product.”

This is such a good quote. Within it are multiple principles: be likeable, entertain, don’t shout, all of which lead to more sales. We seem to forget much of this these days.

Mediatel News this week contained a piece from that well-respected brand marketer Jan Gooding entitled ‘Ads aren’t welcome any more’ in which she uses similar language – ‘be an interesting guest’, ‘I despair at the unwelcome intrusion, and ’go away, you’re not welcome here..’.

Feldwick joined Martin Boase at BMP in 1974; Gooding is writing 48 years later.

Why are we so poor at learning lessons?

I’ve written before about the lowering of creative standards in advertising. There are no doubt many reasons for this but if you look at the wider world you would be quite wrong to assume that we are living in an age of zero creativity.

Take music, art, film, theatre, literature. Are we going through some sort of barren age? I don’t think so.

The talent is and has always been there. Whether it’s attracted to advertising is another question which, if the answer is ‘no’ may have something to do with what follows.

I think one reason why so much advertising these days is so dreadful, so shouty, so unwelcome is we’ve become unbalanced.

We used to be unbalanced, but the other way. ‘Media’ and everything connected to it was ignored, the numbers seen as justification as opposed to offering any insight or direction. Creativity was all; the five-minutes-for-the-media-presentation-before-lunch story was real, and not funny.

Some of us may not have liked it, it may well have lead eventually to the break up of the full-service agency model but at the end of the day there were more good ads out there.

Now it’s the other way around. Decisions are made on media numbers that sometimes aren’t real, and on the occasions they are real are (often wilfully) misused.

Those selling throw around data like confetti. Like confetti they float away on the breeze or are swept up, only to be replaced by the next lot.

The arguments, like the data are transitory. If you don’t like this one, wait around – another one will be along in a minute.

We have no collective memory, no interest in learning from the past and so we just keep making the same mistakes.

We would rather talk of new technology per se than of what we might do with it, how we might use it to benefit our clients and the customers they rely on.

We want everything done fast, and cheap. We want to use data, and indeed we should, but we then stretch and bend it into all sorts of weird shapes for which it was never intended.

We place algorithms and systems ahead of people’s judgement because they’re faster and cheaper, forgetting that these are tools, hugely valuable in the right hands but equally dangerous if they’re misunderstood.

Martin Boase, and Jeremy Bullmore, Leo Burnett, Bill Bernbach, David Ogilvy, and many more from that time were craftsmen. They built things that lasted.

We should ask ourselves not only will this campaign or this ad be seen, for how long and how many times but will it be remembered, will it last.

If we can make ‘em laugh, entertain them, be welcomed we have more chance of being remembered.

This is the cross-media measurement initiative launched by ISBA’s DG, Phil Smith at the asi event in Prague in 2019.

Duffy made the point that many have made before him back to 2019 (including this blog) that Origin isn’t seeking to replace any of the existing JIC services: “Origin does not seek to replace other projects or solutions; instead it’s trying to complement them”. His speech is comprehensively covered here, on Mediatel.

One of the more interesting aspects is who funds Origin. I’ve argued, both from the stage at the original asi launch, and subsequently that a levy is the best bet; indeed that is apparently still under consideration.

It was interesting that Duffy listed current ‘funding partners’ of Origin.

26 advertisers; 5 agency holding groups (why no Havas?); one indie agency (The Kite Factory – not the usual suspects); 8 platforms / media owners (Facebook, Google, Amazon but no broadcasters).

How come?

When I started, in the full-service agency era the most important person in any of our lives was the client.

It was clients who paid our wages; agencies rose and fell on the back of work they did for their clients.

And what did clients buy? Creativity.

The best bought great work; but defining ‘creativity’ was always hard and many clients struggled with a definition of ‘good’ let alone ‘great’.

Media on the other hand was binary. Cheap was good,, cheaper was better. And defining ‘cheap’ needed a currency measure.

Along came media agencies, in the UK in the early 1970’s. They flourished because they focussed on buying better. They cut advertisers’ costs two ways – lower commissions and lower media prices.

Over time they worked out, as media supply increased at a far faster rate than demand that they could make money from vendors.

Clients weren’t engaged, the agencies made hay. The relationship between agency and vendor was what mattered. Clients were side-lined – more to the point they let themselves be side-lined.

Then along came Jon Mandel, transparency and all that stuff.

Suddenly clients were paying attention, in spades. The agency gravy train hit the buffers, and here we are.

This is I know massively simplistic, but there is one important piece in the middle of it all. Agency and vendor was the relationship that mattered. Clients came and went, changing agencies on the back of trading promises made and rarely kept.

Agencies had come to realise they couldn’t make decent money from clients, so they looked elsewhere to allow them to live in the manner to which they had become accustomed.

With hindsight they could have changed focus from buying to planning; from volume to high-end consulting, but it’s hard for a management leopard to change its spots. Agencies were largely managed by traders; so trading is what they did. If one trading avenue closed, another would open soon enough.

But recently clients have been moving centre-stage. Origin is a worthy attempt to deliver something all planners need as a first step in a process that will ultimately help them assess the value of their multi-channel communications.

Agencies have been left not as initiators, or drivers but as contributors.

Broadcasters still seem to be living in a world of cost-driven deals, where the cake was for ever growing and their only worry was their share.

It is so obvious that the game has changed. Broadcasters are now up against Facebook, Google and the rest, companies multiple times their size. Money has for ages been flowing the way of the platforms and away from the broadcasters.

They can continue fighting over an ever-smaller cake and become irrelevant to the guys who ultimately pay them – the advertisers.

Or they can change the game. After all, if you can’t win at volume of audience you can either moan on about audience definitions (and still lose) or focus on what you can deliver – an attentive audience (comparatively) seeing the message on a large screen (comparatively) surrounded by trusted editorial content (comparatively).

Broadcasters should realise advertisers are doing what they, and furthermore the industry as a whole needs to do. That happens to include an ambitious research programme based around planning needs, not buying numbers.

The buying numbers bit is well catered for by the JICs. That’s the bit where the broadcasters have historically felt most comfortable, but the game has moved on.

Calling foul on the technicality of definitions – which is what it is, albeit a very large and important technicality will lose the broadcasters advertiser supporters, influence and money.

Anyone will tell you; if you’re losing then better to change the game than complain about the rules.

And if you’re being beaten up, better to get onside.

Broadcasters should join Origin. Sharpish

That said, today’s post will come close to breaking those two principles, as it’s about the BBC.

For the benefit of non-UK readers, the BBC is funded by a licence fee. If you have a TV that you use to watch any live TV, or indeed any downloaded or streamed BBC programmes via its iPlayer service you have to buy a licence, currently £159 a year.

For that the BBC delivers a range of TV channels, radio stations and many and various other specific services. There’s an overview of what is delivered here.

The licence fee has been controversial for a long time. Some see it as an unfair universal tax, others argue it should only be paid by those using the BBC’s services, with those using it more paying more (despite the fact that such a move would most likely shift the burden on to those who can least afford it).

 Others see it as an outdated funding mechanism in an age of subscription services.

The licence fee has been a political issue for decades.

In 1985 then Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher set up the Peacock Committee, chaired by Professor Alan Peacock. It was largely thought at the time that Thatcher hoped and expected that this would conclude that the licence fee should be scrapped.

Unfortunately for the Government, Peacock advised that the licence fee should remain, although he did suggest that Radios 1 and 2 (the most popular and thus potentially commercial of the Corporation’s radio stations) should be privatised.

Around the time of the Peacock Enquiry (in 1985) the BBC ran a famous ad, featuring John Cleese. It’s recently resurfaced online as the issue of the licence fee is once again being politicised.

The BBC does deliver an extraordinary range of content as this film promoting its musical output aims to demonstrate.

Research indicates that most people in this country are proud of the BBC; it’s known and admired around the world, where the World Service is valued, and (outside of the UK) carries ads.

It is often said that politicians see television as something for appearing on as opposed to something to watch. Certainly, the ignorance many of them display over our broadcasting infrastructure is shocking.

For example, our Secretary of State for Culture under recent Parliamentary questioning seemed not to know how Channel 4 is funded. She’s also threatened the BBC – holding the level or even the continuation of the licence fee hostage against any perceived criticism of the Government.

It’s worth considering:

• Around 90% of the UK population view or listen to BBC output every week.
• Whilst the BBC is criticised on social media for being ‘too left wing’ / ‘too right wing’ (seems they’ve managed to upset both sides thus achieving a modicum of balance) the majority of the population like and admire it.
• Most (recent) criticism of the BBC is around its news division. There’s very little criticism of its drama, its documentaries, its nature programmes, its light entertainment or even its sport coverage.
• The level of the licence fee compares favourably with a Netflix subscription – and the output delivered is far more diverse.
• The notion of a subscription, maybe across some selected output is worth assessment – although as far as I can make out nobody anywhere runs a multi-channel diverse radio service on subscription.
• The BBC has an impressive and skilled audience measurement unit. It appears that politicians and critics are either unaware of this (a well-known BBC broadcaster said on national radio last week that ‘nobody knows who consumes the BBC’) or just ignore it.

I am an unapologetic fan of the very idea of the BBC, but of course times change when it comes to how it’s run and funded.

This is not a matter for political game-playing but for a national discussion and debate using both consumer data and expert opinion from all sides.

As a cynical old git of an adman I am reminded of the 1980’s arguments around the agency commission system.

The point was made that the commission system was a hopeless model until you considered the alternatives.

For example, charging a client a fee based on hours would mean that an agency coming up with what turned into a massive long-running campaign would be paid peanuts for the original idea.

Whereas under the commission system they would be paid whenever the idea was used.

The licence fee is no doubt flawed and should be rigorously examined along with other options. The impact such options might have on the wider broadcasting landscape needs to be considered.

Way back in the dark ages the IPA’s Media Policy Group set up a sub-committee to explore whether or not the agency business should be arguing for ads on the BBC (I was on that committee).

We decided against, not least because we felt that given the audience (size and nature) delivered by the BBC, advertisers would flock to it, causing irreparable harm to other commercially funded broadcasters which we felt would not be in advertisers’ interests.

The UK system, BBC et al is balanced. The balance may have become tilted one way or the other but we should think very carefully about abandoning it altogether.

Baby and bathwater, people, baby and bathwater.

I’m regularly accused here of being anti-network. Which is ironic as from the early 1990’s through to when I left corporate life in 2006 I held international or global positions. For example, I was one of Crispin Davis’ team at Aegis working on turning a group of disparate but highly successful local media agencies into the Carat network and extending what was a European operation into the US and APAC.

The international side of agency life is challenging. Large clients hire you because you’re a network – they assume you work the same way, to the same high standards, using the same tools and techniques across the world. After all, that’s what they tend to do with their brands.

They expect you to share experiences, and lessons learned. To bring the experience working on the client in one market to working on the same client elsewhere. To hit the ground running on any new assignment. To help the client enter new markets. And so on.

They also want to be assured that a small piece of business locally benefits from the economy of scale that comes with being part of something far larger, and more significant to the agency globally.

All this is easier said than done; easier on a spreadsheet than on the ground.

Agencies are local businesses, they’re expected to deliver their numbers locally, they deliver solutions locally to their local clients. Asking a local office to resign an important client to help the network win something smaller in the specific market, even if bigger and more significant globally is never easy.

Strategies may be global, executions are local. Lessons can be learned globally and distilled into guidelines and norms but still the implementational planning and buying is going to vary, place to place.

To deliver a central service, agencies need central revenues. There are multiple ways of solving this, with a central fee from the client obviously the ideal. Unfortunately many clients think otherwise, after all their revenues are by and large generated locally too.

‘You’re making money out of us in however many markets, so sort it out amongst yourselves’ runs the argument.

I’ve been through every internal and external manoeuvre known to man, from cross-charging to taxing, from moving people around to setting up consultancy arrangements that deliver a chargeable benefit. I do know how it works, and it’s not an easy dilemma to solve.

But times have changed, data knows no boundaries, online advertising can be managed from the centre.

Yet the same old problems seem to bug the same old networks. Some international HQs are still too internally focussed, spending too little time on addressing how best to serve their clients internationally.

Many are stuck in the old ways, with data and systems bolted on to an old operating model, based, unsurprisingly on how local offices have operated for years.

It should be easier for the newbies to set up one, transparent P&L per client; to pull together the information needed to make the central international case to client management, to deliver visible benefits internationally from the start.

The established networks fall prey to the old joke about a tourist stopping to ask a farmer the way to Dublin. ‘Well’ says the farmer ‘If I was you I wouldn’t start from here.’

The old networks, who were let’s remember themselves once the new kids on the block started off as local operations and were acquired by someone who then made a merit out of becoming international.

The newer guys’ journeys to international network status varies of course but they do have the benefit of learning from others’ mistakes.

With data and systems at their heart from the start the newbies will do things differently. They’ll change the game.

Should be interesting.

The fashionable thing to do would be to fill this post with forecasts of the year to come. I don’t do this for two reasons. First, things are so topsy-turvy who knows, secondly it’s easy to check back 12 months later to my embarrassment and everyone else’s general merriment.

More of us should check back on the accuracy of the predictions that those braver (or more foolhardy) than me choose to make.

So – no predictions. But like everyone I have hopes, ambitions for the industry. Things that I would like to see happen.

Here are some hopes for 2022 – future posts will build on these.

Hope 1: We get back to simplicity, to being creative.

We enter 2022 at a pretty low ebb. Advertising is generally not liked by those to whom it is supposed to appeal. The main reason for this – to my untutored creative eye – is that most of it, especially the online stuff is shit. Not clever, not creative, not appealing.

In the search for excessively narrow targeting, reach, frequency caps, clicks, likes and other largely irrelevant concepts we’ve forgotten what ‘creativity’ looks like.

We’ve forgotten the appeal of simplicity; we overcomplicate. We seem to think our value lies in speaking in a language understood by the very few.

Hope 2: Less prattle, more precision.

Next up, we’ve forgotten to ask what things mean. Take ‘frequency caps’, the notion that consumers can indeed get tired of seeing the same thing over and over.

But what do we mean by ‘seen’? Or indeed ‘get tired of’? Or (come to that) ‘consumers’?

My time with Millward Brown taught me that ads wear-out amongst brand teams far faster than amongst consumers; true wear-out (in old-fashioned media) is rare as the budget necessary to achieve such an outcome would be beyond most brands.

Mind you, it may very well be that having your online experience disrupted by yet another ad for the very thing you bought last week may make wear-out a thing. We’ll know when some ‘digital expert’ thinks of a new term for it.

Hope 3: Less self-interest, more collaboration to deliver business goals.

Next, the concept of NIMS. NIMS is a relation of NIMBY; it stands for Not In My Specialism.

A state of NIMS is achieved when everyone talks about collaborating, but on condition that their particular specialism drives the collaboration.

Take online evangelists, many of whom preach the benefits of working with creative people, but only as long as their obsession with clicks and likes remains sacrosanct.

Media agencies are guilty too: they’re all for that 90-second video spectacular as long as there are 5-second cut-downs to ensure the targets measured by the auditor are hit.

We should focus more on business results. Media numbers are a means to an end, not an end in themselves.

Hope 4: If you’ve got something to say, say it.

I saw an article recently quoting agency leaders ‘talking anonymously’ about Facebook and Google.

Why? Are we all now so worried about what we might call the Baxter effect (after IPG’s Mat Baxter who was censored by his CEO for daring to say something critical about Facebook) that we just accept any old rubbish as long as it comes from someone powerful enough?

And whilst I’m at it, online pseudonyms are tedious. The usual excuse – ‘I couldn’t say what I say if I revealed who I am’ doesn’t cut it. If you’re that important then what you have to say carries weight, so all the more reason to say it out loud, as something may change as a result. If on the other hand you don’t truly believe in whatever it is you’re saying then why bother saying it?

Hope 5: Let’s focus on what truly matters, even if it doesn’t involve a trip to Cannes or Las Vegas.

Next – my pet topic: audience measurement. Frankly if you think that debating how we go about measuring audiences is not worthy of your attention as it’s neither sexy nor shiny you’re wrong.

Most things start with understanding an audience. If we don’t get that bit right by insisting on the highest standards, and commonly agreed definitions and techniques then we may as well not bother with the rest.

Hope 6: More truly international advertisers committing to doing it differently.

Independent, and independent-thinking media agencies will continue to flourish.

It will be fascinating to see what happens when (not if) the likes of Stagwell (the new owners of Goodstuff) or You and Mr Jones win something high profile across markets.

We need new blood, new approaches, new ways of working, not more platitudes from the same old voices.

Hope 7: Tactics aren’t the same as a strategy.

A single placement or stunt may be wonderful, but it isn’t a strategy. Some commentators on all things advertising seem not to appreciate the difference. Words matter. Getting it wrong diminishes us all.

Hope 8: That you’ll stick with The Cog Blog throughout the coming year.

Well, 7 out of 8 ain’t bad.

Everyone lived well, doing what they were best at doing.

The King of Togetherland, Louis the Collaborator, known to one and all as LoCal (and that had nothing to do with his obvious need to lose weight) lived well. He was also a great deal smarter than he was given credit for.

The only cloud on LoCal’s horizon was a most disagreeable neighbour.

This neighbour, The Prince of all the Specialties was a self-confessed moderniser, a force to be reckoned with. He knew he had to find a way to extend the territory under his control, to create new work for his countrymen, and more profit for himself and his growing band of friends and acquaintances.

He had always coveted Togetherland – it was on his doorstep, and would he was sure offer no resistance to a friendly sharing of points-of-view, or, as he put it (but only to his friends and supporters) ‘a take-over’.

One day, the circus came to town. The Prince loved a good circus, and here was the perfect excuse to visit (‘invade’, as he put it). So he got in touch with LoCal and invited himself and a ‘few friends’ over to the circus.

LoCal had been expecting this. Indeed he had hatched a plan.

When the Prince and his ‘friends’ arrived LoCal couldn’t help but notice a couple of things. First, the ‘friends’ appeared to be wearing armour and were armed. Second, there were rather a lot of them.

He noticed these things, but he was in no way surprised.

He greeted his neighbour and invited him to join him behind the scenes at the circus. This was a rather small area, and so many of the ‘friends’ had to wait outside. Only four were allowed in to accompany the Prince.

‘Now’, said LoCal, let’s not beat about the bush. ‘You want to expand your territory; but the truth is we don’t want you here, and we certainly don’t want any unpleasantness. We would rather you looked elsewhere and left us in peace.’

‘We are prepared to do what we have to in order to drive you and your friends out of Togetherland but that may turn unpleasant for both of us. You may indeed beat us in battle, or you may not but whatever happens the outcome would be the same: you would not be welcome here’.

‘And no-one likes not being welcome’.

‘So’, he went on ‘I have arranged a test of skill. Pass it, and we’ll stand aside. Fail it, and you’ll take your ‘friends’ and go elsewhere.’

The Prince was not just a moderniser, a man who knew everything about everything, he was also a big-head. He would never lose a test of skill to such an old has-been as LoCal.

‘Alright’, he said. ‘Bring it on. ‘We don’t want any unpleasantness; my ‘friends’ are more skilful than you can imagine. What do they have to do?’

LoCal went up to the four ‘friends’. ‘First, you must be blindfolded. Then you must come with me’.

He led the four men behind the circus tent, where stood an elephant.

The first man was brought forward, and led to the elephant’s tail. ‘What’s this?’ said LoCal.

The man felt the tail. ‘That’s a rope’ he said confidently.

The next man came forward. ‘What’s this’ he was asked when he was next to the elephant’s leg. ‘That’s a tree’.

The third man was led to the elephant’s flank. ‘That’s a wall, and a fine wall at that’ he said.

Finally the fourth man was brought to the elephant’s tusks. ‘Those are spears’ he said.

Then the four men were led back to their Prince.

LoCal spoke: ‘You’ve all reported on what you’ve just witnessed – a rope, a tree, a wall and two spears’. ‘If you’re right, I’ll step aside and this kingdom is yours. If you’re wrong you’ll leave. Agreed?’

‘Agreed’ said the Prince.

The Prince and the four men were taken behind the tent, where stood the elephant.

The Prince may have been dumbfounded, but he was also a man of his word. ‘Well played, LoCal’ he said. ‘You’ve outwitted us, and we will indeed leave you in peace. Just as soon as we’ve seen the circus.’

And the moral of the story – look around you, being blind to all but what’s in front of you means you’ll miss the big picture. And without the big picture you won’t achieve your ambitions.

May you and yours all have a happy and healthy Christmas!

The Cog Blog will return mid-January.

Many years ago an agency friend of mine (the legendary Daz Valladares, for those with long memories) told me a story about an experience he’d had on the London underground.

Daz had placed an ad in a particular newspaper (just reading that back I realise that the words ‘placed’, ‘newspaper’ and quite probably ‘ad’ must appear like a foreign language to some. Let alone the word ‘Daz’).

By all accounts this placement had been fraught with problems; Daz was particularly proud of the eventual outcome.

There was a guy sat opposite Daz on the tube, reading that particular newspaper.

Daz watched him as he came to the page with ‘his’ ad on it – and turned the page without even giving it a glance.

The way Daz told the story he was so upset he came close to going over to the guy, yelling at him that he had no idea of the time and trouble he’d gone to in order to place that ad in that particular spot and making him turn the page back.

Daz felt invested in the ad. He had gone to great lengths to make sure it appeared in just the right place for the audience he wanted to reach to see it, to engage with it. And here was a real-life member of his target audience ignoring it.

We all know, of course that this happens all the time. We ‘know’ it, but so often we don’t know it in the sense of taking account of it in how we advise our clients, and how we plan and buy.

Today more than ever that’s a matter for algorithms, for unexplained and unexplainable systems.

It’s not a matter that stirs the emotions of those involved.

We aren’t sufficiently engaged in the process; the truth is we don’t really care as long as the numbers say that we hit some meaningless impressions or click-through number. That the auditor likes it.

I’m not so naïve as to fail to understand that it’s all so much more complicated these days, but to me that isn’t any excuse for not caring, not thinking through how people in real-life behave.

We could all do a lot worse than look around us, as Daz did. Look at our own behaviours, at what those close to us do.

That is quite different from saying all media decisions should be based on what we as individuals do, but it is to suggest that we should add some air and some light, some real-life experiences to leaven the stodge that is the numbers.

Take the mirage of data-driven personalised messaging.

I’m just in the process of changing cars. Not a bleat from the manufacturer I’ve been loyal to for most of the last 30 years (I don’t count auto-generated messages telling me my finance arrangement is about to end), nor the dealer.

I’ve just called to change my motor and my home insurances. No attempt to persuade me to stay from the company I’ve been with for the last 10 years, aside from noting my decision.

I get mail from local estate agencies offering me the opportunity to sell my house. All have one thing in common – they address me as ‘Dear Sir or Madam’. Actually, that’s not true. Some use ‘Dear Householder’.

I have just bought a pair of shoes (to those who know me that must come as a shock). I am most certainly not going to buy another pair of the same shoes – despite the constant recontact messages that destroy my online reading experience.

We all know these things are true; we all have these experiences.

So why do we continue selling the wonderfulness of online messaging without considering that really, in real life things don’t always work as well as all that conference-fodder would have us believe.

Never forget that what we do is really a sophisticated form of guessing. All the research, all the data certainly improves the odds, but it’s still guessing.

We should all lift our heads from the computer, from the spreadsheets, from the jargon-infested nonsense that infects both social-media and real-life platforms.

We should look around, breathe, observe.

Involve, engage.

This thought occurred to me when I read my old friend Bob Wootton’s piece on Mediatel last week.

Bob was kind enough to reference me and the campaign for a levy to fund true cross-media measurement that has featured several times in past Cog Blogs, most recently earlier this month, here.

He also made the point that recent asi events, which are all about audience measurement in video and audio have moved on from being a talking shop to something more mainstream.

As Bob put it: “(The asi events have) become much more than a talking shop for media researchers who don’t normally venture out quite as much.”

Media researchers do of course venture out a fair bit – maybe a fairer accusation would be that when they do so they don’t tend to mix with the ‘right’ people, preferring their own kind.

Mind you that’s true of many tribes within the business – anyone else remember the days when TV buyers gathered in one pub, planners in another (or more likely in a wine bar)?

It’s also true to say (as Richard Marks does in his comment below Bob’s piece) that asi can hardly be accused of not making an effort to attract advertisers and indeed their agencies – the fact is this tribe thing runs deep and flows both ways (if bodies of water can be deep and flow both ways).

What’s needed is for a greater degree of consultation and indeed collaboration. Audience researchers are intense, thoughtful people (by and large, stop giggling at the back). They are interested in doing things properly; they’re less concerned with short-term headlines and more concerned with longer-term viability.

None of these are bad traits, in fact just the opposite. Someone has to ensure that things are done to the highest of standards after all.

But at the same time, life moves on. Inventing a cure for something that is no longer a threat isn’t as helpful as coming up with a fix that works.

Or – being 90% right beats being 100% late.

Good luck to asi, and indeed to Mediatel whose Future of Media event started Bob off on his article, for providing the forums (fora?) for debate.

The thing about debate is that all parties need to take part – if one party (say the media researchers) assume primacy and aren’t challenged then the answer risks being unfit for purpose, however technically smart.

And if the agencies and their clients don’t consider this a subject worthy of serious debate then they can hardly complain if they don’t like the outcome.

More inclusion, less tribalism.

More ‘here’s a way through’, less ‘stop giving me the answer to the wrong question’.

Let’s start with the doyenne of online data trends, Mary Meeker. It used to be fashionable to share her humungous annual presentation. This was the alpha and omega of decks, containing everything you ever wanted to know about life, the universe and everything – at least as far as online media forms were concerned.

I always had a problem with one of her charts – which for me coloured my view of the rest of her work. This is the chart contrasting the amount of time given up to a medium with the ad expenditure on that medium.

Meeker’s point was that the gap between these two sets of data represented the financial opportunity for that medium. So – TV took up a comparatively small amount of the average individual’s time, but a large percentage of total adspend. TV was thus over-invested.

Radio, and in particular mobile (Meeker’s favourite) took up a large percentage of time spent, but received a comparatively modest amount of ad revenue. They were thus under-invested – and therein lay the greatest opportunity.

Everybody who knows a scintilla about advertising can spot the problem here. The great and the good, from Sir Martin Sorrell to Tess Alps pointed out that impact and creative considerations maybe have a part to play.

Even the mighty Cog Blog had a go, suggesting back in 2016 that if time spent with a vehicle was the only consideration then we would long ago have had advertising on cutlery, or if we literally looked only at opportunities to see data OOH would easily be the largest advertising medium on the planet.

Meeker still peddles this nonsense though. She might conceivably ignore Sir Martin, she can be forgiven for not paying attention to some random blogger but if she doesn’t listen to the formidable Ms Alps she’s asking for trouble.

Next we have the merry-go-round at The Daily Mail. For those unaware, Geordie Greig, the Editor of the daily paper has this week been (using a journalistic term) ousted, following the promotion of Richard Caccappolo to be CEO of the company’s media businesses.

Why does this matter? Caccappolo is closely associated with the success of The MailOnline, and what a success that has been.

The MailOnline has it is fair to say prospered on the back of its obsession with celebrity. News, per se is not at the top of its agenda, and whatever you think of The Daily Mail’s politics no-one can accuse it of not being a NEWSpaper.

The ad world is though moving even if ever so slowly in the direction of quality of content, of audience attention, and on focussing on business outcomes over the blunt numbers delivered by the social media platforms and many online outlets.

We have moved on from gross impressions and from clicks as we pay attention to other data more closely aligned with advertiser success.

And yet what these two tales illustrate is that what we see as a trend is not recognised by those driving the media agenda.

You might argue that we are ahead of our time and that others will catch up. That would be optimistic.

More likely whilst we may well be right, few outside of our marketing bubble are listening.

And that’s rather more depressing.

In particular, a remark from Phil Smith, Director General of ISBA, the UK advertiser trade body that there is growing support amongst his members for a levy to fund cross-media measurement.

The timing was appropriate as it was two years ago at the Prague asi meeting that I proposed a levy on adspend to fund this aspect of media measurement. I drew a comparison with the UK’s ASBOF levy that pays for our self-regulatory system and is now well embedded within the industry.

Phil was kind enough to acknowledge that this initiative started from the platform in Prague. Subsequent Cog Blog posts have tried to advance the levy idea.

A levy of course isn’t as simple as all that. First, it’s voluntary and so the benefits it delivers need to be recognised and sold.

Second it needs a cap to stop the largest advertisers paying disproportionately large amounts in the event that a proportion of smaller advertisers choose to pay nothing.

Third it would be wrong to see this as some way of replacing the established funding models used successfully for many years within the JIC mechanism.

This last point needs to be made very clear.

The JIC system has served the industry well for many decades. It is though about intra-media measurement, which spot to buy, how many OOH sites are needed, which radio networks are attracting what audience.

The JICs are about a currency – they’re a basis for trading. Their use in planning is tactical (which mix of stations etc).

They are ill-suited and always have been for strategic planning. They are nothing to do with inter-media comparisons.

Comparisons between media forms are not what the JICs are there for – for one simple reason: the JICs are primarily funded by the vendors, and anything that threatens their ad revenues is naturally of no interest.

The problem is that any initiative seen, even mistakenly as a threat to the JICs is threatened by the inevitable howls of protest.

We seem incapable of encouraging any new approach without assuming that the new must by default be there to trash the established.

True cross-media measurement helps optimise planning. The very concept aims to address a question the JICs were never designed to answer.

Talk of cross-media measures lead inevitably to the IPA’s Touchpoints. A fine idea, albeit a snapshot, that seems always to struggle for funding. Agencies traditionally hate paying anything for audience measurement and so after the initial enthusiasm burned off the burden has fallen – again – on the vendors.

But any new structure shouldn’t discard Touchpoints, or indeed TGI rather it should seek to weave what’s out there into a new and improved measurement framework. The new doesn’t have to trash the old.

It’s advertisers who benefit from the better plans that emerge from being able to explore the impact of cross-media campaigns, to quantify the role that PR, or experiential, or in-store plays alongside advertising. And as the main beneficiary, advertisers should pay, as the WFA, ISBA and the ANA acknowledge.

ISBA’s Project Origin is a start – it’s not (yet) about true cross-media. In truth it’s tackling cross-platform video.

But let’s remember the answer to the old question, how do you eat an elephant? One small bite at a time.

A cross-media service meets a long-time need. It makes sense to look for a way of spreading the funding load. Hence the levy.

The great thing about a levy is that it soon becomes part of life.

The UK’s ASBOF levy dates back to 1975. Not everyone pays it, but the massive benefits of self-regulation are never challenged by the industry (maybe by politicians, but not by the industry).

Levies become a part of the landscape. Plans account for them, invoices include them and pretty soon most accept them.

Once there, they can be used to underpin future work, to drive new and exciting developmental research into improving how we plan communication.

They move us forward, step by step along a new path funded by those who stand to benefit.

Specialists often do what they do because it’s what they’ve always done. Advertisers’ involvement is a positive, a levy system is not a threat to the old comfortable order of doing things, but a huge opportunity.

Sweating the small stuff as the caravan moves on is not the way.

The strategic planning issues faced by agencies these days are complex and go far beyond arguments over maximising reach, frequency caps, wear-in, wear-out and the rest. There is a moral dimension too.

There’s also the matter of objectivity and trust. The dilemma is – where to draw the line between advertisers interfering in editorial freedoms, and supporting a channel that seems to consider itself apart from common laws of decency.

Imagine this.

An online platform that measures its own audiences. That avoids external examination and validation. That makes errors in calculations, some of which it corrects, some of which it doesn’t. After all, if nobody notices or challenges the data, who cares? Truth and objectivity?

A channel some of whose staff are so concerned about what they see as their management’s priorities that they would rather jump ship, giving up a no doubt well-paid position to blow the whistle.

A channel that self-regulates, that ignores restrictions on such as political advertising that apply to other media forms.

An organisation that uses the data provided by its users to trap the gullible in a web of dis-information, and then hides behind complex terms and conditions that no-one reads, and details of the privacy options available that are so full of jargon that few bother with them.

A platform, not, please note, a publisher, that avoids taking responsibility for the content that it publishes.

A channel funded by advertisers – many of whom are busy promoting the importance of corporate responsibility, of behaving with a sense of civil purpose, of supporting civil liberties, diversity, inclusion and so on.

Would these advertisers condone lying in their copy? Would they continue running material that offends or even harms some of their audience?

No of course they wouldn’t.

So why on earth do they continue to support these platforms?

We can go further. What if ads on these channels were shown not to attract attention? What if ads on them simply don’t work a lot of the time? What if the ads that do work on them are of a very specific type – reminder messages for example, or direct response?

Why do major brand builders continue to use them to ‘build their brands’?

Let’s recap. False audience data. Misuse of data. No responsibility for the content that appears. Ineffective for brand building.

If anyone reading this plans campaigns for a living they would surely not use these media.

And yet they do.

It really isn’t good enough to say: ‘that’s where you find the audience’. Who says so? Who validates that data? And is ‘audience’ just a one-dimensional number – a gross impression, in the vernacular.

Plus – it’s not the only place to find the audience. They use multiple media forms, as we all know.

Nor is it professional to say: ‘our client mandates it’. Maybe so, but many clients would also mandate smaller ads, larger logos and using the wife’s cousin in the ad. We argue against them because we know from experience, from years of looking at data, we know what works.

Except, in media we apparently don’t; or if we do we keep quiet about it and settle for an easy life doing what our clients want as opposed to what they need.

Media strategising is full of tough calls, but those that do it can be and should be the voice of reason on how the client’s money is spent. It’s up to them to raise effectiveness concerns, even moral concerns.

They won’t always be listened to, they certainly won’t always win the day but they owe it to themselves and to the business they’re in to try.

It was all rather odd; I had failed Maths O-Level, hadn’t gone to university and yet somehow I found myself spending all day looking at numbers and having my opinions listened to on industry committees.

I decided to ‘specialise’ in radio audience measurement on the basis that the total number of people in the entire industry who knew anything about it was, shall we say ‘few’ – and none of them worked in ad agencies. Getting the gig to represent the agencies on what was then JICRAR, now RAJAR was a cinch.

I find myself reflecting on the whole topic of audience measurement ahead of the annual asi video and audio research event, taking place as usual the first week of November.

Today of course there are qualified experts everywhere, on everything. I am not sure enthusiastic amateurs like me would have made much of an impact today, as opposed to back when in the land of the blind the one-eyed man was king.

What attracted me to audience measurement in the first place was not so much the techniques, the formulas, the theories but more a sense of curiosity. I loved ads, and was curious to know how they worked, and why.

I believed that understanding a little about who had seen them might be helpful as a step along the way to understanding how they worked.

I still think that.

I know and understand that audience measurement has many uses – not least in editorial creation and in commissioning and scheduling. I once got into a scrape with BARB for using the data I had bought to advise an independent production company on negotiating their show’s place in the schedule, as part of the process of having the show commissioned by a broadcaster. I do get that.

But within the ad world we can become myopic on all sorts of topics – and audience measurement is one such.

As the industry starts to ‘gather’ (virtually of course) for the asi event I would encourage everyone to lift their eyes and raise their ambitions. Start by appreciating the bigger picture.

Researching audiences is an important role. After all, if your bricks are sub-standard your house will fall down – audience measurement is an important brick, and the fact that most people in this industry don’t spend their time looking at bricks doesn’t lessen their importance.

When you buy a house, you buy more than a collection of great bricks. You buy a structure, one that is fit for purpose and meets your needs. By doing so you’re not arguing to stop the brick-improvement programme. The fact you don’t know about brick R&D doesn’t mean that such work is not essential; it’s just that better bricks make for better houses, and it’s better houses that people want, need and buy.

Our industry needs a better house.

We are poor at understanding how commercial communication works – maybe not as poor as we once were (at least we now talk of communication rather than ads) but we’re still pretty poor.

We are poor at building plans across all communication channels, at seeing how PR adds to advertising, how experiential can work alongside sponsorships.

We can’t even agree on the words we use, the definitions. We can’t sort-out how best to bring together the various strands within video measurement (although kudos to ISBA for at least starting to tackle that thorny topic).

In other words we’re still faffing about with the bricks.

We lack a vision, an architect. Unless we’re careful we’ll end up with a pile of great bricks.

We won’t even have a Tower of Babel.

One of the weird things about not learning from our past mistakes (and to be fair our successes) is that we are as an industry spending more than ever before on research and data. Presumably some part of this is designed to help us explain what worked exactly so that we can learn from our mistakes?

So what’s going on? Is it the wrong sort of research, in the same way that trains in the UK are frequently disrupted by the wrong kind of snow? Or do we all just collectively drop off around Powerpoint slide number 75 in the research company’s deck? The one headed up ‘What Can We Learn?’

There are many smart researchers, many good presentations, many finely crafted reports, even one or two quite good Powerpoint slides. This isn’t where the problem lies.

Where it lies is in organisational siloes.

Consider this scenario. A client’s Research Manager commissions a piece of research. The research is crafted, carried out, concluded.

The same client’s Data Manager commissions a market mix model from a specialist analytics business. The work is done, the models run, the results are impressive.

The client’s CFO and CEO remain largely unaware of this work, until it’s summarised at the quarterly Executive Committee meeting by the CMO. The figures are good, the lines shape upwards, lunch beckons, bigger decisions await, life goes on.

Asked about the implications of these two pieces of work the very next day, both the CEO and the CFO look bemused. Why are they being asked this? What’s it to do with the financial performance of the business, or shareholder value?

At the same time the client’s media and creative agencies are beavering away, doing what they do. Neither is fully aware of the research or the modelling; although both have heard that there is such work being planned somewhere, by someone.

They imagine that they’ll be told about it, sometime by someone. Far too often they’re wrong.

Furthermore, the research agency is unaware of the modelling work, and vice-versa.

The client’s Research Manager and the Data Manager are continuously arguing over budget, and the relative merits of both approaches.

Both, and the CMO have a nagging worry over the client’s Performance Marketing Team, which for some unfathomable reason reports into the CFO, not the CMO as it’s all about ‘real life, real-time numbers, not that namby-pamby soft and fluffy stuff you’re always talking about.’

This scenario may be unfair and exaggerated – but I bet more than the odd bit of it is recognisable to many.

Siloes have pushed us into the very opposite of joined up thinking. Of course, to revert to the fairy-tale above research should inform MMM; of course both should inform and drive creative work and media strategy and planning.

Most importantly both should be able to demonstrate the real impact that marketing has on a business’ financial performance and its delivery of shareholder value.

We’ve become obsessed with outputs over outcomes, with measuring and reporting on the number of impressions, followers, likes, clicks as opposed to understanding what drives sales and margins.

It’s with a desire to change this that four of us, a creative strategist, a media planner, a research company and a data analytics and modelling business formed Crater Lake and Company.

If you agree that siloes are there to be broken down, that outputs are there as one step along the path to understanding outcomes, and that outcomes are there to be explained, if you truly want to try to ‘make sense of it all’ then we would be delighted to hear from you.

I’m in good company as this failure to learn is a theme explored by Bob Hoffman, the AdContrarian in his blogs and in his interview with me as one of the Crater Lake and Mediatel ‘Making Sense Of It All’ series.

Bob talks about our weird ability to keep repeating the same mistakes over and over; almost as if it’s a weakness to accept that anything that happened in the business longer ago than a week last Tuesday can possibly have any relevance at all, given the speed that things are changing.

This idea that good ideas somehow have a use-by date is hogwash. In the same way that in sport we are used to the mantra that form is temporary, class is permanent, the basic principles that drive our business are not fundamentally changed because some digital evangelist somewhere tweaks an algorithm or writes a new piece of code.

I think the problem runs deeper than a belief in the now over the then.

Bob talks of other industries, like travel, automotive and computing. There, learning and changing are a part of life – if they weren’t the end user would have something to say about it.

In advertising the end user, he who ultimately decides what appears is the client. Clients apply their own definition of learning and changing – and in far too many cases these definitions, like improving meaningless metrics like clicks or likes are superficial.

They are far too often not connected directly to that hard-to-define measure: ‘business success’; let alone to ‘creativity’.

A client can improve his performance metrics, and still destroy his brand’s image and reputation. Eventually a poor reaction amongst consumers will lead, as we all know to fewer sales and reduced margins, but that takes time and by then the client has any number of options when it comes to apportioning blame.

Many of us find creativity hard to recognise. Great marketers don’t, but there aren’t so many great marketers.

On the other hand, all of us recognise that a small number is, well, smaller than a big number.

So – which is easier? To go out on a limb and argue that the best way to sell chocolate is to feature a gorilla playing the drums; or to hang your hat on paying less per second, scaling back the creative ‘idea’ to a 2-second pack shot, ramping up the frequency to absurd levels, and buying more followers?

Agency leaders used to be great at standing up for their art (as that is what it is, in this instance). I worked for Leo Burnett whose London Chairman, the late great Richard Wheatly once resigned an account over an argument about the number of bubbles the client insisted on having in shot in a glass of a well-known hangover cure.

The best agencies understood instinctively what was good, fought for it, and often won as, after all if it was that easy to do great work then the client would have done it himself.

The skill in producing great advertising was recognised, and respected.

Today, we don’t fight often enough. Agencies give in rather than risk losing the business over a principle. Media agencies may know very well that online advertising doesn’t engage and doesn’t deliver brand effects yet they buy it anyway. It’s cheap, it reaches loads of people, what could be better?

Don’t confuse me with talk of definitions, or research. Beat the audit, give the client what he wants, not what he needs.

In short: ‘anything for a quiet life’.

We don’t learn. Learning is hard, the whole process can and usually does involve confrontation. If we don’t stand up for something, if we just say ‘Yes sir, no sir, three bags full sir’ then what we get is poor advertising appearing in the wrong places.

We console ourselves with increases in irrelevant metrics, and then express amazement when we end up with consumers not noticing the work, or, even worse tell us they find it boring, irritating and irrelevant.

Meantime we kid ourselves we’re being smart by talking to ourselves, ignoring the inconvenient truth that nobody is paying us any attention (‘but we won an award / we bought more likes / we have more followers’).

One of the strongest points in Bob’s interview is his contention that if you walked into the average agency today, and asked the average executive about Peter Field, Les Binet, Karen Nelson-Field – all people who are doing their damnest to explain what works and what doesn’t you’ll be met with ignorance and indifference.

We should celebrate learning. Hold general sessions for clients on great cases, on what they tell us. This used to happen in creative agencies as a way of opening up a conversation on what was great work, and why. Maybe it still does. I don’t know if it happens in media agencies; it should but I doubt it does.

If we don’t learn we’ll become an insignificant, low-paid, automated supplier looking back and wondering where it all went wrong.

And we’ll fully deserve our fate.

‘Let’s start at the very beginning, a very good place to start’, as Oscar Hammerstein and Richard Rodgers had it.

In the very beginning, media space was in such short supply you took what you could get. But as restrictions eased, new media forms emerged and the media business grew, those responsible for spending advertising money needed some indication of who was doing the watching and the reading.

Over time it became clear that these numbers had to be as accurate as possible, objective, unbiased and acceptable to all sides. ‘Trust me’ became less acceptable than ‘Look at this data’. Mind you, sometimes we seem to be back in the ‘trust me’ days.

Thus was born the Joint Industry Committee, or JIC system. In the UK this meant JICTAR for TV, JICNARS for print, JICRAR for radio. Other geographies (except the US) followed suit so that today we’re at a point where the JIC concept is well and truly accepted, some would say embedded within the business.

The principle remains a simple one. All sides, that’s the media vendors, the agencies and the advertisers all sit in a room and decide what research to do to measure audiences.

They write a brief and jointly commission a research agency to do the work.

The individual sides’ priorities are different. Media vendors want the biggest possible numbers, whatever the reality.

Agencies want something that gets them closer to defining and understanding the audience to an ad. They also want to pay as little as possible, and for the talking to end so they can get back to their day jobs.

Advertisers want much the same as the agencies with one proviso – historically they have been averse to paying anything. As the great Bernard Balderston of P&G, the ISBA representative on every media committee there ever was used to put it, ‘We’re paying for everything anyway. It’s up to you to convince us to buy.’

And so it was that the cost was largely carried by the vendor – it was their audience that was being measured, they paid.

And of course they controlled; after all, he who pays the piper..

But things are changing, as the industry edges towards measuring what has always been true; consumers use multiple media forms so we need to understand how they fit together. We need a framework for cross-media measurement.

That much is clear, the problem has always been less about how, more about who pays, and crucially who controls?

Agencies never have any money (although strangely they seem to discover a magic money tree whenever award season comes around); media vendors can’t be expected to prioritise research that by definition promotes others’ strengths.

That leaves the advertisers.

Advertisers are the ones driving this car. They ultimately benefit from better planning based on a comprehensive cross-media framework.

Thus, advertisers have to pay, but how can they ensure an industry consensus?

What if the large advertisers made it clear that they expect their agencies to support work done to improve the industry’s measurements?

What if all pitch briefs, and agency contracts made it clear that the client recognises the benefit to the business of better cross-media planning, but also notes and values the significance of this work to the industry as a whole?

As a part of that expectation, the client will play its part and pay for a proportion of the time that the agency allocates to industry affairs. Not only will this time be allocated and measured as a deliverable, but the agency should pay a share too.

The agency’s fees are adjusted to reflect this, but the rule would be simple: no industry involvement – no business from us.

There are alternatives. One is the levy system proposed here several times, and reportedly under consideration.

Such tactics may be in part cosmetic – at the end of the day, the advertiser pays, but as Bernard said, they always do anyway. It’s just how.

The media vendors, of all colours should be involved. They have significant expertise, and they can contribute a great deal to the conversation around what’s needed to improve planning across channels.

But they shouldn’t control or dictate. They don’t get to drive.

Planning is an inter-media discipline; buying is intra-media. Control over the shape of inter-media should be in the hands of those who plan and those who buy those plans – the advertisers and their agencies.

The buying piece, the currency remains crucial, and that’s where the vendors’ control should remain.

In any cross-media measurement, headline numbers by medium might go down as new considerations, like attention enter the fray. Media vendors shouldn’t argue on the basis that the bigger the better, the smaller the poorer.

Smaller, more engaged can be beautiful.

Planning needs a cross-media framework – not a replacement for a currency, not a new system to replace everything else. A framework, a way of bringing together knowledge and data to help improve and shape how we plan.

As our old friends Oscar and Richard had it: ‘When you know the notes to sing you can sing most anything.’

We have the notes; we just need help putting them in the right order.

Some years ago, I was on a conference panel alongside other agency people. We were asked whether we would encourage our children to make a career in media agencies.

Setting aside the fact that my children are grown up, have their own careers and wouldn’t have paid attention to me anyway, I was the only one on the panel to say yes I would.

At their best agencies are great places to work; full of interesting people with (to (mis)quote a famous adman) permission to interfere in others’ businesses without having to take all that much responsibility for the consequences of their actions.

Yes, OK people have bad audits, people lose accounts, but it’s hardly on a par with having to close a plant, is it?

The sheer range of marketing activities required by clients and thus regularly offered up by agencies is huge.

It’s not only the number of communication channels on offer, but the opportunity to advise on how best to knit together e-Commerce, in-store, PR, experiential media forms, packaging, content creation and so on.

The more complicated things get, the more relevant it is to remember basic principles.

There are two basic rules:

1. Be paid 100% by the client. Put the client’s interests front and centre. Do what’s best for him or her. What the media vendor wants, what the platforms decree, what will benefit your agency the most financially – these should not be your primary concern. If they are – you’re doing it wrong and eventually you’ll be found out.
2. Whoever you are, whoever you work for you can’t do everything. It’s very easy to say yes, to claim invincibility, to pretend to be an expert in all things. The truth is, you’re not. If you think you are, you’ll be found out.

I can almost hear the howls now: ‘But clients don’t pay us properly. We have to offer new services to make ends meet’.

Questionable.

The best clients (and there are more of those than perhaps you might think) pay their agencies properly. If your clients aren’t amongst them then there has to be a grown-up conversation, sharing numbers and making the business case. Discuss the options. If a client wants the best people then this is what they cost; if the client doesn’t need every service, then don’t provide those that aren’t used, and don’t charge for them. Be honest, transparent.

The agency business isn’t all that complicated. Costs are c. 70% + in people and thus within your control. There’s no manufacturing, no supply chain, no raw materials. You can flex, adapt.

Granted there are holding companies but to most clients that’s an internal matter. As my dear old mum used to say: look after the pennies and the pounds will look after themselves.

What’s wrong is to assume that you can always find ways to make the money up from somewhere, somehow. That can work for a while, indeed it worked for years, but today we all know where that ends, and it’s not pretty.

Rule two: don’t over-promise. Don’t say yes to everything.

One small example – remember when agencies suddenly became experts in measuring effect, some offered trackers, others econometrics? That worked for about 5 minutes until everyone worked out that paying the agency a fee to mark its own homework may not be smart.

Far better to accept that you’re brilliant at certain things. Others are equally brilliant at other things. Look to collaborate, to partner up.

Nobody’s great at everything, so ask yourself which is better. To offer a suboptimal service provided by people who if they really were the best would not be buried in an agency backroom somewhere, in order to make money until you get found out?

Or might it be better to partner up with someone who’s built a successful business doing whatever it is, to incorporate their work into yours and to bask in the reflected glory that comes from a job well done?

I recently interviewed Nick Emery for the series Crater Lake is doing with Mediatel.

Nick has the opportunity to build a media agency operation from scratch for You and Mr Jones. Nick made the point that now is a wonderful time to be in media, given the opportunities. I agree (as you can hear next week when Mediatel publish the video interview).

Agency leaders just need to grasp the opportunity whilst keeping to basic principles. ‘Just’.

The reason I say it’s rare is that it outlines a number of issues rarely talked about, indeed glossed over by those who lead agencies these days, even if I know several who would privately agree with every word.

It’s also unusual in that it was written by someone current, not some old blogger who left the agency business over a decade ago.

The issues raised are worrying for the future of agencies – who after all only succeed because of the talent within them. If they can’t offer a workplace environment that’s rewarding (and indeed fun) then they won’t attract the talent in the first place.

I don’t know Anthony, but he has impeccable credentials and 25 years in agencies.

The first canard Anthony shoots is that media agencies should be places only for the young. Apparently only they have the energy, only they can survive the stress and the long hours.

As he says a little later, how very machismo. How totally rubbish.

“What I want to say … is this – how utterly … stupid …. (the media agency business is still) a young business that hasn’t escaped its dilettante origins and so can’t trust itself to be wise. Media agencies, deep in their DNA … don’t want to believe that they matter enough to invest in that great destroyer, that great leveller, that great learner – TIME.”

We all have stories. Mine involves meeting a young agency guy who began, with great pomposity: ‘Let me just explain to you how advertising works …’.

I sat quietly, listened and responded politely. I believe he left the agency soon after.

In many professions age and experience are valued. In ours, not so much. Look at the number of ex-agency CEO’s consulting for ad tech businesses, or for media vendors. Why aren’t those people sufficiently valued by the industry sector they’ve recently left?

Anthony raises the general awfulness of most pitches. As he writes:

“What is wrong with pitches? They are too long. We kill ourselves doing them. They have a massively adverse impact on people’s mental health. This helps no one and nothing and it could be done better with zero impact on the rectitude of client decision making”.

To be honest we do sometimes run pitches. We do so rarely as we believe that often the last thing the client needs is a pitch.

I was brought up at Leo Burnett, one of whose clients, Kellogg’s had a brand manager bible given to every starter. The first paragraph read (I paraphrase): ‘It is not your job to change the agency. It is your job to get the most from the agency’.

One large FMCG client many years ago asked us to help them change media agency as ‘they’re rubbish’. As the incumbent was one of the largest and most awarded agencies they transparently weren’t ‘rubbish’.

We talked the client out of precipitous action, saw the agency, helped them strengthen their team, advised the client on improving their briefing and operating procedures, and left.

The agency retained the business for a number of years.

We could have run a media pitch, taken the fee, changed the agency on the promise of an apparent reduction in costs, or never-to-be-seen again tools, seen promises broken, blamed the agency, rinsed and repeated. Over and over.

Meantime the client would have run up substantial hidden costs in time and lost opportunities and no doubt sold less product.

Who wins? (Yes, I know..).

When we do run pitches, we satisfy ourselves first that it truly is the best route for the client. We discuss the options with the client, including not pitching.

When we do go ahead, we try to treat agencies politely and with respect, we brief thoroughly, we give everyone sufficient time, we do everything we can to keep to timelines, we respond to calls, we do our best to ensure that each agency presents itself in the best possible light.

We offer honest debriefs to those that don’t win.

We try to treat others as I would have liked to be treated when I was doing the pitching.

Sadly, often we fail to convince clients, so we just don’t participate (we have that luxury).

None of us can change the world on our own, all we can do is affect our very small bit of it.

Respect others, respect experience, respect the job to be done.

Respect to Anthony Swede.

A quick scan of comments from today’s media gurus turn up any number of cliches and platitudes around ‘business outcomes’. It’s as if the very notion that brands spend money to achieve something is a new concept invented by this generation.

The truth is that market mix modelling has been around for decades as a valuable input into decision-making.

But the old MMM approach is creaking more than a bit in an age when the impact of commercial communication is often immediate, and when so many of the basic data building blocks are exclusively in the hands of the big platforms.

It’s also not helpful that many conflate concepts like viewability and attention to give a false impression of effect, as Karen Nelson-Field’s column in Mediatel this week points out.

This week a piece appeared on LinkedIn from my Crater Lake and Company colleague David Beaton on the approach we at Crater Lake take to measure the business impact of all channels, including online. David uses a hub and spoke analogy to make the point that all models have to work with what they have; and that the data varies channel to channel.

Each channel used contributes to the whole; the model needs to take account of the fact that individual communication channels use multiple different ways of measuring their particular contribution.

David’s piece concludes that it’s better to be 90% right and to deliver guidance in a timely fashion, than 100% right and tell everyone what they should have done, after they had done whatever they were going to do in the first place.

The Crater Lake approach starts from the point that the old MMM model is really not suited to a multi-channel, digital, always-on world within which things are changing constantly.

The old model is also by definition backward looking, when what is required is a predictive service that learns and grows as circumstances evolve and change. This is the aim of the Crater Lake approach.

Crater Lake is all about making sense of it all. To do that we have to measure the totality of customers’ experiences with brands, something that another Crater Lake partner, MESH Experiences is particularly expert at doing, analysing the impact that each channel has on how consumers see the brand.

The business is still evolving from being all about advertising, and mass audiences, to taking advantage of the many opportunities created by multiple channels used in so many different ways by consumers.

We need to get far better at applying advertising skills to non-advertising media forms and we need to be able to measure the results each brings to the whole effort.

Organisationally, disaggregating into specialist units has led to us losing perspective, as anyone who has ever tried to plan a campaign using advertising, retail promotions, email and PR will know. The fights internally for share of the budget, the irrational belief that advertising is by some divine right more appropriate than (say) an influencer campaign can turn nasty.

We need to accept we’re living in a world where we are expected to plan across all comms channels. All we need are the tools to help us do that using the evidence we have.

The specialists’ job is to make the most of the budget they’re given to meet the objectives set. The planners need to think across all channels, without fear or favour.

It’s their job to make sense of it all; to act as integrators within a dis-integrated world.

This is where Crater Lake and Company (www.craterlakeandcompany.com) can help.

If you would like a full explanation of how Crater Lake assesses and evaluates the contribution that all media forms make to the whole you can download the full version of David Beaton’s paper by using the button at the end of his piece here.

We may have built a multistorey structure, with floors containing specialists in PR, digital content, influencers, advertorials, product placement, customer relationship management and the rest but the truth is, it’s all ads.

When you see social media commentary explaining that ‘advertising’ these days has to compete with brand influencer messages on Tik Tok – just remember, it’s all advertising, even if it’s competing with itself.

Levels of control vary across communication channels (the influence a press officer has over what finally appears is clearly less than with a paid-for communication, whether that appears via an ad or an influencer), but levels of influence aside what a company says about itself in any shape or form says something about the company.

I’ve never really understood how come so many non-marketers don’t get this. Maybe it’s because those at the top still see marketing as something nice to have, something to be proud of, something to show off about, but not something that has much to do with the real business of business.

Everything communicates. There will always be odd occasions, rogue employees or whatever but companies are far too often seriously inconsistent in the messages they put out there. Even when they have 100% control over the message as with paid for ads.

Take far too many ads on social media. Not only are they dire, but they’re disliked and avoided wherever possible by those they’re supposed to reach.

It’s as if creative teams don’t really understand how to get the most from these media forms (I almost typed ‘new media forms’ except that they’re in no way new). In the same way that print ads rarely work well on OOH sites, so traditional ads are just wrong for social media.

If everything communicates then as much care should be taken over a paid for message on social media, with how staff address customers, with retail layouts and displays as with a TV spot. It certainly looks as if that isn’t the case.

It’s as if in the large agencies social media is today’s radio. Chuck the brief to the junior team – no-one cares. It was wrong; it is wrong.

Outside of paid for communications, even CEO’s seem unaware that what they say and how they behave can undermine the carefully constructed edifice of their company’s reputation. And that can influence not just a few survey numbers but also their share-price and the opinions of their investors and stakeholders.

As Mark Borkowski put it in a piece in ‘The Guardian’, referencing an unseemly Twitter row between the CEO’s of Just Eat and Uber: “Twitter is perfect for renegades, mavericks and disruptor brands. It’s much harder for well-established brands with solid reputations, if something goes wrong for them they risk damage to their hard-earned brand.”

If a lowly manager messed up operationally at Just Eat or Uber you can be sure something would be said and indeed done. Hands (and quite possibly necks) would be wrung, pearls grasped, internal reviews commissioned.

But something that undermines the company’s reputation? Far too often that’s seen as less of an issue, which is the opposite of the truth.

Even CEO’s need to appreciate the power of media communications to influence those things they care about. Marketing isn’t pink and fluffy, but business critical.

If everything communicates, then we should do our best to plan everything, to measure what we can and to have some idea of how things work individually and collectively.

That involves introducing a system of cross-media thinking that goes a lot farther than the measurement initiative being driven by the WFA and ISBA.

Both the WFA and ISBA are well aware that what they’re doing is only a start, albeit an important one.

We should all be aware of that, and keep our eyes firmly on the prize, of creating a way of thinking within which all forms of communication are considered, assessed and where practical measured.

Everything communicates. We just need to understand how.

One example of this sudden emergence of a new class of experts (as in: people who don’t know much but think they do) is the reaction on social media to what’s happening over at GBNews, our latest TV channel.

As background, ads on GBNews are sold by a third party, Sky. GBNews is a tiny channel – latest estimates put a typical audience to their most popular slots at somewhere around 20,000. Further, the audience delivered is not only small but almost certainly reachable elsewhere.

So, without making any comment at all on the channel’s editorial position (one that has attracted controversy) it simply isn’t a big deal for advertisers.

Sky uses automated processes to allocate funds across the channels it represents. Unless an agency or client specifically requests that GBNews be excluded, the odds are that the channel will be used as an audience makeweight, albeit a small one.

So far, so reasonable. If as an advertiser you really want to avoid the controversies around GBNews, or indeed any other channel, then just make it clear you don’t want to use it.

Or, in the vernacular opt-out in order to avoid being opted-in.

Assuming you’ve not opted out, and your ads have been appearing on GBNews there’s a good chance you’ll have been targeted on social media by some of your (alleged) customers or by groups like Stop Funding Hate who have been (in their eyes) naming and shaming advertisers on this and other media outlets.

I find this disturbing. Advertisers should be free to advertise wherever they like, within the law.

It may very well be that as an advertiser you want to avoid those channels or contexts within a particular channel that clash with your values as a brand, and / or those that might stir up trouble and strife internally and with stakeholders.

It may be that you want to support, or deliberately avoid certain media because of their editorial views, or because of how they behave in terms of various of their policies.

You may also decide that the audiences attracted to a channel are not relevant, or that the audience’s views and opinions run counter to those with which you wish to be associated.

But all of that is for you, the advertiser to decide on the basis of the facts and the evidence, not as a result of pressure from some third party.

To take a real example, I noticed a number of tweets this week attacking Sainsbury’s for using GBNews. The message was – I’m a customer, stop doing this or I’ll take my custom elsewhere.

Presumably if enough Sainsbury’s customers take this view, and if that number is greater than those taking the opposite view then Sainsbury’s usual mechanisms for evaluating effect will conclude that given the amount spent on GBNews this was expenditure that didn’t deliver a return.

This of course assumes that advertisers evaluate effect thoroughly – using a mix of research and data analytics to take into account reputational harm / enhancement as well as sales, and that they have the means to do this by channel.

If they don’t (and let’s be frank the chances are they don’t given that many don’t even bother to find out where their ads are appearing until someone criticises their ‘selection’), then they have little choice but to use proxy measures or to be buffeted by the prevailing winds of controversy.

Personally I don’t like GBNews. But then like everyone else I also choose to avoid numerous other channels in preference to those that match my opinions and ethical position.

But what I do or don’t think is, along with my prejudices irrelevant when it comes to doing what’s best for my clients.

What’s important is that we have a free and diverse press. Advertisers can then select from a whole range of audiences, contexts and editorial opinions.

What is clear is that whereas audience size, reach and cost were the only games in town, the context within which the message appears is now right up there as a variable in media selection.

Now all we need to do is measure it.

Let’s take the biggest issue first.

Last week an agency strategist called Zoe Scaman wrote a remarkable piece on Twitter called ‘Mad Men. Furious Women’ about misogyny in the ad business. It’s a tough read, but if you haven’t read it, you should.

I don’t know Zoe but to write about what happened to her must have taken extraordinary strength and courage.

She’s empowered others to come forward with similar stories. And she has had to put up with the inevitable pile-ons from those trying to make light of what happened to her.

It’s true that almost every woman I’ve ever met in our industry has similar stories. I’ve not come across one as dreadful as Zoe’s.

Those from my era were and are too prepared to shrug these things off. They saw it as an inevitable consequence of the ‘all lads together and sometimes we go a bit mad’ culture.

How dare we. It was not OK; it is not OK and if it takes the terrible extremes of Zoe’s and others’ stories to make the industry face up to this and do something then it’s about time.

Maybe ‘Campaign’ could help by keeping this story front and centre.

There’s a culture that still, even today often seems to put our industry’s priorities as constantly glorifying the extravagant (boasting about the hours worked, the alcohol consumed) ahead of celebrating the business benefits that great work brings.

The extravagancies conflict with several uncomfortable facts.

As we all know, right now consumers don’t like ads much, and those they like least, appear on the fastest growing (in ad revenue terms) media forms.

To be clear we seem to be saying let’s do more of something consumers don’t like, as they seem not to like it in sufficient numbers to hit some fanciful audience target that has little to do with any business outcome.

One way to express dislike of something is not to consume much of it.

Yet we’ve convinced ourselves, via the modern equivalent of snake oil that an ad exposed for 2 seconds is worth even discussing in the same breath as an experience that lasts maybe 15 times as long.

Then we’ve fallen for the trick that has likes and shares as worthy objectives even though study after study concludes that alone they contribute zip to any positive brand building.

We shake our heads about the paucity of great journalism, but then act as if we play no part in the fact that today journalists are judged not by the impact their stories have on society but by how many clicks they generate.

What if we all made clear to media vendors that we care diddly for clicks?

Apparently, we think it’s OK to support platforms that allow abuse of those whose opinion leads them to speak up against our own favourite but unsubstantiated theories. Even when the facts show we’re wrong. Abuse equals likes and clicks. So that’s alright then.

Why is this OK? Why do we keep supporting the channels that host these lies and abuses? What if the ad business pressed Twitter to only allow accounts with an identifiable owner? Isn’t accountability a good thing?

To be clear I am not in favour of boycotting legitimate channels that express a different point-of-view to my own. Advertisers should be free to advertise wherever they like; our job is to make sure their decisions are well-informed based on whatever knowledge and experience we may have.

If it’s appropriate to point to context, then so be it.

Abdicating from that responsibility, ignoring the signs we’re being sent from consumers that certain elements of what we do are not appreciated and thus don’t work, is not indicative of an industry at ease with itself. That knows what it’s doing and appreciates its true worth.

Zoe Scaman appears to be an immensely brave and principled woman but she shouldn’t have needed to prove that. The men who abused her behaved obnoxiously displaying an arrogance, a failure to think of anyone except themselves.

What happened to her and to many others is of course at a level far, far above moaning on about a few media numbers.

But what is concerning is that the selfish behaviour Zoe exposes is mirrored, even if only in shadowy outline as opposed to in harsh high definition in so many areas that we touch that we should all take heed and ask ourselves how we can make things better.

Even if all most of us can do is (compared to Zoe) minimal and at the margins.

I wonder which of these four the agency world considers the most important of these as defined by where they spend their own money? Here’s a clue, it isn’t media structures, audiences and measurement.

Most years for the last dozen or so, I’ve helped with the annual asi audience measurement conference. This event has been going for over 30 years and is (most would agree) the best of its type.

This particular event and others like it help set the agenda when it comes to defining what the industry needs from measurement. As a for-instance, it was at an asi event that Phil Smith of ISBA unveiled his organisation’s Project Origin cross media initiative.

Asi regularly attracts high calibre speakers, from David Wheldon to Bob Hoffman, from senior measurement figures from Facebook and Google to leading broadcasters and research agencies.

And yet the one group that is hardest to attract as attendees, year in, year out is the agencies.

I’ve asked my agency friends why they don’t attend events like this. Certainly, no event has a God-given right to an audience, so maybe (I’ve wondered) the organisers are missing the hot topics? Or maybe they should rethink the format or the content?

The answer is always ‘we don’t have the budget’.

And yet mysteriously these same agencies have the budget to swarm all over Cannes.

This year’s Cannes was naturally virtual. I don’t know what it cost to ‘attend’ or access but the entry fees for papers or campaigns are revealing.

This year, I make it that Cannes handed out 44 sets of awards across 28 categories, which led the incomparable Bob Hoffman (author of the AdContrarian blog) to make the clearly outrageous and patently unbelievable claim that he once met someone who hadn’t won at Cannes.

The cost of entering varied by category between €985 and €2,450. Most seemed to be around €1,150 before any discounts.

Per entry.

Then there’s the cost in a usual year of showing up. I wouldn’t like to estimate the annual cost of sending a delegate, once expenses are taken into account, but the whole shebang must cost an agency holding group something way into the high 6 figures, maybe even € millions; and an impoverished media agency somewhere between €25,000 and €50,000, assuming they don’t go too crazy with the entries, or the rose.

Hopefully someone will correct me on these numbers.

I’m certainly not against awards (I can’t be, I’ve entered a fair few, won some and judged many more) nor do I think it’s in any way a bad thing to come together to celebrate creativity – but do we really think that much of that happens at Cannes?

Cannes used to be an ad agency festival. Then clients started showing up, and major ad tech vendors, and smaller ad tech vendors, and media agencies, and traditional media houses and research agencies and software houses.

These days it’s about as much a ‘celebration of creativity’ as this blog. And more expensive.

If Cannes is holding a mirror up to and celebrating creativity then to be frank there’s not a huge amount to celebrate at the moment, judging by consumer reaction.

What it is (Cannes I mean, not this blog) is a huge party, a demonstration of old-style excess leavened by the odd award ceremony and (judging by the approved photos released for PR purposes) some Very Serious Meetings that naturally couldn’t possibly take place under any other circumstances (‘You’ll never get such a group together, except in a beautiful waterfront setting or on a yacht’).

If it’s that important I expect a way could be found.

Meantime the industry, and in particular the agency side of the industry can’t afford to come together to discuss what media measurement is required to equip us for the future.

No budget.

Well, I can think of a way of solving that one. Maybe send a few less people to Cannes; maybe enter a few less awards.

Maybe prioritise. At the end of the day if the choice is between a headline boasting that you’re the most awarded holding company network at Cannes, and helping fund whatever work is needed to improve how the industry measures audiences, and thus improve how we spend our clients’ budgets I think I know which I would pick.

I also think I know which most advertisers would pick. Try listening to your market, guys.

There are plenty of smart agency guys. Maybe they should be encouraged to attend events that might actually help shape things in an industry in bad need of change.

A strong execution of course was and is a wonderful thing, but a campaign is, to coin a phrase not just for Christmas. A campaign lasts, a campaign adds layers and depth to the original idea.

A campaign has the potential to become an asset, in more ways than one. It can mean you need to spend less during each burst; there’s no need to introduce the idea or concept, there’s the added value you get from non-commercial messages like PR, or word of mouth, there’s the opportunity to manage a sense of anticipation amongst consumers.

Great marketers understand this and the best are able to subsume their natural wish to do something entirely new and different in the knowledge that they’re building an asset for the business.

They also know that ads very rarely wear-out, except amongst brand managers and so replacing them constantly is not necessary.

It may be a consequence of getting older, and the inevitable decline into a mindset where the default is that everything was better way back when but I do think that campaigns are rarer these days.

‘Campaign’ (the magazine) carried an excellent piece by the writer, Walter Campbell who worked on one of the most famous TV ads of recent times – Guinness’ ‘Surfer’. How it came to be, how it linked the thought that waiting for something adds to the eventual enjoyment to be had when it arrives, with the famous Guinness Is Good For You line. Hence: ‘Good things come to those who wait’.

And how it ignored the original brief not to mention the length of time it takes to pour a Guinness.

Guinness believes in great advertising that lasts, as anyone who has visited the brand’s Guinness Storehouse in Dublin, which devotes a floor to the brand’s advertising heritage will know.

Campaigns can be created around lasting lines (Audi’s Vorsprung Durch Technik, famously copied by Sir John Hegarty from a poster on an Audi factory wall in the 1980’s), jokes (Perrier’s clever ‘Eau’ puns), characters (Leo Burnett’s ‘critters’, the Jolly Green Giant, Tony the Tiger), mini-dramas (Nescafe Gold Blend) or comedies (PG Tips chimps).

They can tie together a disparate series of messages to evoke a common feeling about the brand – VW, Nike, adidas, Tango.

For some reason they catch, and they last.

So how is it that all of the above are old? Where are the new great campaigns?

There are some of course, Warburtons, the John Lewis work (getting on a bit), Comparethemarket’s Meerkats (positively vintage), McDonald’s musical sting (verging on the classic) but they seem to be rarer somehow.

Maybe we’ve come to believe that all messaging is transitory. Nothing lasts, from Instagram posts to Twitter threads, they flare, they disappear. Our attention spans are shortening, we don’t have the time or the patience for anything that requires us to concentrate or to remember.

This can’t be true though. Cinema was riding high pre-pandemic and seems likely to do so again. Book purchasing is apparently booming. TV drama series are making the news.

I suspect the focus of marketers and therefore their agencies has shifted away from great creative, and thus campaign-able ideas and towards accountability. Nothing wrong with that, except that ‘accountability’ has come to mean ‘short-term accountability’.

If the likes of Facebook and Google, who stage-manage so much of the industry debate were honest about their desire to influence business outcomes they would see that true outcomes build and need to be assessed over time. They would note that great long-running campaigns can add immensely to a brand’s value.

They would realise that yes, as transitory platforms they have a role to play but that role is not at the expense of brand-building activities using other channels and other means of communication.

That outcomes are not solely about clicks and likes. That brands need more than 2, 3 or (horror..) even 4 seconds to tell their story.

That great advertising is additive, not exclusive. Collaborative not confrontational. Long-lasting not transitory. Campaigns not ads.

GBNews has been dubbed our very own version of Fox News in terms of that channel’s political leanings. Whether it is or not isn’t the point of this post; the Cog Blog tries to steer clear of political comment.

Rather, it’s the ads on the channel, and how they got there which interests us.

The channel launched this week supported by what looks like a good level of ad content sold on its behalf by Sky Media, the sales arm of Sky that represents a large number of independent channels.

What happened next was pretty predictable. For months prior to launch activist groups and opinionated individuals had been calling on advertisers to boycott the new channel. Neil, never one to back away from confrontation had responded. Ah well, all publicity is good publicity. The point is the launch was hardly a secret. This was never going to be anything other than controversial.

So it was hardly a surprise that as soon as the channel went on air the activists started naming (and in their eyes, shaming) those advertising on it.

Many advertisers promptly pulled off the channel, stating they were unaware that their ads were due to appear there in the first place.

Let’s just park the fact that what matters to advertisers is audience, and the broadcaster’s adherence to OFCOM’s regulations on fair and balanced content, and explore how these ads came to be ‘placed’ on GBNews.

I’ve put ‘placed’ in quotes for a reason.

Imagine yourself in an agency. Unless you’re simply unaware of what’s happening in the media world (pretty weird if you’re a media person) you would have known that GBNews would be controversial.

That may be a good thing – audiences would have been attracted to the first evening, so why not capitalise on the curiosity value?

But what if your client has brands that promote certain values – values that would likely clash with the editorial on offer?

Wouldn’t you have perhaps waited? Explained the situation to your client and recommended holding off. Wait till things calm down, if the audience is there, and the content is in line with the client’s values then in you go.

If the client was prepared to forego his values for the (rather small as it turned out) spike in audience and interest then fine, the agency has done its job, the client has decided to ignore the advice and spend the budget as appropriate.

I strongly suspect this is not what happened.

What I suspect happened was that agencies handed budget over to Sky Media with zero instruction to avoid GBNews. The placement, across all of Sky Media’s channels was down to Sky Media’s audience-based algorithms. I suspect the agencies of those clients with ads that finished up on the channel didn’t bother telling them, didn’t know or couldn’t have cared less.

It’s all audience numbers isn’t it?

What happened to planning? What about aligning a brand’s values with content? This is a subject agency leaders talk about endlessly in the trade press and on conference platforms. Avoiding the issue is what happens, unfortunately when planning principles meet buying pragmatism.

This is a sad indictment, a microcosm of how agencies work these days. Hand the money over to a third party and let them get on with it. Algorithms over thinking on behalf of the client.

Meanwhile, will I be watching GBNews? I’m a busy man with grass that needs watching grow during the day, and paint that needs keeping an eye on to make sure it dries.

I suspect I’m not alone in not caring much beyond this week.

A couple of weeks ago The Cog Blog reported on Dentsu work; now we have a study from Ebiquity. Both use UK data from Lumen, Ebiquity add US data from TVision. Further work from the person who perhaps more than any other started this ball rolling way back when, Karen Nelson-Field has been done in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Australia and the US, much of it shared with the asi community via podcasts and their annual conference.

The Dentsu work seemed to involve a number of vendors, including Facebook in its planning and implementation. I suspect, and Dentsu can easily correct me by commenting, that the bulk of the cost was borne by these sales organisations too. Whether that matters in terms of the findings and how they’re presented is up to users to decide.

The Ebiquity work was I believe independent of any vendor or indeed agency involvement.

Regardless, we are now getting to the stage where there is much public information and data swilling around, much of it consistent from Lumen, TVision and Karen Nelson-Field’s Amplified Intelligence.

Discussions around attention to advertising, or rather lack of attention are hardly new. I recall a study from the early 1980’s (although ‘study’ may imply a certain rigour that wasn’t there) involving JWT’s then Creative Director, Allen Thomas calculating how many ads he was exposed to over a typical day, and how many he remembered at the end of the day.

Several thousand, and about 4 were (if I remember correctly) his conclusion.

With apologies to the late, great Allen we now have a rather more technically robust, research-y way of getting to much the same findings.

The fact is, as we’ve always known people have ‘opportunities to see’ a shed-load of messages and remember very few.

I also remember the great Mike Yershon telling me that first in break, in the first break of the first episode of a new series was the greatest builder of attention you could find (in large part because of the number of light commercial TV viewers attracted to something new).

One debate at the time centred around whether it was better to be in a programme environment of great viewer involvement, on the basis that nobody left the room during the commercial break for fear of missing something, or whether that was hogwash as the break offered the only viable opportunity to do something else for a few minutes.

If you believed the latter then a less-involving editorial context appealed as you just stayed put and did whatever the old-days equivalent of fiddling with your phone was (picking up a copy of ‘The Radio Times’?).

What we now have is the technical wherewithal to start to answer a number of questions like this, and their modern equivalents.

Is there a platform effect – does Facebook per se deliver a less-attention-grabbing environment than YouTube? Is there a difference between different elements of FB (yes, according to Dentsu)?

Does comedy attract and hold attention more than drama? Does this apply to ad copy? Does it correlate with pre-test findings?

Do stars attract and hold attention more than mere mortals, and if so what sort of stars?

What about pure audio? Or audio consumed as one element of a video message (hearing an ad whilst not in the room, for instance)?

How about print, OOH, and static online ads, and how they’re laid out and designed?

And eventually someone’s going to work out a way of quantifying the potentially greatest attention-grabbing medium of them all – cinema.

Next week The Attention Council is hosting a summit of the great and the good from the attention measurement community. It will be well worth a look.

I was always taught that it was better to be 90% right than 100% wrong. On that basis we should not get too bogged down in technical arguments (which need of course to go on in parallel) but rather go in search of pragmatic and actionable solutions.

They may no longer be the biggest, or indeed independent as these days of course they’re a part of Dentsu but their investment in tools and research is still to be admired.

The latest manifestation of this is Dentsu’s work on attention. This has been going on for a few years under the catch-all title of The Attention Economy, involving the leading attention-measurers the UK’s Lumen, TVision out of the USA and Amplified Intelligence from Australia.

This week the agency unveiled its latest work, part of a multi-year journey designed to highlight the importance of attention in media planning and (eventually) buying. Mediatel carried a piece today highlighting the work.

So – all credit to them for the ambition, the consistency and what I would guess is a not inconsiderable investment.

But (and you knew there was going to be a but) the work unveiled this week does pose several questions unanswered, one even unasked in the webinar’s Q&A.

The first, the question posed on the Q&A screen but not asked of the panel (I apologise for not noting the name of the person asking it) related to how the agency saw their data being used within the walled garden approach to data adopted by Facebook and others.

This is significant as Facebook are it seems ‘partnering’ with Dentsu. I’m not sure what that means exactly although I can hazard a guess. Certainly watching Mike Follett of Lumen present slides that talked up the importance of what are according to the MRC guidelines ‘unviewed’ views, and very short exposures to messages made this cynic wonder about the exact role and influence of the partner.

But putting cynicism aside for a moment, it’s right and proper to note that Dentsu along with other agencies are all over the topic of cross media measurement, as being explored by ISBA’s Project Origin and others.

This UK attention work from Lumen is all about ads on mobiles. Certainly collecting data on ads viewed on mobiles is important but in a cross media age so too are ads seen on TV, news-sites, in audio, on OOH and the rest.

The question is (and to his credit Jonathan Waite from Dentsu did have a go at this one) surely the attention paid to a brand’s ad on (let’s pick a platform at random – Facebook) is influenced by (again, taking a medium at random) the same brand advertising on TV? That influence is likely to be considerable.

The Dentsu response mentioned their involvement in a future study with TVision who do indeed measure head movements in front of TV sets, in the US. Yes, the use of multiple media forms is a key influence on attention, but at this point it’s hard to do this in the UK, came the response.

It may be hard but Yan Liu from TVision and Karen Nelson-Field of Amplified Intelligence will tell you it is absolutely possible (we’re not that weird over here..) and can be done should Dentsu or anyone else want to do it.

Plus, Neil Mortenson of ITV in the UK presented a fascinating paper as a part of the asi event last November that touched on the topic.

Of course, Karen Nelson-Field’s work, along with ITV’s may not make either best mates with Facebook, but this is a Dentsu project, not a Facebook one.

Isn’t it?

Agencies feel advertisers underpay them. They feel that their true worth is under-valued. They feel misunderstood, under-appreciated. They always have, they probably always will.

Weirdly though they rarely feel any of these things so strongly as not to pitch (although credit to Red Bee for doing just that). It’s unusual to read of an agency resigning business.

Complaining about clients was always part of the zeitgeist, along with having fun spending time with like-minded souls in a creative, relaxed atmosphere. Yes, the hours were long, but (back then) so were the lunches.

But that was then and this is now. Now, advertising is not liked, and largely not enjoyed. It’s synonymous with being chased around the web, being unable to read an online article because of all the interruptions, all the black holes.

The long hours are still there though; the macho behaviour that leads some mid-level exec to keep some impressionable junior hanging around just in case he (the mid-level exec, and shamefully usually a he) might want something photocopying.

There is still a sense that bad behaviour can be tolerated as this is an industry that everyone wants to get into, so sit there, do as you’re told, and cancel your plans otherwise you’ll just be replaced with the next cab in the rank.

But these days it’s not quite like that. Back in the days of the old university runs, agencies were able to pick from the brightest and the best creative minds. Now that’s not so true.

In today’s adland the hours are still crazy, it’s not so much fun, the industry is less socially admired and agencies are still underpaid.

And yet somehow, according to the Chairman of D&AD this is all the clients’ fault.

I disagree. This is very largely (I say 100%, others whose opinions I value put it at 80%) our own fault. We manage the agencies; we put in place the structures and the pay grades, we set the culture, we establish the standards and the rules.

If agencies were truly delivering to their clients’ business needs, if they were recognised as valuable business partners then surely the longer they worked the more they should get paid?

The truth is that for decades agencies have failed to get their hard work recognised by Boards; they are still seen as the guys who do the pink fluffy bit / beat up the media owners to get us a great deal (delete where appropriate).

How many CEO’s truly know anything about their agency? They may know Sir Martin Sorrell, but truly how many know anything about the agencies they hire?

Now ask the same question of their appointed management consultancy. Or accountants. Or lawyers.

We might start by asking ourselves why might that be? Could it be because we have failed to make the case to the right people that what we do is of real, demonstrable value to the business. We don’t do enough to quantify it. We haven’t sold it in.

That’s not to say we don’t have the data – the Binet and Field work aside there is a mass of evidence stretching back to my old mentor Simon Broadbent and beyond.

But which CEO’s have ever seen that work? Aside from a one-off ‘thought you might be interested in this’ presentation.

We know that advertising needs frequency to work. So why aren’t we banging the drum over and over?

Why do we focus on winning what we are pretty sure will be loss-making accounts? Does our position in the new business league table trump everything else? Do we really believe that any client looks at those tables and says ‘get me the biggest new business winner of the year, they must be doing something right’?

Why isn’t our trade press full of business leaders praising the role that advertising has played in their success? Stories that make the case for great advertising. Stories told by CFO’s, CEO’s.

We need to do this again and again. Not ‘just’ when the effectiveness awards are handed out but week in, week out.

We should celebrate the role that we can and do play in building business.

We should be at the universities, the business schools promoting advertising in this way – not as a fun way to spend your time but as a way to build your client’s business using creativity.

We should behave like responsible employers, investing in our staff, paying them properly, mentoring them, helping them find the right work-life balance. We should say no to rapacious clients wanting the earth for nothing.

We should resign such business and go public as to why. Yes, some do this, but they’re few and far between.

We should praise great clients publicly. We should build a sense that great clients contribute to and get great advertising that builds businesses; bad clients just waste money.

We should, to be frank take responsibility and grow up.

We all know why, of course. The online players needed to position TV as yesterday’s medium and themselves as new and wizzy.

Yet the report commissioned by the ISBA from Enders Analysis paints a scary picture of the commercial side of TV being stuck in the dark ages, or the 1970s as those of us who lived through them like to call them.

Yes, audiences have changed. How they watch video has changed. What they watch on has changed. Where they watch has changed. But the way that the industry buys and sells airtime is depressingly recognisable to old gits like me.

Airtime buying and selling is the equivalent of the old cathode ray set. It’s rather like the music business refusing to accept that much listening is done via streaming, or newspaper editors believing that this online thing was a passing fad.

One day the record industry turned round and saw the business had left them behind. The day dawned when grizzled newspaper sales guys realised that their future lay in the hands of those young guys they’d given online to as a toy to play with whilst the serious business was done as it had always been in the ski chalets and in print.

As we said last week, Enders is predicting a serious fall in ad revenue unless something changes.

Since then, Phil Smith from ISBA and Bob Wootton, ex of ISBA have added their perspective and weight.

And Nick Manning, whose original Mediatel piece we featured last week has given an interview to me as part of the asiCast series expanding on the issue.

Nick makes the point well in the interview that advertisers are the ones now driving change. The agencies are strangely quiet when it comes to debates over trading – no doubt because the largest have a considerable vested interest in maintaining the status quo of share deals and the rest for as long as they can.

The broadcasters have a tricky problem. On the one hand their largest customers are the large agencies. On the other they have a bank of wisdom, knowledge and insight called Thinkbox directing them down a clear path towards a focus on advertisers’ business outcomes.

This crystallises the dilemma facing the broadcasters. TV has always been seen primarily as a buyers’ medium in how it’s traded and thus how it’s measured and researched. Now it needs to transition into a medium for planners, with all that that implies for how TV plans are activated and how its measurement and research evolves.

Beneath it all, TV is still a wonderful ad medium – the best ever invented. But it now comes in multiple flavours. It’s not that it’s dying, it’s more that it’s having babies (to quote Tess Alps).

Babies grow up, find their feet, get educated, leave home, and start working. The parents that hang on to the past, hoping that things will never change and refusing to let go end up disappointed (and probably broke).

The broadcasters are still a major force. Of course they face new challenges, but they have the tools and the wits to overcome them.

They need to use both, fast.

Let’s talk about planning. Even better, let’s be clear what we mean by the word, then let’s talk about it.

Way back when, media agencies decided it was essential to rise above the perception (amongst their clients) that their true value lay in buying media, cheaply. What they needed was for clients to value them differently and appreciate the range of services they could provide.

One step was to rebrand media planning as ‘communications planning’.

This was a smart in that buying media cheaply was something that couldn’t hope to command a premium fee if it was all that the client thought you did. Everyone was doing it, everyone could claim they were doing it better than the next guy, and everyone was undercutting everyone else.

Plus the era of greater transparency was dawning and eventually machines were likely to be able to do large chunks of the job. Focussing on buying was not a long-term plan.

Comms planning, on the other hand was all about integration, sitting at the centre of a wheel with spokes reaching into all kinds of areas (and budgets) including PR, sponsorship, product placement, events, and experiential as well as advertising.

This was the promised land of consultancy, sitting at the client’s right hand. Respect and fees were high. Some agencies sought to draw parallels with management consultancies (whilst not hiring at consultancy salaries).

There was though one major problem.

No-one in agencies had a clue how to deliver it, nor were the tools there to assist.

Agencies fully understood the benefits of integration. They were great at ensuring that the advertising tied in with other marketing activity. And brilliant at stunts.

What we were (and I suspect still are) less good at is planning these things, once we accept that ‘planning’ is about more than working around the timing of pre-committed activities.

Planning campaigns that involve more than advertising, splitting budgets between ads, events, PR and the rest to arrive at an optimal plan has always involved a mix of the diplomatic and the technical, where the technical bit is lacking.

Intra-media planning is firmer ground, which is why building a framework to measure all video, or systems to mix print and online versions of print are all the rage. It’s also vital.

Take video as an example. As this week’s Enders report (summarised here by Nick Manning) suggests, whilst TV viewing is doing well, TV advertising is not. Enders suggests a possible decline by 2027 of between £364 million and £1.35 billion.

Enders make the point that TV advertising is still rooted in trading concepts like share deals, station average price, and contract rights renewal.

Share deals and SAP date back at least to the 1970’s; CRR to 2003.

If TV advertising is going to flourish it needs to remind those in advertisers and their agencies of the effectiveness of the medium. Audience size and cost was once a proxy for effectiveness.

Today we are starting to develop the tools that support the hypothesis that effectiveness is as much to do with how people receive the message, where, when and on what screen. Plus we increasingly link activity to business outcomes.

To maximise effectiveness these days involves smart planning, supported by great buying.

In broadcast, Thinkbox are world class. Their masters should listen to them more and to the big buyers with their share deals and their prices v SAP less.

Meantime the labyrinthine task of sorting out cross-video measurement should be seen (and promoted) as a crucial first step towards integrated communication planning.

This is where research businesses like MESH Experience come in. MESH tracks exposure to all brand communications, and the impact each has on brand perceptions. Not just advertising; all brand communications across all touchpoints.

MESH is a Co-Founder of Crater Lake and Company combining the data they collect with the predictive modelling capabilities of fellow Co-Founder Custometrics.  The outcome are narratives that guide those charged with creating integrated plans.

Integrated, not ‘just’ advertising, and based around outcomes, not outputs; business results not impressions, likes or followers.

Plans based on neutrality, not agency in-fighting.

I remember sitting in a 1970’s meeting once at an ad agency discussing a cosmetic product (I think it was a nail polish remover) with the client when one of my creative colleagues (Jane Barry was her name, an outstanding writer) said she had noticed that the product was particularly good at cleaning intricate pieces of jewellery. She went on to suggest a new brand, marketed on this basis.

To this day I recall my reaction was something like: ‘Are we allowed to suggest things like that? I thought we did ads.’

The point is of course that we are ‘allowed’ to suggest anything that might improve the client’s business.

I once won a piece of business for my agency and finished up account directing a multi-award winning TV commercial. I was the head of media research at the time. The client was a newspaper (I knew about them), and I was lucky to work for an agency that didn’t see job titles as restrictions.

Don’t feel restrained just because you’re a media guy, or a market researcher. Good ideas can and do come from anywhere.

When I started working internationally I got invited to all sorts of grown-up internal agency meetings. One, held in the US was to discuss the agency’s evolution from ad agency to a total comms business, producing work for all channels, advertising and non-advertising based around ‘the big idea’.

It struck me in this meeting that rather than listening to pearls of wisdom passed down from our US lords and masters (all of which were of course ad-based) we would be better off hearing from some of our smaller offices who had had to diversify to survive, ad budgets being what they were.

So I said so, no doubt rather too loudly and too often.

Never limit yourself when it comes to learning lessons. The smallest office can teach the largest a lot; the most junior executive can bring you insights that you, on your lofty perch will never normally get to hear unless you occasionally descend and walk the floors.

And always speak up. If you’re considered sufficiently knowledgeable to be in an important meeting then your views and opinions are worth as much as the next guy’s. Someone thought you should be there; be confident in your own abilities.

The same principle applies to public gatherings. It’s never easy to stand up and ask a question, but assuming you want to know something just get up and do it. Make yourself be noticed.

After all, standing out, building awareness and reach are principles we preach to our clients. Apply them to your own personal brand.

I was once faced with a situation when a TV buyer literally forgot to buy a campaign on one small region of the UK. Clearly it was a dreadful mistake; the buyer spotted it but only after a few days had gone by, when the audience and ad data was released. He was distraught.

I was the guy in charge. I called the client myself and admitted the mistake. It would have been easy to have blamed the TV station, the systems, any number of external factors. It was I thought better to come clean, take responsibility and admit we had screwed up.

The call wasn’t easy but the client, having rightly yelled at me worked with us to resolve the issue. We survived with I think a stronger relationship than if we had not been honest and subsequently been found out.

Far better to be honest and transparent. If you find that you can’t make money on a client’s business, steel yourself, sit down and have the tough conversation. Take the client through the numbers, be clear and together work to solve the issue.

I know some feel this is naïve, that procurement won’t wear it, and that it’s better to make the money up somehow without the client knowing. Believe me I am more than familiar with these arguments.

I once had to give evidence under oath at a US Securities and Exchange Commission enquiry into alleged agency malfeasance, and I was a lot more comfortable knowing I had done the honest thing throughout as opposed to having to remember what I had said to who, when.

Be enquiring, never stop learning, remember good ideas come from anywhere, and do the right thing however hard it might be at the time.

And, have fun. I did. I am.

Weirdly it was only last week that the Cog Blog was chuntering on about how good we are at polishing up new ideas and reinventing the wheel. So, let’s look at the history, and the pros and cons of clients doing it for themselves.

If you were a TV buyer in the 1970’s and early 1980’s your favourite ‘client-you-loved-to-hate’ was Procter and Gamble (I should add that P&G might have been one of only very few, but they weren’t unique. It’s simply that I grew up on their business so know them best).

P&G did their own TV buying. They had an in-house team (led by the formidable Bernard Balderston), which would even buy down to the spot level and would then FAX the agencies what spots they had bought. The agency would then enter the buys onto their systems, thus making it possible to claim the commission.

Procter also developed a brilliantly simple argument to use in negotiations. They believed fundamentally that TV advertising worked; so more TV advertising worked better. They allocated regional TV budgets on the basis of share of sales – if your region generated 10% of sales you got 10% of the money.

So – if you give us a cheaper deal we’ll end up with more advertising that will generate more sales and more budget for you next time.

The ‘jam tomorrow’ tactic, in other words.

P&G were masters of the in-house approach. Over time, maybe even at the same time Nestle, Mars, Unilever were doing something similar. Unilever had, way before then started an internal agency which became Lintas (Unilever, or maybe Lever Advertising Services).

Years later Unilever were amongst the original funders of Brainjuicer, the research company now known as System 1. Investment in expertise comes in many flavours.

This bringing stuff in-house wasn’t confined to the UK. There was an agency in Holland called (I think) Kobalt that was owned by a consortium of advertisers lead if memory serves by Heineken. Mercedes Benz started Debis in Germany. Both closed rather fast.

In-housing isn’t new but it’s improved and evolved. It’s no longer purely about buying cheap stuff, and it’s no longer loathed as a concept by the agencies, some of whom (Oliver being the best example) have embraced the idea and are working to help clients set up strong in-house models.

The best in-house teams improve planning by ensuring that the client’s proprietary first-party data is available, and used. Many are by definition fleeter of foot than any agency when it comes to reacting to social media.

All of the in-housers – and this is surely the defining factor – take media at least and often beyond media to embrace all aspects of communications seriously and see it as a key business driver.

After all, most Boards will likely believe their own people, their own experts over what they see as a justification of their existence by their agencies.

There are naturally cons too.

In-house operations aren’t always that objective. Who, after all tells them they’re doing a poor job?

Most comments in the public domain from in-house teams talk of how much they’ve saved (hardly surprising given the fees saved and the lack of identifiable costs), and how wonderfully integrated life is. Mostly this is hogwash.

Others see this type of organisation as a stick to beat the agencies (Lloyds’ comment that ‘no-one in agencies can write these days’ was misinterpreted but it can’t have added a lot to agency / client trust).

Then there’s the career path matter. If you’re a media guy in an agency you have a clear route ahead, with options along the way. If you’re an in-house media guy at a client your options may well be more limited. One route is to move up the marketing ladder at your organisation (or at another client), but your skills may not prepare you for that. Or move to a sales house or agency – which few do successfully.

Then there’s the term itself. In-housing isn’t a great descriptor, suggesting as it does something divorced from agencies, something limiting, even something anti-agency.

Far better to see what is happening at these advertisers as one element within a digitally-led transformation of their marketing operations, as a result of which certain (but not all) marketing decisions are taken faster, smarter than going through a briefing / meeting / responding / redrafting system.

Not as snappy a headline though, I’ll give you that.

These days posting thoughts online is a little like the question of whether a tree falling in a forest makes a sound.

If you know something, it’s not enough just to know it, you have to broadcast the fact that you know it on social media. Unless and until you do that, you may as well not have gone to the trouble of knowing it in the first place.

Then you gather hundreds or thousands of comments from those praising you for thinking of something that if truth be told has been known for an age. At least you’re spreading the word, sharing the knowledge around (wherever it comes from).

In this way you build your reputation. It’s how you sustain yourself, how you know you have a professional life.

This may sound un-necessarily bitchy but there is a serious point to be made.

If you look around the industry you see people doing things that experience tells you won’t end well. These may be huge and consequential or small and only annoy obsessives like me.

Take personalised advertising (as the old joke goes, please do).

The sales story is easy: consumers like to see ads that are relevant. The data we have on who’s consuming media forms can now be taken to the n’th degree of granularity. So let’s offer up smaller and smaller audiences and thus personalise the messages they see.

There is such an obvious flaw in this that it’s embarrassing to point it out.

Consumers like to see ads that are relevant. This means the content has to be relevant. The timing has to be relevant. Whether one other person sees it, or 10 million others see it is irrelevant to my liking of the ad.

The size of audience may do lots of other things – like making it easy to amplify the message, but at the point that I’m reached I really don’t care.

No consumer ever saw an ad and said: ‘I hate that media plan.’

The whole point of personalisation is around the creative. Not the media plan.

This is as old as the hills. We’ve had personalised comms channels ever since someone invented speaking.

If I’m told something by someone I trust, and if the message is appropriate to me, I’ll likely react to it. ‘Trust’. ‘Appropriate’. Two key planks in any successful ad campaign.

And yet the likes of LinkedIn is full of people who it seems have only just worked this out. ‘Personalisation is all about personalising the message…’ ‘You need to look beyond the media reach amongst an ever-more segmented audience to the nature of the message’. Duh.

Take online tracking – following consumers around the web. Take retargeting. Take excessive frequency levels. Take dodgy audience figures that need to be revised when no-one is (hopefully) looking.

These things are so clearly bad ideas and are seen to be so by anyone with an iota of experience in advertising.

The only people who think these are good ideas are the geeks, those for whom a very big gross number is always more important than the message conveyed. And who have worked out that a bit of adjusting of audience numbers will be forgotten long before the image that this thing has been seen by half the people on the planet.

Those who lead and those who advise the tech companies and the giant platforms should listen not only to the accountants and the management consultancies but also to those who’ve built successful careers understanding, and communicating effectively with consumers.

Learn from the mistakes of others – they’re all around us.

PS Thanks so much for all the generous good wishes, ideas and thoughts following last week’s post on Crater Lake. You’ll notice us cranking up our SM presence but in the meantime check out the blog post on the site (and our lovely photos). We’re open for business.

One thing that has always fascinated me about this business is how much all sides agree on the big issues the industry faces. We may see the problem from different perspectives, we may all have different solutions but we generally all agree that whatever it is exists.

Whether you’re a creative agency, a tracking study partner, a media agency, a market modelling business, a design business, a PR outfit, an adtech supplier or a client marketing manager one key theme keeps re-occurring.

You can call it the need for greater collaboration; the requirement that we all pull in the same direction; the need for integrated thinking. Whatever you call it, we simply don’t have it, don’t do it and yet we all recognise its worth.

It’s not just down to structure and organisation (after all, the full-service creative agencies of my youth weren’t exactly models of collective thinking), the reason for our failure to collaborate lies deep in a need to prove our own worth, to promote ourselves and our specialism above all others.

A few years ago this manifested itself in arguments over who was the client’s ‘lead strategic partner’. Everyone had a claim, which of course led to turf wars and to clients spending all their time settling disputes and putting over-ambitious partners back in their boxes.

As the specialisms have multiplied, and the sheer quantity of data has increased from a trickle to a gush, and as measured accountability (however you define it) has become essential so the need to work together has increased.

As one seasoned marketer put it: ‘I’ve got more data than ever before; and I’m more confused than I’ve ever been.’

It doesn’t matter where you sit, odds are you’re less well informed than all this data sloshing around suggests you should be.

Market research studies that stay in their siloes and are never shared with non-research partners or colleagues. Data analysts whose work never gets to creative agencies. Media agencies who are seen as buyers, as executors but whose knowledge of what data and insights lie behind the briefs that guide their buys is sketchy.

And then there’s the poor client, faced with more and more data, more and more specialists whispering in his ear, more pressure on his time, and more often than not a CFO who sees marketing as pink, fluffy and an expense to be cut as opposed to an investment to be managed.

And, at the same time coping with fewer neutral resources at his disposal, and a business that expects short-term performance whilst not linking those needs with the benefits that come from building the brand over time.

The four Crater Lake founders have come together because we want marketing to be understood at Board level and to be seen as an accountable driver of business. In short to succeed.

We are a collective: Hilary Woods, a creative agency strategist with decades of experience at BBH, Ogilvy and mcgarrybowen working on brands like American Express and Unilever. Fiona Blades, the Founder of the Real-time Experience Tracking (RET) business MESH Experience, a business she founded after spending time in brand management and agencies where she discovered that her questions on the relative performance of PR versus advertising versus in-store versus sponsorships were not being answered. David Beaton, co-Founder of Custometrics, a data analyst business built around predicting outcomes, something it’s done successfully for many years across North America. And myself.

We all have our specialist areas; we are all highly experienced; and we know that how clients will use us will vary.

We are launching with the stated aim of ‘making sense of it all’. Taking all that expensive research, all that data, all that insight and turning it into a clear narrative, a story understood by all of a business’ partners, as well as by those internal stakeholders outside of marketing.

We believe that there are many clients with a pile of jigsaw pieces in front of them and without the time and resources to complete the puzzle. We aim to provide the picture on the top of the box.

Crater Lake itself is a beauty spot in Oregon. It’s famous for the depth, and clarity of its water.

If you’re intrigued, and want to dip your toe in, to see what we can do for your business we would love to hear from you. You can contact any of us: in my case it’s brianjacobs@craterlakeandcompany.com.

Why did we do that? (Please resist the temptation to write to me to say ‘I never paid a premium for anything, ever.’)

Well, obviously it was because we believed in the importance of stand-out. Or, to put it another way because we knew we had more chance attracting the consumer’s attention by being in those positions.

We didn’t need data – indeed (to take the magazine example) what data there was via the old reading and noting scores showed precious little difference between right-hand and left-hand pages. Yet we all paid more for RH, because we ‘just knew’. Sometimes we rambled on about logos disappearing into the gutter, but mainly we ‘just knew’.

The truth was it was a matter of supply and demand. Everyone wanted RH (everyone ‘just knew’), so the publisher charged more. Same with first in break – although in this case as has been pointed out to me by several eminent TV researchers there was some data squirreled away that supported the theory that audiences declined throughout the middle stages of a commercial break.

This week Magnetic, the trade organisation for the UK magazine industry held their annual Spark conference.

The session I attended featured Mike Follett from Lumen, Anna Sampson Magnetic’s Head of Research and Insight and Mike Florence, CSO at PHD, chaired by Dominic Mills.

You can view the session (and indeed the rest of the Spark event) here.

Lumen has done good work on how to optimise ads (and I can imagine, editorial layout) in magazines, the major findings from which indicate that aside from anything else arresting content is key to attracting an audience to ads surrounding it, and that as a medium, magazines are consumed online at a slower pace than social media platforms.

Presumably because it takes longer to read arresting content than it does to scroll through random content (the reality of ‘precision targeting’ is still nowhere near the promise).

Mike Florence made the point that agency contracts slow the progress towards attention becoming a key planning metric.

He was referencing contracts with clients, not spend commitments made by his group traders to particular vendors.

What was strange was Mike discussing contracts as if they were things that happened to him, as opposed to happening with his input and involvement. He did go on to say that many client contracts happen at group level, which although it makes things harder must surely be a process over which as CSO he has some influence.

He also sought to lay some blame for this state of affairs on the auditors. His argument went – we are contractually bound into delivering a price as judged by the client-appointed auditor.

I hold no candle whatsoever for the old-fashioned price driven media auditors but blaming them for a clause within a globally negotiated contract agreed by the agency seems harsh.

I suspect, but of course cannot prove that a larger issue with building attention metrics into planning comes with squaring off group trading deals.

I’m with Mike (Florence) in seeing some progress as price became less of a differentiator, although to be fair this point has been made many times over the years and so far hasn’t been proved correct.

But the ambition must be that factors like attention become more significant in media execution.

Hopefully, the good work done by trade bodies like Magnetic (and there’s a lot of it about) feeds though into the trading policies of individual magazines. After all, negotiations involve two parties. Someone has to make the first move.

Attention is a key metric, it always was. It’s just that now we have far more proof, served up in a way that has the potential to influence how agencies plan, and indeed buy.

I was never sure if this was meant as a compliment, or a put-down, but what is for sure is that even then (the early 1990’s) large advertisers like Procter and Gamble, Coca-Cola, Unilever and McDonald’s took the detail of how hundreds of millions of their dollars was spent seriously.

There were some fearsome advertiser media directors around at the time, but their focus (like their counterparts in agencies) was on the price paid. Planning was something of an after-thought, even a post-rationalisation – indeed at my agency the US media guys were called buyer-planners, not planner-buyers.

I was always brought up to believe that agencies were there to advise, not merely to react. And even though we sometimes needed reminding that it was at the end of the day the advertiser’s money and thus their final decision we should never be backwards in coming forward.

There are certainly as many smart people in media agencies today as there used to be, but their skills may not always be aimed at the right targets.

New technology solutions focussed on such as optimisers, or new ways of dividing up an audience into ever-smaller segments are all very well as far as they go but we’re in danger of falling into the ‘how many angels…’ trap.

For example, why is extreme personalisation a good idea? There are a whole host of arguments to suggest that most of the time it isn’t. If it isn’t why bother building a system to do it?

All of which is a long preamble to get us back to the cross-media measurement debate.

This may be a lot less sexy than personalisation, but it does matter in that it improves how advertisers spend their money, not just where they spend it. In other words, a system that helps with planning decisions, to sit atop the executional buying currencies.

This is what the UK advertiser association, ISBA is aiming for with its Origin project.

Any cross-media framework has to aim at delivering something that helps advertisers decide on how best to allocate funds and effort between (say) advertising, PR, sponsorships, events and the rest, as well as between ad media forms (so, video versus online print versus search), and within media forms (so broadcast TV versus streaming versus YouTube, TikTok and the rest).

Origin is following a pyramid approach; the ISBA team started off focussing on within-video, and now, through the inclusion in the project of non-video players (like the PAMCO / Ozone axis) are broadening from that base

A couple of weeks ago I was rather cynical about Origin. Although I’ve never doubted the ambition, I questioned whether or not the funding was in place to deliver, and as a result whether the trade body had access to the right resources.

ISBA, in the form of their DG, Phil Smith and the Origin project lead, Richard Halton provided a useful update.

The ISBA team talks of a vision along the lines of a Greek temple, with the currency measures delivered by the JICs as the pillars and the cross-media framework as the lintel at the top.

Significantly, Origin now has 25 advertiser supporters, up from 6, as well as an involvement from GroupM, Omnicom and Publicis. Funding is improving, as advertisers realise that they need to pay for the work. Progress is being made in what I can well imagine must be a challenge with the JICs, specifically BARB and their broadcast masters.

The whole cross-media debate started and continues as an attempt to meet a very real advertiser need. In this it is entirely different from the JICs, which exist primarily to meet media owner needs.

It is foolish to see one as replacing the other but we do need to raise our eyes above measuring impacts / exposures / ratings.

You don’t dump something that works well; but at the same time you don’t limit your ambitions to keeping on doing the self-same thing, even if you do it more efficiently or technically better.

Audience measurement has had a limited ambition for ever.

It’s time to think bigger. The future of audience measurement is too important to be left to the audience researchers.

The media world fuels these divisions. Some hate, some love the BBC (often for the exact same reasons). To some, Fox News is a destroyer of all that’s decent, to others it’s a fearless speaker of truth. Your favourite newspaper columnist or radio talk show host may to you appear as a beacon of light challenging the status quo, but to others he or she is a bigoted idiot.

This last week alone we have had numerous examples of conflicting opinions. Coverage of the Prince Harry / Meghan Markle interview, the UK ex-editor turned broadcaster Piers Morgan’s views expressed on a mainstream TV show, and comment from the Society of Editors (‘the UK press is not racist or bigoted’ versus the opposite view expressed by a raft of, ahem, editors and journalists who make up their membership).

The media world is either ‘biased’, or reflects the true debate taking place in many countries.

As ad people, should we care that some of our TV stations, radio broadcasters, newspapers and websites are becoming so polarised? Should we mind if news is manipulated, with clearly fake stories being created to promote a particular interest or point of view?

Does it matter that the social media platforms continue to provide an outlet for extremist views and conspiracy theorists under the inviolate cover of free speech?

Or does the creation of a large audience justify anything?

And whilst there are clearly societal issues in play, what does the ad world have to contribute to this debate, if anything?

As media guys we do it often appears care about these things only through the lens of audience data.

You would be forgiven if you concluded that the only metric that matters is the ratings. Piers Morgan storms out of an ITV studio having been criticised on-air for his views but the next day he’s on Twitter boasting that his ‘work is done’ as for the first time his show, Good Morning Britain (GMB) beat its BBC rival in the ratings.

TV buyers justify their placement of client messages on this size metric. They won’t think too hard that an editorial context of confrontation and belligerence might have an adverse effect on the public’s perception of their clients’ brands.

And maybe they’re right, after all that word ‘might’ is doing an awful lot of work in that sentence.

This is what happens in a world driven by the single dimension of size, where the aim is to buy the biggest thing for the least money. And what if the biggest thing is toxic, damages the environment, drives people into poverty and ferments violence?

At a personal level of course we care, but professionally do we really? We buy eyeballs; what the owners of those eyeballs think or do is apparently of little concern.

Media placement is more nuanced than that. On the one hand it is an agency’s role to consider all options in the round, not just on the basis of the biggest audience. Context matters. But on the other advertisers have historically felt nervous about doing anything that could smack of interference in the editorial process.

If there is virtually no editorial process, as with the platforms then that dynamic shifts. Hence advertisers’ willingness to enter the contextual debate under the banner of brand safety.

It may be that I loathe and detest ‘The Daily Mail’ (actually there’s no ‘may’ about it), but at the same time I can recognise the undoubted fact that ‘The Mail’ attracts a sizeable and in many cases appropriate audience for my clients’ brands.

Both points of view can co-exist, indeed they have done so for years.

Many audience measurement initiatives, from the WFA, ISBA and the ANA on cross-media through to the efforts of the attention-measurers like Amplified Intelligence and Lumen are seeking to add nuance to the crude audience size metric.

As sections of the media polarise, the ability to recognise nuance, to consider the relevance of different attitudes and points of view becomes ever more important.

Should advertisers have a view on a channel’s suitability for its messaging based not just around audience numbers but taking into account that channel’s editorial policy? Should advertisers pay any attention to organisations like Stop Funding Hate?

Is the purity of editorial freedom, unencumbered by commercial concerns worth preserving, or should advertisers allow their decisions to be influenced by particular vocal interests?

Or should we revert to a simpler world in which we buy eyeballs and look the other way?

This is an overdue debate worth having.

Unilever had a similar mantra, ‘Steal with Pride’.

The basics of both were and are simple. Look at what others do, look at what’s worked for you, look around you, collect the evidence, review, collect more evidence, then and only then act.

This whole process can take a long time, or a very short time depending on the task but common to everything is the twin realisation a) that someone else, possibly even someone smarter than you has faced and maybe solved this problem before somewhere and b) that sometimes your first thought, your gut instinct can be wrong.

These thoughts come from an acceptance that there are many ways to skin a cat, and a humility to accept even though you have a million Twitter followers, a trade press column and a LinkedIn profile that contains every endorsement going you never stop learning.

It’s been a good week for the oldies, the dinosaurs, and those with the experience and the scars to prove it.

Take the personalisation of ads, now about to be made rather harder by Google.

Like so many things, the reality of personalised ads isn’t quite all that it seems. But let’s keep it simple and say that it sometimes makes sense to have many variations of the same basic message, and to push the most relevant variant in front of the most appropriate audience.

So – if you’re Ford cars you may have a basic message, but that message is translated in multiple different ways to promote multiple models.

I may see the old gits’ model, with a large boot for the golf clubs, a high driving position that allows for easy entry and exit, and 5 doors.

You may see the sporty two-seater perfect for that weekend getaway (I really should have been a copywriter…).

But not always. You may be a beer, for whom fame is all, and context is key.

Here’s a quote from a blog called Melting Asphalt by Kevin Simler, a man so good he’s been quoted by Bob Hoffman (in 2019) and Richard Shotton in (I think) 2018 and again this week. The original quote (the below is a precis) dates from an even older piece called ‘Ads Don’t Work That Way’. I believe it’s from 2014. When dinosaurs roamed the earth.

“If a relatively unknown brand of beer advertises itself as an ‘unpretentious fun-times party beer’ during the Superbowl, you can bring that beer to your friend’s BBQ later confident that your intentions will be understood.

“Whereas if the same unknown brand advertised itself across 100 different TV shows (reaching the same gross audience) and you only saw one of them – on an obscure cooking show (say) – you’d have no idea whether your friends at the BBQ would have the same understanding of the brand’s image, and whether they would perceive your intentions correctly.”

If you’re a beer, fame is good.

If you’re Ford, some degree of targeted messaging is good, but all playing to a consistent brand message.

Then there’s the news that Airbnb is ‘slashing’ their performance marketing spend in favour of brand building work.

Perhaps the notion of adding some brand magic to the tedious and competitive process of booking accommodation may finally be gaining traction within Airbnb’s hallowed halls.

A few days ago I had the pleasure of interviewing Paul Feldwick, one of the industry’s best strategic planners, for asi. Paul has a new book out, ‘Why Does the Pedlar Sing?’ subtitled ‘What creativity really means in advertising’.

The interview was a delight to do, a reminder of how good we used to be at ads, how popular they were (certainly compared to now) and why we seem to have lost the knack as ‘new techniques’ take hold.

Here’s a link to the podcast: https://www.asiconferences.com/asi-casts/asicast-118-why-is-advertising-so-unpopular/

The absurdity of so many modern arguments (in themselves reruns of very old arguments) about what technique, channel or medium works best is that the real answer is potentially everything, in combination.

No-one’s right all the time, most things have been tried. Think how much money could be saved if everyone followed the Search and Reapply principle.

Marketing is rarely either / or, it’s this and that, plus.

The only issue is how good you are at doing your job.

Or, as my old Coca-Cola client Jelena Veselinovic put it beautifully in a post this week:

“There’s no such thing as performance or brand marketing. There are only different marketing problems that require different marketing tools.”

ISBA’s announcement came alongside their global counterpart, the WFA’s outlining of their strategic vision for the future of audience research.

I’m not much of a wavemaker, but for what it’s worth the Cog Blog is all for advertiser-driven initiatives; this post outlining a blueprint for media measurement in the future is one example.

Time to check on progress.

First, the basics. Media measurement is largely paid for by the media channel being measured. Taking UK examples – BARB is primarily paid for by the broadcasters; RAJAR by the radio station owners; PAMCO by the newsbrands and magazine publishers and so on.

This is all fine as long as all the industry needs is currency data for the buying and selling of space.

In a buying-dominated world, that works.

But for at least the last 15 years it’s become clear that what’s needed alongside the currency numbers is a set of measures that help planners decide how much of a given budget to spend on advertising versus PR versus events versus sponsorships.

And within (say) advertising how much to commit to broadcast TV versus online video versus radio versus search versus out-of-home.

In short, an ambitious programme to lay out a framework for cross-media planning. Not to replace BARB etc but to sit alongside the currencies.

Not to replace the agencies’ proprietary studies but to set standards, common definitions, base principles and the like.

Standards are essential to help create integrated plans across all communication forms, thus helping us all become more efficient and consistent.

As with any measurement programme you need to look at who benefits to get to who should pay or (at the very least) lead. In the case of the currencies, it’s obviously the seller / content creator.

In cross-media it’s the advertiser, hence their involvement.

From a purely outsider’s perspective it looks that the trade bodies are struggling.

Facing an ambition of this scale, it might have been an idea to set up a Council of Wise Researchers to guide and advise.

There’s plenty of smart people around. Just look at those who’ve left Kantar post the Bain Capital acquisition: Andy Brown, Richard Asquith, Jennie Beck and Margo Swadley alone have forgotten more than I ever knew about measurement.

Then there are people like Richard Marks (also ex-Kantar), Steve Wilcox, Helen Harrison, Sheila Byfield, Roger Gane, Mike Sainsbury of asi. These are just from the UK. I’m sure there are equal numbers in multiple other countries.

ISBA has hired one consultant (the excellent Joe Lewis) and a small team under Richard Halton. WFA is this week advertising for a 5-year old to join their 6 strong media team (working on a far wider brief than cross media measurement).

The task these thin teams are facing is daunting.

So they look for help. There’s a couple of strategy papers produced by the WFA, written last April by Google and Facebook, neither of whom are known for their objectivity nor indeed for their collaborative nature, but both of whom have the resources available to drive audience measurement thinking.

You have to question if that’s the wisest of moves for the industry.

There’s little or no funding available (hence, the cynic in me suggests the involvement of Google and FB), and little likelihood of any being found via the usual channels.

Ideas away from the usual membership fees, such as a levy on adspend, proposed here seem to have got nowhere.

I can see one of three things as likely to happen.

Option one: disillusionment will set in, the scope of the cross-media project will shrink and the WFA / ANA / ISBA will move on to other things (it’s not that they haven’t rather a lot to do what with regulating the platforms, establishing a more diverse work force throughout the industry, tackling prejudice, improving creative standards and so on)

This will lead to option two: the Goggle / FB work progresses, with ‘cross-media’ becoming ‘cross-platform-video’. Important, but small stuff driven by highly partisan organisations under the auspices of the world’s largest advertisers.

Or there’s option three: the brave option. This has to start with funding.

One idea certainly is a levy, another might be for the biggest advertisers to tell their agencies that they are expected to contribute $XYZ to become part of a cross-media funding circle, membership of which is the cost of entry to handling their business.

In return these advertisers commit to a full review of the way their agencies are remunerated.

The point is not whether or nor either of these are viable ideas, but that there should be a wide-ranging conversation around funding options before much else happens.

If as I hope bravery wins the day, then the advertiser bodies need to identify and approach their Wise Men, scope the work, define and find the budget and move the whole industry forward from the 1970’s to the 2020’s.

Will they be foresightful? Or will they wither?

The post generated a number of responses, some of which, together with my replies are on the site below the post. Others came in via email or on my various social media feeds.

Two in particular caught my eye and made me think that regardless of the two companies involved, the issue of balance between machines and skilled practitioners is worth another look.

My ex-Universal McCann colleague Greg Smith, now COO at TEAMS wrote: ‘It’s not the wand it’s the magician is what we used to say, but perhaps now it’s both.’

Nobody is suggesting that we don’t need tools to analyse media options. We need even better and faster tools to allow us to assess multiple options, which is what Wavemaker has recognised.

Plus we need smart visionary people to spec the tools in the first place, and people familiar with advertising best practice and theory, built up over years, to get the most from them.

There are always questions to be asked of any tool (by the way I’ve never seen Wavemaker’s Maximiser and have only read what’s been released into the public domain).

First, where’s the data coming from to fuel the tool? How good is it; how robust? If, taking media exposure data as a simple example, the agency is relying on data from the tech platforms then you have at least to question its objectivity / accuracy; if it’s JIC-style data then that is of course different.

From looking at the screengrabs from the Wavemaker tool it seems they are using proprietary panel data, and attitudinal responses as well as media data, which increases its potential usefulness.

But, regardless, it doesn’t matter how fast the tool, how clever the algorithms, if you put garbage in, you’ll get garbage out as my dear old mother used to say.

Stephan Bruneau from Wavemaker, who (modestly?) describes himself as the ‘person who created the Wavemaker platform’ accuses me of using a dated argument in discussing creativity versus maths.

It was of course his ex-boss who coined the phrase that the ad industry of today is lead by MathMen as opposed to Madmen.

It’s in no way an outdated debate. Any follower of the ad business will be aware of the argument around artificially created ads versus the output from human creative teams. And then there’s those ‘Advertising: is it Art or Science?’ polemics.

The point is that today it’s creativity plus maths, not ‘or’ maths. Which is something Stephan and I can agree on.

The bigger discussion is around integration (ensuring creative and media sing from the same hymn sheet) and a focus on relating media and market research results to business effect.

Maybe the Wavemaker tool does this; it’s not clear, but it is clear that’s where the pressure points in the business are.

The second comment that intrigued me came from Vic Davies, who is these days a Course Leader at Bucks New University (Vic was a media agency visionary way back when).

Vic wondered aloud if media agencies were in danger of falling for the McNamara Fallacy – a concept that dates back to the Vietnam war.

Robert McNamara was the US Secretary of Defense from 1961 to 1968. To precis from Wikipedia:

“The McNamara Fallacy originates from the Vietnam War, in which enemy body counts were taken to be a precise and objective measure of success. War was reduced to a mathematical model.

“US Air Force Brigadier-General Edward Lansdale reportedly told McNamara, who was trying to develop a list of metrics to allow him to scientifically follow the progress of the war, that he was not considering the feelings of the common rural Vietnamese people. McNamara wrote it down on his list in pencil, then erased it and told Lansdale that he could not measure it, so it must not be important.”

Or, as Oscar Wilde put it, a cynic is ‘a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.’

Lots of cynics in media – the Cog in Cog Blog does after all stand for Cynical Old Git.

The news broke in ‘Campaign’ on Monday, in a piece by their media and technology editor Omar Oakes who by Thursday was speculating on whether media agency brands were becoming an endangered species as planners migrate to tech businesses and media sales operations.

The media consultant Tom Denford of IDComms wondered aloud if the Wavemaker move signalled the end of media planning.

And the creative agency Mother revealed details of their entry into the media agency business with Media by Mother, which aims to ‘rethink the media agency’.

This paragraph from their ‘manifesto’ caught my attention:

“Media planning needs to be about business and content planning. That means analytical talent who create better inputs for media and understand attribution. It means having content creators who can turn around a meme because they know culture. It means copywriters working within creative management platforms so banners aren’t the shitty posters of the internet. It means experts in media buying platforms who can work like producers, managing activation through the right access point with a deep knowledge of ad tech and data.” (David Gaines, CEO, Media by Mother)

Going back to Wavemaker, media agency networks need tools. They’re a key ingredient in the cement that holds the network together, they’re the answer to the inevitable question – ‘but what differentiates you from the others?’

They also define a way of working. In the eyes of those at the centre, if the local markets all have the same tools they all work consistently. A key requirement for international clients.

It’s never that simple.

Will all local markets understand and use the tools? How will the centre check? How and how often will they train? What will they do if the tools aren’t used?

These aren’t hypothetical questions – we faced the same issues building the Carat network way back when.

There are certain lessons that have stood the test of time.

First, if the local market doesn’t understand the tool they won’t use it. The first time a client asks them to explain the inner workings, and they can’t is the last time that tool will be used.

In another lifetime I once had to present how we estimated cross-media reach to a large client (I was my agency’s head of media research at the time). Being a smart-arse, I put up a long formula to demonstrate 1) how clever we were and 2) the scientific rigour behind our approach.

My line was ‘I’m sure you don’t want me to take you through the formula..’ Unfortunately the client had a deep and abiding interest in statistics and asked me to do exactly that. I couldn’t, looked and felt like a fool and never made that mistake again.

Incentivising offices to use the toolkit can work well. At Carat we used to visit local markets, ask to see examples of the tools in action, check their use with international business, and adjust local bonus payments accordingly.  

Tools are great, but the clue is in the name. You need to have smart humans to work the tools. Smart humans need training in why they should be doing this when local market custom and practice dictate otherwise.

The danger with the Wavemaker approach is that it will stop people thinking about what they’re really trying to do – which is not to maximise the media numbers (a means to an end) but to use commercial messaging to drive business success for the client.

The alternative approach – followed by Mother, and agencies like MediaHub and VCCP is to bring media planning in far closer to the creative process.

It’s a question of whether you focus on the ads, or the algorithms.

It’s time to talk about the E word: Ethics.

The notion of ethics within media agency operations has been in the news this week with the release that GroupM has created a tool, called The Data Ethics Compass. This with some feedback (as ‘Campaign’ calls it) from Unilever.

The issue of ethics and agencies is a broad one.

GroupM’s initiative is based around the notion that using certain data in certain circumstances to do certain things can be unethical. No-one’s going to contradict that. Indeed some, like Jerry Daykin from Glaxo SmithKline have been saying much the same thing for a while.

What GroupM has done is develop and formalise the thought, creating a tool that can be used to help guide their planners.

In other words they’ve rather elegantly created a tool that helps them decide whether or not it’s ethical to use a tool.

The ‘Campaign’ piece states that ‘GroupM has been training its agencies and has identified champions at each firm to begin rolling out (the tool) to different teams’.

GroupM is moving to operationalise ethical considerations when using datasets, which is smart.

Maybe the role of these local ‘ethics (tool) champions’ could usefully be expanded from the external to the internal.

With the media themselves, and how they’re evaluated offering opportunities for investment and innovation, where should the boundaries be drawn between buyer and seller?

For example, how should media agencies behave when their parent invests in a global partnership with a media platform, as WPP did with Tik Tok earlier this week (and both Publicis and IPG have done in the past).

The headline on the WPP / Tik Tok collaboration prioritised brand safety, something we can all agree is A Good Thing.

The copy though makes clear this goes deeper. The partnership is “focused on developing new ad products on the video-sharing platform while bolstering its brand-safety measures”.

At a corporate level this makes sense. Tik Tok is clearly hugely successful; WPP have clients who may well value new ways of using the platform.

The question is: how to remain objective and avoid an over-zealous use of the platform?

How about Finecast – the addressable ad business? “Finecast enables advertisers to precision-target viewers across multiple on demand, linear and live streaming TV environments”. This from the WPP Annual Report. Finecast is a GroupM company.

Again – no-one will argue that a technology that offers advertisers the option to improve how they target TV messages is a bad thing, but any internal pressure from above on planners to use addressable TV repackaged and sold by a sister company would be unethical.

Remember how agencies screamed and shouted about conditional selling?

The media agency world is full of examples of clients being pushed towards a medium, a platform, a technology for no other reason than the agency in question either owns or has a mutually beneficial financial arrangement with the vendor.

This detail usually escapes mention to the client.

The Cog Blog has covered the linked issues of a lack of transparency and the threat to objectivity so often it’s becoming monotonous.

Fortunately others are on the case too.

Scott Moorhead’s Aperto Partnership wrote an excellent white paper on the topic just last month.

As they put it: “There are no circumstances under which a media agency should sell advertising space to their clients”.

Then there’s this white paper ‘From Transparency to Neutrality’, well worth downloading from the7stars’ website.

Tricky blighters, ethics. Do the best for the client, the rest will look after itself.

Enough of The Smiths; let’s instead focus on Ian Dury and try and cheer ourselves up, if only a little.

I’ve always found extremes uncomfortable. Back in the day, when everything in advertising agencies bent to the latest whims of the creatives, us media guys chuntered on.

Didn’t these people care if it didn’t work? Had they never read Ogilvy? How the hell was I supposed to buy 2 minute commercials on that budget?

And yet – halcyon days. Creativity ruled the roost, a greater proportion of ads than today were memorable, client production budgets were extravagant.

My friend Pam Vick, at Caspia Consultancy was this week recalling her days as a Leo Burnett suit on the Cadbury business and receiving a call from the Milk Tray ‘Waterfall’ shoot. ‘Pam – we’re going to need two more speedboats…’

How the pendulum has swung to the other extreme. The calls now are for more likes, more clicks, better algorithms, more impressions. The media guys are omnipotent (by the way, when did an expertise in online media qualify you as a ‘marketing expert’? Did I miss the accelerated learning programme?)

Extremes are bad – in just the same way that creative people largely ignored most media stuff, now far too many media people couldn’t care less about the creative work.

But there are signs of hope.

The penny may not have reached the ground yet but it is dropping. Survey after survey show that people don’t like or trust advertising – and specifically online advertising.

This is becoming recognised as an issue. Too much repetition, too much spooky targeting, too interruptive, too omnipresent.

And it doesn’t work.

Ad agencies are talking, the better-informed media agencies are concerned, the criticism of the large platforms grows louder (how far off that promise to encourage conversations between consumers and brands seems. And how irrelevant).

Clients are becoming aware, and engaging in the issue.

Out of concern will come action – a rebalancing of creative and media skills. Better ads, placed in the most appropriate channels and measured extensively.

No longer will the cry: ‘Facebook has gazillions of people, everyone uses it, we must be on it and they tell me all I need is 2 seconds’ be heard throughout the land. The number of advertisers believing this rubbish will decline.

Media people will work better. Less blind reliance on machines and formulas, more using machines and formulas as tools to create impactful campaigns.

Less obsession with audit pools, CPM and naïve assessments.

More paying attention to attention, on how to engage, entertain and delight the audience.

More of an appreciation of context (thank you Andrew Tenzer and Reach); less of a mistaken belief that all impressions are equal.

A greater acceptance that ‘negotiation’ means: how can I get what I have worked out is what the client needs for less; not how does this benefit me?

More concentration on planning, on understanding that a plan combines numbers and creativity.

It’s time to celebrate great work – and great work emerges from a collaboration across many parties.

Including TV. Including social media, Including influencers. Including DM. Including algorithms. Including mavericks in all disciplines.

Including Hammersmith Palais and the Bolshoi Ballet. And if you get that reference … I salute you!

It was an important pitch – and not just because of the money. Carat had  other large international accounts, of course but Philips was one of, if not the first multi-geography client won from scratch (we didn’t have the business anywhere) by what was then a new management team.

The Carat of those days was referred to by its competition as a NOTwork; a loose collection of strong local agencies thrown together with no common culture, no common tools or processes, and local managements who too often prioritised their own needs over those of the organisation to whom they had sold their businesses.

The Philips experience helped shaped what the Carat of that era became – a strong network with great international clients.

There were lessons learned that even today resonate.

The first lesson is that collaboration around a common goal is essential if you’re going to win. Without it, you have no chance.

Carat was a new network, born out of local strengths. It didn’t have the built-in advantages of (say) Mindshare that came out of two international ad agency networks (JWT and Ogilvy) skilled at working with global clients.

Nowadays the new breed of media consultancies, like ID Comms place great store in common processes, and collaborative network procedures. How an agency works is just as important as the prices it delivers.

In the early days of the Carat network we needed to convince successful local managers to introduce common tools and processes. The Crispin Davis initiated Carat Sphere programme, subtitled The Way We Work was genuinely new and different (and has since been much copied). The original concepts are still applicable today (which is ironic as Carat no longer use them).

Then there were the financials. Why should a local manager resign a competitive client paying a decent fee to take on an international client at a lower local fee? Why should a local manager care about any benefit elsewhere?

These discussions were much to the fore when we prepared to pitch Philips. The lessons we learned (not least in persuasion) were applied to a host of other successful international pitches from adidas through to Kraft, Pfizer and Coca-Cola.

The concept of a strong international offering, with a dedicated centre delivering consultancy services alongside excellent local offerings was fully established on the back of the Philips win.

How local offices and local managers were assessed were shaped by the Philips experience.

In short, it’s no exaggeration to say that the Philips win played a huge role in the success of Carat.

The best lesson came from Philips themselves. After we had won we met a senior member of the management team.

I remember asking him – what was it that turned Philips from an unsuccessful brand, spread across so many industries to what was (even then) a highly successful, focused business?

His reply applies to us all.

‘We used to invent things because we could. Then we found that nobody wanted them. Once we learned to listen to what people wanted before going off and inventing it we became successful’.

Still – you’ve got to smile, have hope and carry on. It can’t be as bad a year can it?

In our own little world, there are interesting changes afoot. Commentators have often criticised advertising (and related) businesses for being slow to change. We are great at advising our clients that their models need to adapt and evolve – but we are not so good at it ourselves.

Until change is forced upon us.

Jon Mandel’s 2015 ANA speech accusing agency buyers of keeping rebates exposed a practice well-hidden within the agency world. It took one speech for the trading model to change.

Has it changed completely? No, but the direction of travel has been reset. Innovative revenue models (and a new breed of independent auditor / evaluator) will continue to emerge throughout 2021.

Agency managements have for a while known in their hearts that staffing levels are un-necessarily high (but margins were good, so..). It’s taken a pandemic and a catastrophic drop in revenues to force the issue, but agencies will eventually emerge as leaner and more efficient businesses.

The large research companies have been criticised for ages for being too wedded to heritage techniques and too slow to adapt to the changing needs of advertisers.

One of the largest, Kantar enters 2021 under new management. What Bain Capital do to streamline the business and to set it up to succeed in a cookie-less world of data and automation will be fascinating to watch and will no doubt prompt others to react.

Audience measurement will look different in a year’s time. One of the stand-out sessions at November’s asi event was the one focussed on measuring attention. Expect to hear more from Karen Nelson-Field, Mike Follett, Yan Liu and friends in 2021.

If advertiser trade bodies continue to agitate for change then progress will be made towards a true cross-media measurement system.

But if lack of funds means they have to rely on the platforms for the heavy technical lifting then their ambition risks being narrowed to cross-platform measurement, and we will be even more in hock to the Facebooks and the Googles of this world.

Talking of which, whatever one’s politics the banning of President Trump and many of his followers from social media platforms raises an interesting issue. Do their actions mean that Twitter et al accept that they are indeed publishers (we all know they are; it’s just that they historically haven’t wanted to admit it)?

As publishers, they need to be regulated and subject to an appropriate set of rules.

Expect online media regulation to rise up someone’s agenda, somewhere.

Welcome to 2021. It won’t be boring.

With Christmas approaching the widow sent her son to the market to buy their Christmas bird. ‘I want the biggest, the fattest bird you can find. But don’t pay too much for it. Mr and Mrs Pool over the field make sure I know what things cost.’

The son set off. He had in mind buying a beautiful bird, just big enough to feed the two of them over several meals. He had heard talk of a turkey – but surely that would be too big? And anyway, how would he get it home?

When he got to the market there was so much on offer. There were beautiful pheasants, plump chickens, even the odd goose. And there were turkeys – masses and masses of turkeys.

The son remembered his mother’s words – the biggest, the fattest, and don’t overpay. He wasn’t quite sure what that last bit meant, but it was a worry. What if he inadvertently paid too much?

Maybe he should get a free-range organic chicken? Quite big enough, guaranteed to be tasty; affordable but nothing like as big as the turkeys.

The son was mulling over what to do when he saw a stall selling live birds. The birds were nowhere to be seen – he presumed they were round the back, away from the crowds, to stop them running away.

But one was out front, sitting there quite calmly with his face in a book. It was huge, bigger than any bird he had ever seen before. And then it spoke to him.

‘You looking for a turkey, mate?’

The son thought this was unusual, but not knowing too much about turkeys he thought he ought to be polite.

‘Yes’ said the son; ‘For me and my mother. We want the biggest, fattest bird I can find. And be aware that I know very well what things cost.’

‘Of course’ said the turkey. ‘I’ll take whatever you’ve got, and I’ll even give you something back for your trouble. After all, you’ll need to get me home, and you’ll need to learn how to cook me won’t you?’

At this stage the son started to feel a little anxious. Admittedly he didn’t know much about turkeys but he was pretty sure they didn’t talk, or indeed read. Didn’t they just go ‘Gobble, gobble’?

He was also fairly certain they didn’t have four legs.

‘How come you can talk, and it seems, read? And how come you’ve not even said ‘Gobble gobble? Isn’t that what turkeys do? And whilst I’m at it, what’s with the four legs?’

‘You’re a smart lad’ said the turkey. ‘You don’t miss much. I’m an educated turkey; I’ve gone out of my way to better myself. Yes I can do the goggle goggle bit – but that’s for the tourists, not for smart customers like you.’

‘The book is my escape – if you lived with the idiots I live with you would do anything to get away, even if only in my imagination.’

‘And as for the legs – I’ve evolved. I’ve had to, after all how else are customers going to get me home?’

‘Fair enough’ said the son. ‘But hang on, what’s this goggle goggle? I have never met a turkey before but all the ones I’ve read about say ‘gobble gobble.’

‘Well’, said the turkey ‘Maybe in learning a new language my natural diction has slipped a little. I have to admit I rarely have any call to speak turkey. Like I say, I live with idiots.’

‘So let me get this clear’ said the son. ‘You’ll accept the little money I have; you’ll walk home with me; you’ll give me some of my money back (and you won’t tell my mother, or she’ll have that off me in a flash); you’ll tell me how to cook you; and you’ll taste delicious.’

‘That’s it’ said the turkey.

And so they set off. The son feeling pleased with himself, the turkey goggling away under his breath.

They got home.

The son rushed in to tell his mother the good news. ‘You’ve done well, son. Let me take a look at this beautiful bird, and let’s get it into the oven’.

The son took off his coat.

So did the wolf.

Allegorical fairy stories involving widowed mothers, naïve sons and animals in disguise rarely end well – and this one is no exception.

Happy Christmas.

The Cog Blog will be back in the New Year.

What will we take away?

First, social media continues to blur the line between opinions and facts.

For instance, it is my opinion that advertising on social media platforms does rather a lot of harm and very little good. It is a fact that social media ad revenues continue to rise.

Or, to put it another way, who knew there were so many qualified epidemiologists in advertising?

We also continued in 2020 to imagine that what we do is so important and skilful that it equips us perfectly for anything remotely related.

Imagine the Venn diagram illustrating the overlap between buying an ad campaign and negotiating a trade deal.

And yet a well-known media professional seriously suggested in a published article that the nation’s best TV buyers (as decided by ‘Campaign’ presumably) should lead our Brexit negotiations. Mind you…

I’ve always rather liked the expression ‘stick to your knitting’. It might be old-fashioned but I continue to hold the view that you diminish your standing in one field if you’re forever making a dick of yourself in another.

Next, there can never be too many pieces illustrating that advertising works. This ‘Contagious’ interview with Dr Grace Kite pulled together many strands to remind us that actually, used properly advertising does deliver. It may not be new news but it’s worth remembering that what we do can have an effect.

Of course, not all advertising is equal. Not all advertising is designed to do the same thing; some is designed for brand building over years; some to elicit an immediate response.

This is so obvious that it’s almost embarrassing to write it down, and yet the supremacy of the placers over the creators makes it necessary to spell out that no, not all impressions are equal; and no, a view is not a view.

We really need to remember this and re-establish the primacy of creativity in 2021.

Work by The Ad Association and Kantar Media in 2020 confirmed that (regardless of whether it works or not) consumers don’t trust advertising, and that they particularly don’t trust online advertising.

Excessive frequency online, and retargeting in the name of the myth of waste-free, precision placements both remain live issues that irritate. And yet advertisers presumably some of whom are advised by agencies staffed by online media professionals) keep doing both.

Talking of advertisers, the big guys moved to the centre of the media stage – with more taking media responsibilities in house, and with trade bodies including the WFA, the ANA and ISBA driving cross-media measurement forward.

As an agency guy I find it sad that my old colleagues aren’t doing more to lead; but at least the paymasters are driving things along.

We’ll see how far they get in 2021 – sorting out who pays and how is going to be critical.

Two final words of praise.

First to the UK media vendor trade bodies. Thinkbox, Magnetic, Newsworks, The Radio Centre, JICMAIL have all advanced knowledge over the last twelve months. All credit to them, and to those who fund them. They’ve come an awfully long way in a short time.

And finally, well done the wise old heads.

I’ve enjoyed reading Dave Trott, Ray Snoddy, Bob Hoffman, Bob Wootton, Nick Manning and (if he’ll forgive me) young Dominic Mills in 2020.

All of them write more sense than most – largely because they’ve been there and done it. When faced with the newest shiny thing, the latest manifestation of the same old theories (or the latest made-up numbers) I like to imagine them sighing, sipping on their pint of mild, and lighting their pipes before calming us all down with what it all really means.

Next week The Cog Blog will be back for the final time this year with a cautionary fairy tale for Christmas. Ho ho ho.

Advertisers rarely featured – indeed back then there was almost a paranoia around anything that could be described as sharing secrets outside the organisation.

Today, at least on my feed you can’t move for tweets and posts from those charged with a media responsibility within advertisers. Conferences are full of these guys, hardly surprisingly. It’s easy to justify paying if you’re going to hear from the top media guy at Client A.

Multiply this up, and the ANAs, WFAs and ISBAs, representing as they do lots of advertisers speak with an even greater authority.

This is all well and good when the matter under discussion is around a point of principle. Everyone agrees that the lack of diversity in our business is shameful; it is a very good thing that the likes of Jerry Daykin of GSK uses his platform to champion change.

But – and I don’t mean to demean Jerry’s efforts in any way – this hasn’t really put GSK money at risk. Yes of course it’s cost Jerry time, and no doubt GSK, like many others have set up programmes to deliver on the promise. But it’s money behind a cause nobody can argue with.

Let’s take another cause close to advertiser hearts – cross media measurement. Hardly a headline matter, nor something that non-marketers can get uncompromisingly behind, and yet it is one that anyone who understands anything about how media funds are allocated agree is important.

If we are to increase the chances that commercial messages end up delivering a business benefit then we need the tools, the evidence on which to base plans.

Big advertisers are vocal in calling for a robust system of cross-media measurement. Of course they are. They stand to benefit from better budget allocation.

Sooner or later the vocalists are going to have to face up to one of several options.

First, agree to pay. Imagine the conversation with the procurement teams. Marketing has enough trouble convincing their finance colleagues that marketing, beyond the very short-term stuff works at all. Now we are seriously expecting that they’re going to convince them to pay for something that delivers a benefit in better plans? That’s a hard sell, and they know it.

Second, offload the responsibility to someone prepared to carry the cost. Google and Facebook, to name but two would no doubt be delighted to spend a few million resourcing the programme if the prize is to shape planning measurement for decades to come.

Third, have the industry pay. Everyone contributes a little, a fund is generated, a team is hired, a plan is built. Work is done objectively for the benefit of all. I would feel a lot more confident selling that to a finance director – we’re paying our bit, everyone else is paying their bit.

Furthermore if the mechanic is a levy, as I’ve suggested then no extra money need be involved. Here’s a Janet and John example as to why not.

An agency writes a plan to spend £1,000. They select four magazines and plan to buy four insertions in each (sorry for the antediluvian language, feel free to insert the word ‘programmatically’ in here if that helps). They’ve calculated that 4 x 4, or 16 insertions is the best plan to reach their objectives.

But because the agency buyer is big and butch he buys 18 insertions, negotiating 5 in two of the magazines.

Yes, 16 was the optimal number, defined by the plan. 18 is surely better – more goodies to impress the auditor and the client.

But what if the agency bought to plan, and saved the money? After all, the plan was based on something.

And what if that money funded an industry research programme?

The agency buys the plan the client has approved. No more money has been spent.

A levy doesn’t have to involve more money (although of course it can), if it’s planned for upfront it can be funded via the buy.

We are living in a world of vocal advertisers – a good thing too.

But it’s time for these guys to start thinking about how to pay for what we all agree they need.

Fine words butter no parsnips as my dear old mum used to say.

For example – why on earth do we have to choose between a campaign’s media delivery, and its creativity when discussing why it’s worked? Why is it that we even discuss ‘which works better, media or creative’ as if we’re in some ridiculous competition?

It’s really simple. The greatest ad in the world is useless if nobody sees it. The best media plan ever written won’t rescue a dreadful creative idea.

Back in the dark ages, ‘media’ was the poor relation. All those jokes about the pre-lunchtime presentation slot, the five minutes that followed the three-hour discussion of which beach was going to be used for the shoot.

The media numbers were worthy and dull, focussed far too much on the discounts to be achieved and far too little on who needed to see the ad, and how many times, for it to have the desired effect.

And now in the self-proclaimed ‘age of media enlightenment’ we spend forever making sure we don’t ‘waste’ a penny of the budget reaching someone outside some crazy target (even if we don’t quite know what ‘waste’ is, or if it’s a good thing to be rid of it).

Never mind that those of us in the media geekhood can’t even decide how to define a ‘viewer’, let alone an impression. Or that the largest ad market in the world still deals in programme ratings as opposed to having anything to do with trading based on the number who see the ad.

We tie ourselves in knots with all the talk of reach, ignoring the fact that very often we’re adding together apples and carrots. Apples and oranges would be an advance – at least they’re both fruits.

And good luck if you want to discuss the ad in any media forum. Many media sales people (and media buyers) have no idea what they’re placing. Quite how they’re taking account of context without knowing the ins and outs of the creative is another mystery.

The industry has moved from an unhealthy obsession with creativity and a complete lack of interest in where and how the money was going to be spent, to an unhealthy obsession with media numbers and a complete lack of interest in the quality of the ads.

Both extremes are of course wrong, and out-of-step with advertisers’ stated needs.

It’s why those agencies, like MediaHub and VCCP who balance creativity with media planning and buying are winning. I would say they’re going back to the future.

It’s also why it was such a pleasure to remember what Nick Manning and Colin Gottlieb were trying to do when they started Manning Gottlieb (now part of Omnicom) 30 years ago.

Here, courtesy of Nick (who clearly never throws anything away) on Mediatel a week ago is how they set out their stall in 1990:

• Rooting media thinking in the client need
• Being consumer-centric (using Account Planning techniques as well as media research)
• Working hand-in-glove with creative partners
• Being innovative to achieve cut-through
• Marrying innovation with the best available media pricing

This was counter-cyclical at the time. Our business was based on ideas; not just creative uses of media but buying media in different ways to make the creative work harder.

If I was running an operation today I would ask Nick in to present pretty well what he presented to prospects 30 years. I would then steal it with pride.

Frankly if you don’t understand the importance of balance and teamwork you’re in the wrong business.

Audience measurement is one of those topics that creates a great deal of heat and light amongst a specialist subset of the industry. Audience researchers toil away, mainly un-noticed by the rest and yet what they do is essential to the whole media ecosystem.

Most of us on the periphery of the subject would agree with two core principles.

It’s important to measure audiences.

It’s important to do it properly.

‘Properly’ includes remaining objective, and producing data that is acceptable to users, is verifiable and is accessible.

It seems obvious for in-sector competitors to collaborate. So, in the case of TV the major broadcasters come together in BARB, to the benefit of all.

But we are now in a world where the key players in what is now video include but extend way beyond traditional broadcasters. And so far, many of these major players haven’t felt the need to collaborate.

We’re coming out of the monochrome, silo-ed world within which each medium is measured separately, to a technicolour world of integrated communication working across multiple channels.

Audience measurement needs to keep pace, or more accurately to catch up – hence the flurry of activity around cross-media measurement.

The problem is that this creates an obvious funding challenge.

Within siloes, it’s natural for the medium to fund research into its audience.

This research is primarily about currencies – and thus, as the name suggests about buying and selling.

Providing data for planning purposes has largely been outside the purview of the audience measurement systems. When the media business was all about buying and selling that was good enough.

Trading and currencies remain important, of course but there is a gap when it comes to deciding between as opposed to within channels.

For over 50 years that gap has been manfully filled by the TGI – but even TGI media data has been weighted to the currencies.

There’s a need to move forward, to reflect today’s multi-comms world.

The obvious group to fund this advance are those who will benefit from the output – and that means the advertiser.

But who? Which advertiser(s)?

At the asi event earlier this month, Sarah Mansfield from Unilever was clear, or clear-ish: “We are very much willing to lead from the front in terms of governance and funding and be actively involved going forward.”

I wouldn’t bank that quite yet.

Sarah didn’t actually commit to funding anything. Indeed, when asked a more specific question on funding from Kantar’s Margo Swadley she ducked it and passed it along to ISBA’s Richard Halton who was equally vague on any specifics.

This is in no way unexpected. I would be surprised (delighted, but surprised) if the funding conversation with individual advertisers has moved beyond the conceptual.

I’ve argued (here and on stage at last year’s asi) for a levy on adspend to fund cross-media audience research.

That way the largest advertisers pay the most, but everyone contributes. Going cap in hand to the usual suspects, the UL’s, the Coca-Cola’s, the P&G’s is unreasonable. After all why should they shoulder the total burden to deliver something that will hopefully become embedded in how the whole industry works?

I don’t buy the argument that says that this somehow denudes the agencies of the competitive edge gained by an investment in proprietary research and tools. They can still do what they do – but with the added benefit of another base source.

The levy would pay for setting up and running the base cross-media measurement system. It would cover the cost of a small team at the advertiser trade body, along with whatever original work was decided upon and maybe a small amount of ongoing R&D into new techniques and approaches (the measurement of attention might be one such).

A levy would place advertisers at the heart of moving audience measurement into the new integrated comms age.

It would help bring advertising and other communication methods together through a planning methodology that ultimately would save money by reducing duplication and discouraging inconsistencies.

Advertisers have long called for such an approach – this would be a giant step towards facilitating it.

For all, funded by all.

Last week’s asi conference, the annual get together of the video and audio audience measurement community broke new ground, and not just because it was a virtual as opposed to a physical gathering. It featured a session devoted to the concept of attention; it was the best ‘attended’ event asi has run; it attracted an audience from a number of disciplines beyond pure audience measurement; and it generated a wider, and a more lively debate than usual (and most asi’s in my experience are good at debate).

I chaired the attention session, containing some excellent papers and discussion.

First, if you wanted to see presentations summing up the best of the different approaches being used around the world all in one place we had Karen Nelson-Field from Amplified Intelligence in Australia, Mike Follett from Lumen in the UK and Yan Liu from TVision in the US.

Their approaches are different as indeed were their presentations. Karen presented new work from Germany, Austria and Switzerland and introduced her company’s new planning tool currently in trial.

Mike and Yan both illustrated the benefits of attention and the ways in which their approaches have been and are being more and more widely used.

We heard too from Sorin Patilinet from Mars, Colin Gottlieb from LadBible and Dino Myers-Lamptey from The Barber Shop on how they are going beyond the more traditional audience numbers to incorporate attention, or some notion of quality of exposure into their thinking, their selling and their plans.

From the more traditional media vendors Mark Barber from The Radio Centre made the point that attention is not a one-size-fits-all concept across media channels, and that there’s a difference between hearing and listening (both have a value). And Neil Mortensen’s (from ITV) fly on the wall approach, watching families watching TV was fascinating, producing results that seemed to be consistent with Karen Nelson-Field’s broad conclusions.

Asi will be making the recordings available – I strongly advise anyone interested in media beyond the traditional numbers to ask for access.

Beyond the papers it struck me that some people seem to find it hard to think beyond a black / white approach.

Nobody seriously thinks that a measure of attention will replace the measurement of audience size, and yet some of the questions seemed to come from a point that you have to have one or the other, but having both is somehow impossible.

The currency data we have today emerged from a place where media was all about trading. Us oldies know our history, the meetings in Fleet Street pubs, the ad agencies buying as much space as they could (back then newsprint was in short supply) then working out what to do with it, and so on.

Even today far too many clients talk of ‘my media buying agency’ as if that was all the agency did.

The terminology may seem trivial but it is important – if clients really believe that all agencies do is buy then that’s all they’ll pay for.

If agencies don’t provide the evidence, the benefit to their clients in planning then they can’t complain if they don’t get paid for that part of what they do.

But we all know that agencies do far more than buy (to my point of the dangers of becoming binary, yes I know buying is important too).

We are slowly moving away from this obsession with buying. ‘Campaign’ hasn’t carried a story of how Agency X has withdrawn its clients’ money from Media Vendor Y for months, even years.

The great benefit in measuring attention, however you do it is that it moves the narrative along. It allows agencies to quantify the quality of the exposure, as opposed to simply believing that first-in-break, or first RH page are somehow ‘better’. And it provides a simple way of building quality and not just quantity into the agency’s output.

The asi session contained a poll amongst those attending. The question posed was: “Do you think that our trading currencies should adapt to include some measure of attention alongside the traditional measure of numbers viewing?”

Adapt, not replace. Alongside not instead of.

62% answered ‘yes’.

Change is coming; credit to the Karen’s, the Mike’s and the Yan’s for driving it along.

There’s a lesson too for how we work.

This coming week sees the annual asi video and audio audience measurement conference, this year virtual, of course and consequently attracting a wider audience than usual.

The asi event has been going for nigh on 30 years. It’s a coming together of those who measure audiences, those who care about the techniques and the results that emerge from different variations.

Audience measurement along with data and an understanding of a client’s business, provide the raw materials but those alone aren’t sufficient to create a plan.

For that you need intuition, and a degree of integrity in how you apply it.

This is something we often forget in a world of optimisers, spreadsheets, and the latest shiny tool.

Intuition in the media world as in most others comes with experience, with an innate understanding built over time of how different channels work, how they fit together, how they combine to create a campaign.

There’s no single course teaching ‘intuition’ or ‘experience’, but there are events where you can learn where to find and how to use the straws and the scraps. Over time, the more you learn, the more valuable you become. But you have to serve your time.

Some learn quicker than others, some develop their skills further, some become expert at recognising it in others.

As Steve Jobs once said: “Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something.”

It’s the same with great planners. They put in the hours, they spend ages on the data and the research, then they ‘just see something’.

I’ve always maintained that you can tell you’re in the presence of serious talent when your reaction to some insight is ‘Well yes, duh, of course.’ But at the same time you know you would never in a million years have come up with that thought.

As a child I used to enjoy ice galas. My favourite bit was the guy who came on, flailed around, almost fell dozens of times, knocked everything over, then somehow managed to get off without injuring himself and others.

I was told he was the best skater. He had to be brilliant to be that apparently bad.

He’d learnt his craft, he’d earned the right to showcase his skills in his own way.

We are in severe danger of believing in the power of the shortcut, and of letting machines replace craft skills.

Learn where to find the straw and the scraps; without them there’s no nest.

At the start of this year (on January 9^th) The Cog Blog came out with the traditional list of predictions for the year 2020 to come. Amongst these was the following: ‘Media runs on measurement. If the measurement is wrong, or not there, or not validated objectively then we’re all in trouble. Anyone who thinks otherwise is in for a nasty shock when they wake up to find that the ground beneath their feet has turned into a rather nasty, messy bog’.

On November 2^nd the audience measurement community, or rather those bits of it concerned with video and audio media forms meets at the annual global asi Conference. This is the world’s premier event on the subject, having covered all manner of measurement changes over the last 30-odd years.

This year is different, and not just because it’s virtual, lasts five days instead of three with each daily session lasting just 2 hours. It’s also free to ‘attend’ – the organisers feel, correctly that this is a critical time for audience measurement and thus the widest possible range of views should be sought.

It’s also different because we are witnessing a changing of focus.

Audience measurement has always been a rather arcane topic. Yes of course it’s critical that BARB etc gets it as right as possible but ‘right’ used to, and still does mean ensuring statistical and technical rigour.

Debates on smart meters might not be for everyone but thank goodness they’re for someone.

The changes coming follow on from the media world’s move away from an obsession with buying to a greater focus on planning.

Planning involves thinking across media. Buying means focussing within media. Measurement has been within media; now it needs to stretch beyond its boundaries.

This does not mean that to add something we have to lose something else, that within media measurement somehow becomes less important. It’s just that we need to add a planning layer.

Surely we can hold two ideas in our heads at the same time?

Planning measures have always hit a funding barrier. Within media is straightforward; the media vehicles pay to measure the audiences they deliver.

But who pays for cross-media? The agencies have no money, nor have they the focus or even the resources. The media vendors will pay as long as they set the rules, which immediately introduces biases and politics to the world of objective measurement. That leaves the advertisers.

Advertisers have never truly paid for audience measurement. Yes, back in the day (in the UK) ISBA, or rather Procter and Gamble, Mars, Unilever and a very few others would participate in the debate. But their argument was that they paid for the advertising anyway, a validated audience measurement system was fundamental to their spending anything, so the vendors and the agencies had to pay.

It’s interesting to speculate what would have happened had the vendors said no, or that they would confine their measures to what they had to do in order to fulfil their programming requirements, and not bother with anything to do with ads.

Would the P&G’s have stopped spending?

Anyway, that’s all in the past, and is speculation. Remove the vendors (if you were a broadcaster would you pay to measure Facebook’s audience?), forget the agencies and we are back with the advertisers.

One thing audience measurement does not need is constant change. Plans need to be built on a stable system, a stable set of accepted principles. Chopping and changing is bad.

What’s needed is an advertiser-funded, advertiser-driven system.

It may very well be that the advertisers can recoup their costs by charging all media forms covered by the system, and the agencies for access, but the media forms still have to cover their own within-media research too.

There are two options.

Option one has the advertisers, through their trade bodies driving towards a cross-media measurement system via some form of subscription which will not guarantee stability or consistency over time.

Delivering option one will be a great achievement, but is at the mercy of whoever funds the work. At the moment it looks suspiciously like Facebook and Google are carrying a large part of the burden on the basis that he who pays the piper…

Option two creates a funding mechanism – my preferred version is a levy on ad spend – that survives (if only through apathy), is neutral to any media form and is consistent.

ISBA and the WFA are both participating in the debate at the asi event.

It should be a fascinating event, even for non-researchers who can pick the sessions they wish to attend.

Book now whilst there are still places available. Bookings close on 23rd October.

One that did, and who didn’t insist on anonymity was Pam Vick, ex Leo Burnett, now running Caspia Consulting. I’m grateful to Pam, whose ‘lesson learned’ is below.

To recap, I listed four lessons:

1. Love ‘the work’
2. Take responsibility
3. Clients are always right, except when they’re not
4. It’s the client’s money

Here are some more.

Lesson 5: Be polite; be professional

The other day I timed how long it took me to type ‘I’m really sorry I had to cancel our meeting, something unavoidable came up. I will I promise refix.’ It took 20 seconds, and I’m slow.

It really isn’t hugely hard to be polite.

When I was a media agency guy I was (apparently) known for being easy to get in to see. This wasn’t altruistic; I always thought there was a chance that the person I was seeing would have a good idea that I could use and naturally pass off as my own. After all, no-one knows their product better than those selling it.

Now that I’m a consultant with neither a title nor any corporate infrastructure around me I find it extraordinary how rude people can be. Like many others I’ve been kept waiting for hours, not had calls or emails returned, and had meetings that had been set up for weeks cancelled without any explanation.

I get it that people are busy. A dog chasing its tail is busy.

One major media agency was asked to see us by their largest global client. We duly arranged to come in to see the executive mentioned with a presentation, involving thousands of pounds worth of kit and prototypes (this was a gaming business). Reminders and invitations were sent and acknowledged.

Come the day, the person concerned a) forgot we were coming; b) hadn’t bothered to invite her colleagues (the client asked us to be sure to see the whole team); c) hadn’t booked a meeting room; d) with bad grace eventually agreed to see us in the agency’s basement café; e) spent 10 minutes telling us about her forthcoming holiday; f) had a secretary come over 10 minutes later with a trumped up excuse that she had to leave to go somewhere else.

At no stage did the executive apologise or even admit she had made a mistake. There was no suggestion of a follow-up.

I can’t help but smile when I’m approached for advice by people who ignored the present me for years whilst they were in a big job, but who are now suddenly out on their own and think that, all of a sudden I might be helpful.

Of course, I always see them. I might learn something.

Lesson 6: Celebrate the craft

None of us really knows how advertising works.

What we do know is that some advertising has worked, and some hasn’t. And we’re quite good at explaining why, after the event.

Some of the most useful sessions I was ever involved in within agencies were the ones spent with multiple clients just chatting over the latest award winners, the stories behind them and what made them great.

Be they Cannes winners, or IPA Ad Effectiveness awards entries there are always lessons to be learned.

Spending time with clients talking about the craft of advertising, or media planning, with no specific agenda and no pressure works well and communicates far more than perhaps you might think.

Lesson 7: Don’t prejudge the channel (with thanks to Pam Vick at Caspia Consulting)

When a prospective client calls to ask for advice it’s surprising how often they’ve already decided what they need to do to solve their marketing problem.

For instance, what they know they want is quite often a brochure.

Why? “Because we don’t have one / need a new one”.

It’s remarkable how often clients start from the wrong end.

The need is not for a new version of the old thing, but to think through such basics as what you want to achieve and who you need to reach to achieve it.

Then you get to move on to the fun bit; deciding on the strategy and the (mix of) channels best suited to achieve your goals.

The answer may be a new brochure. It probably isn’t.

Lesson 8: Saying it isn’t the same as doing it

I once worked for one of the largest market research businesses in a global role. Early on, as the new boy, I was invited to present to the UK management team on what I was planning to do, as part of a ‘vision away day’.

The team were clear as to their vision: they were going to stop being researchers and start being consultants. That way they could move to a different fee structure, and charge more (I paraphrase, probably unkindly).

There was no talk of hiring people better suited to the new vision; no talk of bringing in a different type of graduate; no talk of retraining, restructuring or cutting out the deadwood to encourage the new growth.

In their minds it was simple. They had smart people, all that was needed was a clearly articulated vision.

When banks discovered marketing back around the early 1960’s it was always said that the key word in the title Bank Manager was Manager. Once a Manager you could manage anything, your skill was transferable.

Here’s news: it isn’t true.

There’s a fine line between harking back to ‘the good old days’ whilst sucking on a pipe and criticising those who’ve come later; and referencing the past with the aim of avoiding making the same mistakes again.

For example, it’s become rather fashionable to believe that many of the problems facing the advertising industry today started with the break-up of the old-style full-service agencies.

Those of us who worked in full-service agencies, and there are one or two of us left believe it or not, don’t agree.

Certainly it’s easier to work in an integrated fashion when you’re all in the same space, but the distance between certain media people, and certain creatives had less to do with physical distance and more to do with attitudes and states of mind.

At the same time, the best media people today have no problem working closely with the best creatives, regardless of where both sit.

Some, like MullenLowe’s MediaHub and VCCP Media have fine-tuned the old model and made it fit for purpose in today’s world. Others will no doubt copy them.

Media agencies started and flourished because those running full-service agencies (in the majority of cases account people) under-valued the media department’s contribution and growing importance.

Agency managements didn’t spot the coming storm – and to the great surprise of account people everywhere advertisers did. Hence the massive media agency business of today.

Ignoring something because it doesn’t fit your own narrow narrative is dangerous. Account people saw themselves as guardians of the client’s business. I could fill a book with examples of arrogance, condescension, threats and worse.

The account guys saw themselves as running the business, everyone else was there to do the colouring-in.

Clients, even then, wanted access to those doing the colouring-in.

Today, media agency managements are in danger of making the same mistake when it comes to planning and research.

In the era dominated by deals and trading, media planning became a front-of-house irrelevance to many management teams, crucial at pitch time, but to be subsumed into agency deals the rest of the time.

Now that we’re in the data era there is an equally dangerous focus on automated tools, often at the expense of creative human thought.

The clue is in the word ‘tools’. The best media strategies and plans mix creativity with data; data is accessed by tools. It’s dangerous to pick up a tool without knowing what it can and can’t do.

You may not know how it’s constructed, but you have to know what it’s for.

Audience measurement is a key tool – you can’t do your job without it, but if you pick up the bargain pack from the basket by the till the odds are you’ll find it’s the wrong thing for to the task.

Anyone who’s tried to bash in a nail with a screwdriver will know what I mean.

Audience measurement might be arcane, and complicated, and the people responsible for it don’t exactly make the subject accessible but it is the bedrock of so much of what media agencies do.

Media agency managements don’t need to understand the ins and outs of measurement but they do need to encourage and provide support and leadership to those who do.

If they don’t do this (and most haven’t, and aren’t) then they give up the right to complain that the tool created doesn’t meet their needs. In the vernacular they become rule-takers not rule-makers.

Too many media agency managers are like the account men of the full-service era. They’re blind to changes in their clients’ priorities, believing that above all else what he or she wants is the old model, the only question is what colour they would like it in.

Clients want integrated thinking across communication forms and disciplines. This used to be so obvious a statement as to be un-necessary (anyone else remember Y&R’s ‘whole egg’ approach, or Leo Burnett’s ICS?), but today’s over-siloed industry needs reminding of its importance.

At this point we can cue every conference speech ever given or trade press article written by a media agency CEO over the last five years. Everyone loves talking about integration, but what many don’t enjoy quite so much is explaining how they intend to go about achieving it.

A cross-media approach to audience measurement plays a vital role in the delivery of integration.

It might sound arcane and complicated – and to an extent it is but try building a house without the right tools.

The early media agency entrepreneurs were helped to succeed by a lack of vision from full-service agency managements, combined with the foresight of their clients.

It would be ironic if their successors made the same error.

Charlie Brown never grew up, of course. His creator just shuffled off to that great pumpkin patch in the sky.

I don’t doubt it. Trade bodies hire smart people; and those smart people have access to legions of other smart people. In this particular case, egta lists 29 contributors from (unless I’ve mis-counted) 10 markets

Of specific interest and relevance at the moment is Part 4, ‘which outlines recent examples of industry collaborations and initiatives which aim to raise the bar in cross-media / total video audience measurement’. This is the bit that acknowledges the work being undertaken at the moment by advertiser groups the WFA, ISBA and the ANA.

Egta rightly point out that they have been keen to collaborate in these initiatives, hosting their own mini-conference in January this year attended by around 150 stakeholders.

I’m not sure which outputs from this event found their way into the WFA / ISBA / ANA work. I hear not many.

And right there, it seems to me is the problem.

The advertiser groups have correctly identified the issue – the need for an accepted cross-media measurement system. They’ve issued a framework document for peer review, although quite how widely that particular net was cast seems questionable, and this global framework has been carried through to the US and UK local associations.

So far, so grand.

But for this to work, it needs a roadmap, and someone keeping their eyes very firmly fixed on the end goal.

At the moment, it appears that the people driving the car are Facebook, Google and the other major platforms.

They wrote the framework document; they are the ones devoting the time and the energy to the project.

It is right that they should be heavily involved of course, but I would question whether you really want a cross-media system designed by people whose interest is both limited (in the cross-media sense) and inherently biased.

The WFA, ISBA and (I bet) the ANA are stretched, and under-resourced. They’ve taken on a mammoth task.

So when a couple of fairy godmothers appear waving resources, data, and no doubt some commitment to cash it is extremely hard to turn them away.

He who pays the piper calls the tune. We all know it and we should beware.

Advertiser trade bodies were quite right to become involved in audience measurement. In so doing they have come across two well-known, highly visible barriers, one political, one technical. The politics (or rather the money) defines the technical journey.

How we measure audience impacts the reported size of the audience. Many have believed, for decades that the larger the audience the greater the revenue.

Suggestions from vendor researchers that we could all (for example) learn a lot from how people read or view, or how the audience’s attention varies were typically filed away in the nearest bin.

Apply any filter to anything and the gross number goes down. And the media buying and selling business only cared about gross numbers.

We know, we have always known that people view TV programmes differently, genre to genre, time of day to time of day.

We know that the social platforms deliver a service that many love – but in a transitory ‘give me what I need to know and move on’ way.

We know that magazines are read with different degrees of intensity in different circumstances. That the placement impacts the engagement.

Every so often someone pops up with some research designed to keep the sceptics quiet, meanwhile the selling of gross numbers continues merrily along.

Well, we seem eventually to be at least discussing moving away from the large stick that is unqualified gross numbers to some sort of shaped tool, or nuanced data. It’s only taken us 50-odd years, but hey…

The problem is that what’s good for one is bad for another. Live TV is losing audiences but it’s attracting advertisers because it works. It works because it engages viewers.

Facebook (and the rest) deliver massive audiences with unprecedented  amounts of data attached. But they’re under-used for brand building because they don’t engage.

To be over-simple; Facebook and their like need to focus on how big; the broadcasters need to demonstrate how engaged.

The WFA, ISBA and the ANA must be careful. They need to keep their eyes on the prize and not be distracted by shiny solutions created by those with the resources to give the time to a system that benefits them above all.

There are a lot of smart people around. Many don’t work for Facebook or Google.

It would be wise for the advertiser bodies to engage with the likes of egta, and indeed others more than they appear to have done to date.

That will take resources and money – but if advertisers are truly serious about driving the industry forward in a solution-neutral manner (as I believe they are) then they need to pay attention to establishing a broad-based financial solution that funds a multitude of opinions and experts over a considerable time.

One thing’s certain: Facebook and Google (etc) will be expecting a return from their investment in outlining the cross-media measurement system of the future.

This is not to diminish the ambition of the WFA in entering the bear-pit of cross-media measurement. They’ve done a fine job defining the task, specifically around understanding more about the net reach delivered via (in particular) Goggle and Facebook, and to edge towards some standardisation in certain definitions.

They have delivered a framework covering Governance, Standards and Metrics, Privacy and Technical Infrastructure.

The WFA’s process understands that different media measurement customs and practices have grown up alongside trading conditions that vary from country to country. It therefore makes sense to expect local associations to come up with their own solutions building from the WFA’s framework.

Almost a year ago, the UK advertiser trade association, the ISBA announced their version, Project Origin from the stage at the annual asi conference. I chaired that session and took soundings afterwards. It’s fair to say there was some scepticism amongst the multi-national audience measurement community.

But here we are, close to the first anniversary of the unveiling and ISBA’s approach is very much alive and kicking. With admirable symmetry, asi is interviewing the ISBA team as a part of their virtual conference this November.

But, and it’s a very big BUT media measurement is a marathon, or rather multiple marathons, not a sprint.

It might all sound rather tiresome to those who expect to place an ad on Day Zero, and to receive definitive results by close of play that same day, but changing how an industry thinks and behaves takes time, and a lot of hard work.

There are many constituencies to satisfy, for one thing. What’s the point of a Google / FB driven solution that is rejected by the major broadcasters? Or the largest newsbrands? Or indeed vice-versa?

But, as ISBA has recognised you have to start somewhere, and as the old joke goes the way to eat an elephant is one small bite at a time.

Google and FB (and no doubt the other platforms too) have been brought together and are we are told collaborating – which in itself is no small achievement, but where that gets us is to a measurement system acceptable to the platforms.

In other words, cross-platform, but not cross-media. A milestone, but not a destination.

There are strategic issues too, that sit alongside the formidable technical barriers and which need to be at least thought through, and eventually overcome.

How does a WFA initiative in which Facebook is a key partner sit alongside the decision of many prominent WFA members to boycott FB as an advertising channel? Is the spoon long enough to sup with this particular devil?

Are we to believe that the platforms’ historic lack of transparency when it comes to opening up their datasets to independent investigation is going to be set aside? If so, then great, if indeed they’ve agreed to any such thing.

Don’t let’s forget that the WFA, following P&G’s Marc Pritchard’s famous 2017 speech issued its Global Media Charter in June 2018. Here’s the relevant elements from that Charter summarised in a chart presented at the 2018 asi conference:

Third-party verification and measurement as a minimum requirement

• Self-reported data is unacceptable, and advertisers need third-party verification that inventory is viewable, fraud free, brand safe and on-target. Advertisers commit to prioritise … companies who are audited and certified by the relevant industry-approved bodies.

Removal of ‘walled garden’ issues

• Data and technology should be unbundled, allowing advertisers to use the third-party buying platform of their choice in any and all environments. Publishers and platforms should work to create a solution that provides impression level data…

Will the platforms agree to open up their walled gardens? And what if they don’t?

Given the cross-media ambition, have the WFA, ISBA and the American ANA taken into account the views of (as examples) ‘The Guardian’? ‘The Mail’? Global Radio? JC Decaux? All are after all large global media players.

As to the broadcasters, their European sales organisation, EGTA organised a gathering in January to discuss the WFA initiative but how much of that thinking found its way into the published document?

And where are the agencies? Those thought leaders, those media visionaries? Nowhere to be seen. What an abdication of responsibilities to their advertisers.

Then there’s funding. The Cog Blog has covered this before, but it has to be said again: someone has to pay for this cross-media stuff. You’re not going to find the broadcasters paying for something that disadvantages them; nor will FB et al carry any funding burden when advertisers, as they certainly should, start to introduce a quality of exposure measure, like attention to any cross-media audience metrics.

The beneficiaries should expect to pay; and in this case the only neutral beneficiaries are the advertisers. A levy is the sanest solution.

The WFA / ISBA naturally enough want to demonstrate progress (hence ‘Campaign’), and the starting point has been to stop the squabbling amongst the platforms. To do that is no small achievement, but there’s a very long road ahead, with technical not to mention political pitfalls lurking around every bend.

Don’t count your chickens until they’re hatched. Regardless of the number of cracks in the shell.

A Sad Postscript

Jamming a quote from Harold Evans (whose death at the age of 92 was announced just as I was finishing this post) into a piece on audience measurement might be a stretch (not to mention opportunistic) but here’s the greatest Editor of my generation on journalism:

“In journalism it is simpler to sound off than it is to find out. It is more elegant to pontificate than it is to sweat.”

You may very well ask: what do you know? Who are you to lecture the young and vibrant with your talk of the last century, of full-service agencies, of long lunches and longer afternoons?

It’s a fair point, so from time to time (depending on the response to this post ‘from time to time’ might well turn into ‘never again’) I’m going to try to illustrate some lessons that I’ve learned over the years, sprinkled with real-life examples.

If you’re reading this and you think, yes I have many examples of lessons I’ve learned, and if you’re prepared to be quoted and to share them then let me know and I’ll try to feature them.

Buckle up.

Lesson 1: You have to love ‘the work’

When I got my first proper job in an agency, Davidson Pearce, Norman Berry then the agency’s Creative Director and beating heart told me: ‘You have to eat and breathe advertising. You have to think about it the whole time. You have to love ads.’

Norman may very well have been a tad obsessive, but he had a point. Back then we all, from media research junior (me) through to CEO were all more than aware of, and proud of the agency’s creative work.

Ben Langdon, hiring me decades later at Universal McCann said something similar. When I asked him why he had hired me he said: ‘You are interested in ‘the work’. You care about it.’

At the time I really wasn’t in any way unusual.

I think today I would be. Far fewer people, certainly outside of creative departments, care about the ads. The centre of gravity within the business has swung from creative to media – which (and I’m a media guy) is akin to removing its heart and replacing it with a machine.

If we don’t care about the ads, why should the public?

Lesson 2: Take responsibility

At Davidson Pearce, through a strange set of circumstances I found myself, by now head media research person (within a department of one), getting the agency into a position from where it had a good chance to win ‘The Observer’ account.

I worked with Norman on the pitch, persuaded him he had to break his rules about speculative creative and together we won the business.

I then asked if I could double up, which is how I came to be head of media research and account director. I argued that if the agency had a category expert in house then that person should run any account within that category. I was modest as you can tell.

It seemed to me that I should take responsibility – which, after all is what I had told the client in the pitch.

‘The Observer’ advertising won a string of awards, mainly for this film.

I am proud of some things I’ve done but throughout my career I’ve also made any number of mistakes. One of my TV buyers once forgot to buy a minor ITV region for a brand launch; we miscalculated the savings to be made on a particular negotiation and over-promised to the client; I (more than) once failed to check charts before a presentation. And many, many more.

I’ve learned that if you make a mistake own up to it immediately. Assuming it won’t be noticed, or that someone else will cover it up only ends badly.

And if you’ve never made a mistake then you’re either delusional or you’ve never done anything great either.

Lesson 3: Clients are always right, except when they’re not

Clients hire agencies to help them sell more stuff, enhance their reputations, persuade investors to back them and so on.

They don’t or shouldn’t hire agencies to agree with them.

Yet we so often do this.

At Leo Burnett one of the international account guys once announced he intended to start a new type of agency, the Yes Agency. Whatever the client wanted, however foolish or mundane that would be what the agency would do. Luckily, he wasn’t serious (about starting it; he was deadly serious about the fear we all had that such an agency would succeed).

Richard Wheatly, Leo Burnett’s Chairman once fired Alka Seltzer when the client organised a focus group of his own staff to vote on whether or not our print ad featured a sufficient number of bubbles (we felt it fairly represented reality; the client wanted, needed more bubbles).

Admittedly this was the last of a very long line of straws.

When it comes down to arguing not about the ad but about this or that number of bubbles it’s time to say goodnight.

Lesson 4: It’s the client’s money.

At the end of the day, you can argue all you like but if the client wants to waste his money on this or that channel or medium then it’s his to waste.

I worked on P&G for many years, including a spell in the US. At my first meeting with the global team in Cincinnati the client said something like: ‘You should always recommend what you think we should do; but sometimes your predecessor didn’t know when to stop. We’ll always listen to you, but at the end we may decide to do something different, quite possibly for reasons you’re not party to.’

You have to know when to stop.

You may ask: why is media stuff different from bubbles? One’s art, one’s sophisticated guessing. One matters, one really doesn’t.

If you’re working in advertising today, you’re incredibly lucky. Savour it, love it, care for it.

Pass it on.

Here’s what Read said to an analyst as reported in ‘Campaign’: “If you were to sit through a client presentation or if you were to sit through meetings we have, it’s not Mad Men, we’re not sitting there thinking about 30-second TV ads … We have a very broad range of skills and if you look at our people – the average age of someone who works at WPP is less than 30 – they don’t hark back to the 1980s, luckily.”

‘Campaign’ headlined Gideon Spanier’s story: Mark Read on reopening offices, job cuts, Accenture and his £48 expenses.

The fuss has been rather less about the extravagance of the £48 and rather more about what many see as an ageist remark.

To be fair, Read has (sort-of) apologised (and before someone has a go at me the grammar and punctuation are all his): “All ages are we valued at WPP and the last thing I would want to suggest is otherwise and of course experience is valued. I was asked by an analyst if we had too many people who just did TV ads at WPP and this was my response. I guess I said it to try to make the point that this wasn’t what our people did. I certainly don’t want suggest that age is any way a good thing on its own and I’m sorry that is how it reads.”

First, it’s worth getting even the smallest facts right. The Mad Men era was not the 1980’s. The final series ended with Don Draper dreaming up the famous Coke ‘Hilltop’ ad which aired in 1971.

Next, as Cog Blog aficionado Alan Brydon pointed out on Twitter: “I seem to recall that the 80s were full of stunningly successful ad campaigns, with brilliant creative and media work driving huge sales for clients.”

Advertising today is not exactly brimming over with ‘stunningly successful’ campaigns. Rather, as all kinds of surveys have shown trust in advertising is close to an all time low. Creative standards are by general consent abysmal.

You can argue that this is due to all sorts of factors, but to suggest that we are living through some sort of golden age brought about by the diversified skills of a holding company is as absurd as suggesting that we can learn nothing from the past.

If I was a client looking at the output from my agencies; advertising, media, research, data analytics, PR, social media, influence marketers, I think I may find myself pining for the time when commercial messages of all shapes and sizes just seemed to work better.

Then there’s the age issue. I was genuinely amazed to discover that according to its CEO, WPP’s average age across the business is under 30 (apparently it isn’t, by the way). Admittedly they have sold Kantar – where much experience and wisdom resides – but even so.

Ageism is nothing new, as I know from personal experience. Claire Beale (whom I had never met) wrote a spiteful piece in ‘Campaign’ (the industry’s mouthpiece, remember) when I took over Universal McCann EMEA saying that surely they could have found someone younger for the role. Clients disagreed.

As I write, Gideon Spanier has addressed the ageist point.

It is weird (as Bob Hoffman says) that we don’t seem surprised when people over a certain age win the Nobel prize. Or Emmys. Or Oscars. But it is clearly beyond the wit of old gits to write an online ad or plan a multi-media campaign.

There’s also a certain irony that the financial driving force of WPP, GroupM was started and built by the likes of Irwin Gotlieb, Rob Norman, Nick Theakstone, Steve Allen and the rest. No disrespect to them but even back then they weren’t kids.

Shouldn’t the Board and management team at WPP at least reflect this commitment to the young? I haven’t checked, is the WPP Board’s average age younger than that of the average FTSE 100 Board?

Cindy Gallop, Dave Trott, Bob Hoffman and many others have done a great job demolishing the age argument but it is worth making the additional point that spending time on great TV ads might be just what clients need.

Not the only thing (that was a mistake of the past) but big, fame-generating ideas which inevitably start life on TV before taking flight across all communication channels (and not just ad channels), combined with real results tracked and measured by great data people wouldn’t be such a terrible idea.

One such piece appeared last week from Jelena Veselinovic, an integrated marketing professional of many years standing now based in Atlanta, Georgia. You can read Jelena’s piece here.

Now, having been taken to task by Tom Goodwin for a Cog Blog post of a couple of weeks ago on the basis that I wasn’t qualified to comment on either his posts nor his situation with Publicis as I had never met him (a principle that were it to be applied across social media would decimate, if improve the content), I should point out that Jelena was a client of mine for ages when she was at The Coca-Cola Company.

The essence of Jelena’s piece is that her experience helping build Coca-Cola’s business in various parts of the world apparently counts for not very much at all when it comes to evaluating her appropriateness for work in today’s buzzy online world.

It would be funny if she wasn’t exactly right. Experience today seems to count for little, and certainly a great deal less than knowing what the latest acronym stands for or being able to discuss the technical merits of this algorithm over that formula.

Note ‘discuss’ as opposed to ‘understand’.

The great Bob Hoffman, in his AdContrarian role is fond of pointing out how very bad we are at learning from our mistakes, or indeed from our triumphs.

A few years ago I was one of the first-stage judges of the IPA Ad Effectiveness awards.

The eventual winner that year (I believe it was 2014) was Fosters – their excellent ‘Beach-hut’ campaign delivered outstanding results for the business with every pound spent generating £32 in sales.

‘Beach-hut’ was duly dropped a few months later to be replaced by I don’t remember what, before making a reappearance last year.

I don’t recall too many articles on what that decision cost Fosters

Brands refresh their ad campaigns all the time but only the most successful learn, and apply that learning through a consistency of thought and approach.

It may seem obvious but if you consider some of the most iconic campaigns of all time they are put to sleep before their time. Ads wear-out with brand managers way before they wear-out with consumers. Show anyone of a certain age an ad featuring a boy pushing a delivery bike up a hill and they become all nostalgic. Oh, all right, here it is. 1973, since you asked.

As with creative so with media where the smartest operators are great at absorbing lessons and applying them in whatever circumstances they find themselves in.

Those lessons may involve the importance of reach; the concept of effective frequency; the notion that ads work differently within different contexts; the idea that brand building ads need to wear-in; and the importance of ensuring a consistency of messaging across all channels (and not confining that consistency simply to advertising).

These are universal principles. That’s not to say they should just be applied unthinkingly everywhere, every time but the wisdom within them can be distilled and reapplied.

Understanding these things comes with experience. It’s needlessly expensive to start again every time from scratch and yet time and time again I see articles and posts claiming to discover something that those of around even 10 years ago took for granted. Mind you, we probably thought we had invented them too…

It’s no excuse to say that the world has changed. We all know that’s true but there’s a skill in translating lessons learned in one era to another.

Jelena’s LinkedIn post is titled: 6 Good Reasons Why You Should Never Hire Me. My favourite is: ‘I don’t have performance marketing experience’. To which she responds: ‘Right. I don’t. I only have experience with marketing that performs.’

Experience counts. Ignoring it costs.

This advertiser blockade is nothing like those from the dim and distant past, when advertisers or (more likely their media agencies) would pull spend from publications or broadcasters with whom they had a particular beef.

Those were almost always a part of the negotiation dance, performed in public. Any kind of lengthy boycott most definitely had an impact.

Facebook really wasn’t ever going to be seriously impacted, financially. In fact when a few hundred advertisers stamped their feet and stopped or suspended spending, the Facebook share price hardly moved.

Facebook has such a massively long tail of advertisers (8 million, generating around US$70 billion in revenue in 2019, according to a report on CNN) that a few months of no cash even from the likes of a Unilever hardly registers.

It would though be wrong to say that just because there is no financial impact Facebook couldn’t care less. They are at heart an advertising business.

What worries Facebook is regulation and taxes – they would really far rather have the bare minimum of either. Unfortunately for them various Governments would prefer rather more of both, and these Governments, or their agencies (select committees and equivalents) are starting to make some uncomfortable (for Facebook) noises about enquiries, investigations and the like.

And who might these agencies call to give witness? Who might be amongst those that they might be inclined to listen to? Whose lobbying is likely to cause them to investigate further and wider?

Yes, those large corporations, political party donors and captains of industry, otherwise known as major advertisers.

Politicians have never felt any great empathy for the media business. Television is something they tend to see as a medium to appear on, as opposed to watch.

Newspapers were either left-wing pinko rags holding them to account and thus to be silenced or ridiculed as much as possible, or useful idiots to be used to dis-seminate whatever the message of the day was decreed to be.

The difference back then of course was that newspapers had editors, TV stations had heads of programmes both of whom were responsible for the overall tone and the individual pieces of content absorbed by the great unwashed (that’s you and me).

Governments had no particular reason to listen to advertisers bleating on about the rising cost of TV advertising, or how unfair it was that the Daily Blah was conducting a campaign against a particular ingredient key to the advertiser’s well-being. All of that was a matter between respective commercial enterprises to be played out within the boundaries of freedom of expression.

And should there come a time when politicians felt the need to act (the phone hacking scandal here in the UK was one such) then there was someone to hold to account, someone responsible, someone to send to prison.

The social media channels are of course different, with their content very largely created by the platform’s users. Hence the wide range of opinions on offer; and the occasional tiptoeing over the line into hate, misleading conspiracy theories, bigotry and so on.

And it’s these characteristics and Facebook’s (in particular) inability or unwillingness to address what they see as a freedom of speech issue that’s upset so many and led to the advertiser boycott.

The boycott may not impact Facebook financially in the short-term, but it will have one possibly unforeseen consequence. And that is that FB doesn’t work quite as well quite as often as FB and its acolytes thought.

There are increasing signs that those of us whose world consists not of small local businesses but of major brands have finally realised that what works for some businesses in some circumstances simply doesn’t work for everyone, always.

Furthermore, gross impressions as a proxy for effectiveness belongs in the dark ages.

This hour-long video (it’s well worth the time to watch it through) from the IPA featuring Peter Field, Orlando Wood and James Hurman and curated by MediaCom’s Sue Unerman makes the point powerfully in the last 10 minutes or so.

Maybe us old gits have been right all along. However big the audience numbers the platforms have their limitations – just like every other medium.

You wouldn’t use roadside OOH for long copy; why would you use Facebook as a creator and builder of brand imagery?

It might have taken a boycott to hammer that truth home.

Tom is, or was until last week Head of Futures and Insight at Publicis Groupe. Before that he was Head of Innovation at Zenith; and way back when had a role responsible for Strategy and Innovation at Havas Media.

Last week Publicis fired Tom following a series of Twitter posts about the Coronavirus pandemic. Tom has for months been posting about how we have things all out of proportion, or, as he put it:

“I find the total obsession with Covid deaths over all other deaths entirely gruesome. 7500 Americans die every day but only the ones with this precise new virus matter.”

I do follow Tom on Twitter; I admit I find him deeply irritating in that he is forever complaining about this and that failure or inefficiency whilst rarely proposing any constructive solution. Fair enough, I yell at the screen, so go and do something about it then!

On the few occasions when I’ve moved on from yelling to typing, the answer I would get is that I have clearly over-estimated the influence he has within the organisation that pays his wages.

Like a lot of people Tom has made the fundamental mistake of believing his own publicity. He worked for one of the largest holding companies in the business, and before that for one of the biggest media agencies.

One reason (not, I grant you the only reason) that anyone paid much attention to what he has to say is because of the position he held.

He has some interesting opinions, but the difference between some old git of a blogger expressing a point-of-view and the same view expressed by someone who is (and I quote) ‘part of a team that helps build what a holding company should be, with a focus on unleashing the power of culture, diversity and technology’ is that one has a substantially larger platform and a far bigger megaphone than the other.

So Tom’s defence around his Covid views, that he was merely expressing a personal opinion may be true but is irrelevant. His public persona, whether he likes it or not has been largely constructed around his role at Publicis; if he really wanted to express his personal views then why not create an online alter ego?

But whatever I may think of Tom and his views, were Publicis right to fire him?

First up, clearly they can fire who the heck they like.

Second during a time of large-scale redundancies someone doing what Tom does (or did) must be vulnerable. Was he indispensable to any client? To the business as a whole? Did he bring in direct revenue?

Certainly, since the firing he has had a great deal of support from amongst his legion of followers, but many senior ad people, including one self-proclaimed Publicis client have stated that they felt the company did the right thing.

The Covid-related fuss might have been a highly convenient excuse.

But there is another angle to this. Like him or not, Tom has a point-of-view, and has not been backward in coming forward to express it.

This is something rare, not invisible but rare in the large agencies. Whatever happened to the industry’s thought leaders, the contrarians?

Oddly, and I would be happy to be corrected on this point, I don’t recall Tom ever taking a stand on any of the huge issues faced by the ad and media industries over the last few years.

Transparency in media? Tom would have been at Havas Media / Zenith around then. The holding companies held their tongues along with the tongues of their more garrulous employees.

Cambridge Analytica / Facebook and the misuse of data? Again, he was in a media agency and as a technology geek you might have thought he would have had something valuable to say.

The Facebook boycott? As a leader in one of the largest holding companies what was the Head of Futures view on the position of the platform giants towards hateful content? I may have missed it.

The PWC / ISBA work on the online ad supply chain? Zenith finally issued an incredibly bland comment along the lines of ‘a thing happened’ when shamed into doing so by one of their large clients. But Tom stayed silent.

The largest media and ad agencies have been remarkably quiet as the industry crumbles around them. When someone within the media agency world does stand up to be counted, as Mat Baxter of Initiative did with a view on FB he was slapped down by his holding company CEO.

Tom Goodwin has a voice and has diligently built an audience. He’s now free to act on his own advice.

As to the past, he could have used his position to address the many issues the industry is facing, as opposed to getting sucked in to a controversy over a topic that is both hugely sensitive, and self-evidently way outside his area of expertise.

Or as the incomparable Bob Hoffman put it: ‘As if anyone in the real world gives 25% of a flying shit what some ad guy thinks about COVID’.

So far, at least here in the UK the impact on the size and shape of the various organisations involved in our industry, be they agencies (of any type), advertiser marketing departments, ad tech businesses or publishers has been comparatively minor.

This is not to gloss over the redundancies, nor the businesses that have had to close, but various Government schemes have done a lot to buy time.

However – economic reality is about to kick in. I fear it’s not going to be much fun.

Previous recessions have of course been horrible. My own memories go back to the 1970’s but I’ve lived through variations virtually every decade since.

The one thing that happens for sure in a recession is that the ad business shrinks. Advertisers spend less, pressures on fees kick in and the only realistic option for agencies is to reduce staff numbers.

We shrink, but we hold our shape. Advertising and media agencies emerge as recognisable albeit with fewer people working in them.

A survey by Moore Kingston Smith, reported this week in ‘Campaign’ indicates that 58% of agencies plan on cuts impacting up to 20% of staff numbers, and a further 22% suggest a number over 20%.

The survey, involving 100 agencies from several disciplines also found that: ..”the situation could get worse before it gets better, (but that) 87% of respondents believe the crisis presents them with an opportunity, with more than half saying it allows for a “rationalisation of their business”.

I’m not sure that ‘rationalisation’ is the right word. Why shrink when you could restructure? After all, the agency sector has for years been criticised for carrying on as before, with processes and structures no longer fit for purpose.

What is ‘fit for purpose’? And whose purpose?

Over recent years this has become a pertinent question (farther back it was far more obvious – agencies succeeded or failed based on how well they met their clients’ needs). You could argue that public ownership via the holding companies changed the dynamic; certainly technology, online media forms and the whole matter of media transparency have rewritten the rules.

Now there is an opportunity to rethink structures and processes and for agencies to base what they do unequivocally around the needs of their clients.

In short, to reconsider what value an agency can add in an age of data-driven decision making and in-house operations.

On the list must be a clearing away of anything that detracts from creativity, a more integrated approach to communication, and a more rigorous approach to metrics, research and learning.

But it’s not just what we do, but who does it, and where. It may be a cliché but it’s still true that an agency’s assets are its people. Many have got used over the last few months to different ways of working, and to different priorities.

We all understand the need to create an environment within which talent can flourish. An important part of this has been physical location, and in-house proximity.

Now there’s the challenge of rebooting many organisations given that some staff have managed the last few months comparatively well, others less so.

The online site Fastcompany.com carried a piece this week on how to knit together what the brilliant young author (ahem..) refers to as a psychologically fractured workforce.

“Organizations of all sizes and across all sectors and regions have such a disparity of employee experiences of the pandemic that creating a sense of “oneness” is a formidable task”.

Agencies have become used to a certain way of working. They grow, they shrink, but they carry on doing much the same thing. The biggest have become industrialised. Complacent. Unquestioning.

Any reboot would normally take an age (let’s be honest, it has taken an age). The pandemic and the coming recession are speeding things up.

Agencies have a chance to look afresh at everything they do. To focus on what’s important and to cut out time-consuming irrelevancies.

There’s also the uncomfortable truth that many working and employment practices are simply inappropriate, not to mention self-defeating today. Others have commented on the lack of diversity and the shortage of opportunities for those outside the cities and the bubble of privilege, and, encouragingly are doing something about it.

It’s clear that we have to get a lot better at thinking outside the traditional box if we are to meet both the changing requirements of our clients and the resetting of the priorities of our people.

We have an unfortunate track record of pontificating about change in this or that industry whilst continuing down our own same old path.

Circumstances outside of all of our control are going to give us the chance to walk the talk. The question is are we up to it. The irony is that we may have little choice.

In the midst of all this a ‘Campaign’ piece by Daniel Gilbert ‘In Defence of Facebook’ appeared.

This generated some comment, some negative, some along the lines of ‘FB has made mistakes but hey they’re great really’.

Forgetting ad boycotts for a moment (an action Daniel calls ‘a silly idea’), the piece includes this memorable sentence (memorable in its airbrushing of past misdemeanours): “Facebook has helped to define a new era of advertising, defined by data, measurability, relevance and transparency”.

The problem is:

Data was misused in plain sight by the likes of Cambridge Analytica.

Measurability has been marked by frequent apologies to advertisers for misleading, indeed on occasions made-up audience numbers.

Relevance is achieved by tracking people around the web despite this being unpopular (see Kantar’s Dimension work), an abuse of privacy and just plain wrong.

Transparency although FB’s walled garden approach is hardly transparent.

There was more: “Media advertising before Facebook (and Google) was slow, inefficient and rotten to the core, with backhanders and dodgy deals”.

To be fair he has a point on the last bit – something the Cog Blog has bored on about for years but, and this is a point missed by so many of the digiterati, advertising did in fact exist before online platforms.

Brands were built, nourished and became extremely valuable without Facebook and Google.

I know FB, Google, Amazon and some others are great examples of massively successful businesses built online by providing services people wanted, at the right moment.

They’ve built e-commerce, improved many buyers’ experiences, provided an amazing service to those unwilling or unable to get to the shops, brought a range of goods previously out of reach to us all, made the vast knowledge accessible online available to all, and linked families and individuals across the globe.

They’ve also derailed advertising.

By obsessing over short term metrics, by reducing ‘a view’ down to ‘a passing glance’, and by promoting these and other metrics as true indicators of brand value they’ve sent the ad business down a blind alley where the channel is seen by marketers as being far more important than the idea.

Their interaction with marketers has focused on the audience and the metrics. In this environment, creative ideas are an after-thought. They’ve subsequently withered – to the detriment of advertising as an industry.

Then there’s the content. By creating a user-generated free-for-all Facebook and friends have led us to a point where hate speech is easily spread and multiplied, where conspiracy theories abound, where anyone daring to voice an opinion is hunted down, threatened, abused and insulted by those holding a different opinion.

It’s really not good enough to say this is a few idiots responsible for a small minority of posts. It’s also not acceptable to hide behind freedom of speech. As someone once said, freedom of speech doesn’t give you the right to run into a crowded cinema and shout fire.

This is clearly a societal problem, but the consequence is that these platforms do not deliver a healthy environment for brand advertisers, regardless of how many people there are on them.

There are many examples of small businesses using FB and friends highly successfully as direct response channels. Absolutely nothing wrong with that; if the businesses concerned generate a response, and if the response generates a profit then good for them.

But it is wholly different for the big guys. The big guys care about brands. And brands are built, as the great Jeremy Bullmore has it like birds builds nests, from the twigs and sticks they come across along the way.

One of the sticks is the context within which brands appear. After all, you’re known by the company you keep – and you wouldn’t want to hang around with much of what’s on social media.

Hence the boycott. It really isn’t about money. We all know that Facebook has a massively long tail of advertisers. Even the hundreds of boycotters represent only a fraction of FB revenue.

What the boycott has done is strip away the veneer surrounding FB specifically and social media in general.

The world won’t end for the boycotting brands if they don’t advertise on Facebook. I doubt their models will pick up any sort of decline in business.

Whisper it quietly but the king has no clothes. Facebook and friends are not a suitable place for advertising designed to build brands.

The boycott has changed advertising’s view of the social media world.

I would say it has moved us all on but actually it’s made us pause, rethink and reset.

Advertising has a chance to regroup; brand ideas have a chance to flourish as budgets are invested (online as well as offline) in edited, context-appropriate, attention-grabbing, sales-generating media.

Anyway, on with the show.

The competition to be number one in the spreader-of-hate-and-discrimination stakes is intense. Twitter seemed to have it pretty well sewn up going into the final stages but a late run by Facebook, combined with a sudden outbreak of responsibility over content at Twitter has seen the lead change.

Facebook is now the poster child for all that’s wrong with social media and it’s surely not sustainable to continue to hide behind the feeble argument that what appears on their platform is nothing to do with them.

Arguments involving legislators and academics have so far failed to shift Mark Zuckerberg and so the natural next port of call has been to ‘hit him in the wallet’ by appealing to advertisers to pull their spend.

This appeal has had some success. Unilever brand Ben and Jerry’s ice-cream pulled out, subsequently joined by the rest of Unilever.

North Face, Patagonia and Eddie Bauer have joined the boycott, as have Coca-Cola and several other big name brands.

Verizon are pausing their FB advertising ‘until Facebook can create an acceptable solution that makes us comfortable.’ Which is a rather weird turn of phrase.

Meantime Procter and Gamble, who have been extremely vocal in their calling out of various ad malpractices in online media forms, is considering what to do but has certainly not ruled out a boycott.

Glaxo SmithKline, whose EMEA Media Director Jerry Daykin has been highly effective in his support for the Conscious Advertising Network, which lobbies brands to do more to ‘ensure their budgets aren’t accidentally funding hate speech and fake news’ has as far as I can tell not yet joined the boycotters.

All in all not a bad boycott, as boycotts go.

At any rate it appears to have generated a reaction of sorts from Facebook, although I’m not sure that’s for the obvious reason. Cutting off named brand ad support from FB makes very little direct financial difference – the platform’s revenue comes from thousands of small, long-tail brands and businesses and even a P&G has very little leverage as measured in US$ spent – although the stock market reaction would have stung a whole lot more.

Facebook may not care much about large advertisers, whatever they say in public, but they do care about regulators. And right now the regulatory temperature at least in Europe is rising with talk of taxes as well as monitoring of content.

In such circumstances a boycott can create waves. Facebook would I’m sure rather not fight a war on multiple fronts simultaneously, so if there’s a solution that would calm advertisers, and even partially satisfy the pressure groups then they just might go for it.

Along these lines an imaginative idea has been posited by Rob Norman, ex of GroupM on LinkedIn and in ‘Campaign’

Rob compares the spread of misinformation on Facebook to the COVID pandemic. He proposes that FB stop the sharing of content (to slow the spread by ‘social distancing’) and introduce human intervention (‘a face mask’) to algorithmic recommendations.

This is smart in that it is possibly acceptable to Facebook, will have little impact on most advertising messages, and might, if it was to be done as a trial, point the way to a cleaner, healthier future.

But like me, Rob’s idea has been rather overtaken by events, although I suspect that when things calm down a bit this will be well-worth revisiting.

Facebook in the meantime should prepare to suffer from reverse Chairman’s Wife syndrome.

The original affliction has been around for years. The Daily Mail, when it was the pin-up of the suburban middle-classes benefited from the generic Chairman’s Wife question: ‘Darling, how come my friends and I never see our ads in my paper?’

A quick call later and that was fixed.

More recently this metamorphosed into Chairman’s Grandson syndrome: ‘None of my friends read a newspaper or watch TV; how come we never see our ads on Facebook / Twitter / insert social media channel of choice?’

What’s about to hit FB is the reverse: ‘Why are our ads appearing on that appalling channel, hated by all?’

The golden age of social media advertising (maybe the gaudy, painted age) may well be coming to an end.

As the Kantar Dimension work shows consistently, social media is not trusted; and ads on it are not viewed with any great affection.

Facebook’s real fear is that they will be treated by the regulators as a publisher. That way they will of course be held ultimately responsible for what appears on the platform.

Which should have happened a long time ago.

The hub and spoke model, with the media agency at the centre acting as strategic lead on all forms of communication is easy to type, and very hard to do.

There are two problems – organisational, and directional.

Organisationally, it’s always instructive, as the hub agency to propose a mix involving disciplines other than ‘advertising’.

On one occasion I was physically threatened in front of my teams by the global account lead on the client in question at the ad agency. As we were in the same holding company (along with a branding consultancy, a PR agency, an experiential agency and others) this guy made it clear he had no doubt as to where my loyalty should lie. I didn’t agree.

Then there was the cross-holding-company GAD who doubled up as a Board Director at one of the holding company’s ad agencies. He refused even to countenance the idea that someone might propose a non-advertising solution to ‘his’ client.

It would be nice to think that these dinosaurs will simply die out, and I suspect they will. Integrated thinking will permeate the business, eventually.

What will help that happen at something other than our industry’s natural glacier pace is the creation of decent tools and techniques to help guide us, directionally.

How do you allocate budget between, say, TV advertising, PR, an event, creating an online game, and social media?

Let’s be honest, right now allocating money between video ad formats is beyond us.

The fact is we lack the tools we need to map read.

Once upon a time agencies could be relied upon to have thoughts on this, and indeed to draft the map. But they have largely abdicated responsibility for the development of industry research. Yes, a few people do sterling work on the committees that run these things, but increasingly whenever a conversation on the direction of the industry’s future research needs takes place it’s dominated by the likes of Google and Facebook.

Recent developments and cross-media initiatives have been started and are being driven not by the agencies but by advertisers and their trade bodies.

The agencies are invited along, but they’re a bit like a distant cousin invited to a party because the host felt bad about excluding them, who, when they turn up say little beyond complaining about the traffic getting there on the A3.

The agencies say that their focus is on developing their own tools, but to build something robust and credible you still need the basic materials.

The WFA, ANA and ISBA initiatives are all admirable – but they do in the fullness of time need to lift their eyes above video, in fact eventually above advertising per se to establish evidence-based principles on which future plans can be built.

As the old joke goes, the way to eat an elephant is one small bite at a time. But you still need to keep sight of the fact that it is a bloody great elephant.

The industry lacks the building blocks on top of which the agencies (or anyone else, like advertiser in-house units, or vendor sales and editorial divisions) can build the bespoke structures that will help shape the future.

Common building blocks avoid the nightmare of multiple currencies – it’s a short step from one agency coming up with its own audience metrics to every other agency doing their own versions and before you know it we are all spending our time arguing about the number of angels who can dance on the head of a pin.

Industry accepted research has a huge reason to exist. But it can never be (in fact it was never designed to be) the only game in town, rather it’s there to provide the base kit.

Once that’s done you can go off and build a toy fort or a full-size castle. Whatever takes your fancy.

1. “Whatever the agency model, clients just want low fees”

As with anyone buying any service, advertisers want many things from their agencies, and certainly good value is one. But increasingly there’s a recognition that value is not the same as cheap.

Agencies should promote this sentiment, although they far too often fall into the trap of pitching cheap. This Forbes piece on what they see as the forthcoming decimation of the business makes the point well.

Over the years BJ&A has conducted several consultancy projects for different organisations that have involved face-to-face, one-on-one interviews with a range of advertisers.

What we’ve found, time and time again is that advertisers want their agencies, of all shapes, sizes and specialisms to be open and honest on what and how they charge.

One large financial institution recalled how they were taken through the detail of how a research supplier charged out its staff’s time, and subsequently monitored time spent, and out-of-pocket expenses.

The advertiser’s point to us was that they appreciated the open-ness explaining the agency’s business model and how it was applied in their case. At the end of what was admittedly quite a lengthy but informal  process they felt confident that they were paying a fair rate for the service supplied.

‘Transparency’ isn’t only a contractual matter concerning rebates and kickbacks, it’s as much about open-ness and honesty in all aspects of the relationship. That’s what builds mutual respect and trust.

2. “You may want them to, and the theory is they should, but the fact is nobody will pay for planning and strategic services”

Clients want to understand the benefit from any service they buy.

If the agency can’t explain the benefit how can the client understand it?

This is in large part a problem of the agencies’ own making – for years they charged low fees knowing full well that they would make their margin from media vendor rebates and kickbacks.

The agencies now have the unenviable task of trying to charge for something they used to give away.

One solution is the menu approach. The agency clearly lays out from the start what it will provide for the base fee; and attaches a priced menu of additional services.

If the client really only wants the basics, then that’s what they pay for; but inevitably over the course of the contract extras are requested, added, and paid for.

It takes organisation, commitment and a confidence in what’s being charged but I’ve seen this applied successfully in several agencies and across different geographies.

3. “Agencies are their own worst enemy; winning the business is more important than making a decent margin”

This is at the heart of the issue (again, see the Forbes piece). Put simply there are too many agencies; there are too many pitches; and too many briefs have for too long focussed on bottom-line prices, for media and for services.

Agency people tend to be positive individuals, with a ‘can do’ attitude. They are also competitive. And they rarely question the brief.

Put these characteristics together and what you get are people over-promising to win, under-delivering, and not charging properly for their time in order to avoid a difficult conversation.

Over time, the client becomes dis-satisfied with the service, stays because of the low prices, and eventually is driven to review.

Then the whole cycle begins again.

We should continuously remind clients of the cost, to them as well as to the agencies, of pitches. The disruption. The management time. The pitch consultants. Some pitch consultants are doing this; some clients are listening.

If agencies can regain trust, and become respected partners there will be fewer pitches, better relationships, greater respect.

4. “Agencies lack management talent”

There are many smart people in agencies, but it’s fair to question whether there are enough smart managers.

Agency managements have typically emerged from the ranks. There are exceptions, like Crispin Davis who transformed Aegis for several years in the 1990’s after a career in marketing and general management in large consumer goods companies (P&G, and what is now Diageo).

And some who rise to the top turn out to be inspirational managers (Karen Blackett at WPP, ex MediaCom is a good example).

But the exceptions prove the rule – most agencies are run by those with necessarily great client skills. Often those people are not well equipped to transform the business they grew up in.

The reality is that agencies are facing an uncertain future – money will be in short supply, trust is low, disintermediation is rife, alternatives (like in-housing) are available.

They need a reset; the question is: are they ready?

Agencies and our trade press have been busy opining on what it all means for this or that sector, whilst, one hopes, diligently planning for their own futures. Agencies are due to hit the reset button, but just before they agree to ‘restore factory settings’ it might be an idea to ask whether the old model is any longer fit for purpose.

Most objective observers would agree that it hasn’t been (fit for purpose) for years, but then changing voluntarily whilst flying happily along at 30,000 feet is unlikely to be popular, and thus rarely happens. Upgrading the meal service doesn’t count, by the way.

Changing the engine at 30,000 feet is a lot harder, but if the option is crashing and burning a way will usually be found.

What will the agency of the future look like?

It was fashionable a few years ago to speak of media agencies transitioning to become communication agencies. Media planners became comms planners; the very word ‘media’ was seen as being old fashioned and tied to the old world of print, broadcast television and the rest.

The media agency would become a true comms hub, as comfortable around PR and experiential channels as they once were with network television. A brave new world beckoned, with these agencies at the centre of the wheel, with spokes connecting them as strategic visionaries to the specialist executors who dealt with the necessary detail and delivered to the plan.

It sort-of happened; there are beacons around who do deliver within a comms universe, but if you’re in a holding company media agency, alongside sister companies specialising in other disciplines, like research, PR, events and sponsorships, all trying to move upstream into planning, the difficulties are as much political as practical.

Who leads? Who drives the comms strategy? These are the sort of questions that drive clients crazy, being all to do with inward looking arguments over internal fee divisions and zip to do with getting the job done.

Of course change has been coming for years – look at the automation of buying, the increasing number of partnerships with media vendors, and the disintermediation of the agency business, whether that’s creative through media owners’ in-house creative units, or media via the giant platforms.

What will sharpen the mind over the coming 12 months is shortage of money within the agency sector. That will, sadly mean fewer people.

The hub-and-spoke system will emerge as the standard, with planners at the centre, informed by bought-in research and data services, and sub-contracting execution, including creative out to specialists.

Planners won’t all be cut from the same cloth. Some will come from an ad background, others from related business strands. But all will understand that their key task is as chef-patrons – to decide on the recipe, to source the best quality ingredients, and to keep the customers happy and coming back for more.

Remuneration will be fee based, with fees determined by the scope of work required. This will mean a more disciplined approach, from accurate estimating of time-to-be-spent, through to monitoring and regular assessments of every element of an account’s profitability (or otherwise).

Agencies historically have been terrible at this, partly because the commission system shielded them from the need to justify costs except on an aggregated basis against largely predictable revenue. When ad budgets fell, agencies had a problem given their fixed costs and their lack of internal financial disciplines – but the reality was that ad budgets didn’t fall.

Until now.

All remuneration will be transparent and from the client. Agencies will have no source of revenue beyond clients.

We all know the history – agencies bid low, won business, made money on the side, charged clients unreasonably low commissions balanced by second (third, fourth) sources of revenue, and so the wheel kept turning.

The last four years have created a perfect storm comprising transparency (the ANA and Jon Mandel); an over-inflated and over-complicated online supply chain; increased advertiser scrutiny (most recently the ISBA / PwC case); non-client revenues hitting the buffers; trust collapsing and adspends falling.

Agencies generally, and media agencies in particular need to create a virtuous circle.

The smart ones (will) do this by focussing on what clients need and are prepared to pay for, rigorously demonstrating the value they bring by doing what they’re good at, which in turn is defined by what clients need.

Fewer people, client focussed, outsourced services (including buying and technology), charged for via a fully transparent system based around the work required, within which the agency defines and delivers to the client’s needs, with a demonstrable end value.

Higher margins. Happy days.

In an interview he recently did as part of Kantar Media’s Dimension work, Tom Denford of IDComms made the point that he finds the term ‘in-housing’ unhelpful. Tom’s point, which I agree with is that it implies that something has been taken away from the agency, whereas the best in-house operations (I’m going to use the term for ease of writing) work alongside and with the agency.

Steve Pollack, of Nestle in a soon-to-be-released asi podcast interview makes the same point – in-housing allows clients to use the technology, and their own proprietary data to become involved in and engaged with the media process, to the benefit of the business.

As with most things these days, the current digital generation think they’ve invented a new phenomenon.

Way back when the best advertisers, including several I was lucky to work with had media people on the staff. Procter and Gamble had a team led by Dick Johnson and Bernard Balderston; so did Nestle (Roger Hoskins and Gary Brown), Unilever (Neil Welling, although once upon a time they had a whole agency, Lintas), McDonald’s (the estimable Giovanni Fabris, still going strong), Coca-Cola (Kester Fielding, now at Bacardi) and no doubt many others.

And that’s just in the UK and just the ones I dealt with in the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s; the USA, with larger budgets and greater resources had many more and had had them for a lot longer.

What’s changed is what they do – but then that’s true of all of us. Procter used to negotiate their own deals; Nestle used to monitor and evaluate their agencies’ buying (they too had an agency, Fairfield); McDonald’s made sure that the agency had access to their data for planning purposes, Coke had their media guidelines and principles.

Nowadays the opportunities for an advertiser to become involved in the whole media process are huge – with programmatic technologies, all sorts of ways to access and make practical use of proprietary data, the chance to influence their companies’ broader communication policies and so on.

The agency has a large role to play in that, as a team with the advertiser. Most are delighted to have the opportunity to work with engaged clients.

The ISBA / PwC work has shone a light on the programmatic supply chain. Whatever the headlines, we shouldn’t forget that the underlying message is that advertisers need to engage in the process to ensure the best value from their advertising spend.

Those that do will almost certainly not be using the 40,000 or 50,000 sites that PwC identified as the average. Those that don’t actively involve themselves will be above that (given that’s how averages work) – and of course whilst there may be good reasons for that, it’s hard to imagine what those might be.

Throughout ad history it’s been shown time and time again that advertisers get the advertising they deserve. Those that engage and treat their agencies with respect get the best work. It’s just human nature, we all do better when we’re encouraged to do so; we all do the bare minimum for those who treat us badly.

Look at the most effective creative campaigns over the years, from Procter to Unilever, from Sony to Audi, from John Lewis to Sainsbury’s, and you’ll find an engaged client.

And they’re not just the biggest – to plug BJ&A’s long-time consultancy client Suzuki Autos, winners of an IPA Effectiveness Gold for the work they do with their media agency the7stars in partnership with key media vendors like ITV and Channel 4.

You don’t have to be huge (although Suzuki is a pretty large advertiser these days), you don’t have to be a fast-moving consumer goods brand, but you do have to engage and be involved.

On the other side look at those who chop and change, who delight in driving fees down regardless, who don’t engage, who never have time to meet with partners and discuss new ideas and you’ll find sub-optimal businesses.

Whether we’re talking about media or creative, CRM or brand building, online or offline, advertising or broader comms, the fact is ‘engage and involve’ are character traits that transcend where you sit.

In or out, there’s no simple rule and there’s no one way.

That should be one key lesson from the ISBA / PwC work.

Last week’s Cog Blog outlined the findings from the ISBA / PwC report into the transparency of the programmatic supply chain, indicating that a large chunk of the average advertiser’s online budget doesn’t arrive at the intended destinations.

Many of the online experts’ comments on social media concentrated on theories around the 15% that PwC had been unable to find. Oddly, less time was spent on the total of 49% that goes somewhere other than the intended end publisher. Granted there are legitimate fees in there, but 49% is far higher than it should be.

As indeed is the average number of sites used by those large advertisers participating in the study. Who needs 40,000, 50,000 or more sites to reach their media goals? Especially when the typical agency ‘white list’ of acceptable sites is somewhere around 2,000 – 3,000.

The word that keeps occurring to me is ‘trust’.

Clients trust their agencies to look after and manage their budgets. Agencies trust the various middlemen they consider necessary to shepherd their advertisers’ budgets from source to intended destination (or, if we’re being cynical, to ensure that they can continue to get away with siphoning off bits of budget to bolster their sagging margins without anyone noticing). Publishers trust agencies when they leap onto platforms to say that the context delivered by premium content is a key element in any campaign’s success.

At its heart, the ISBA / PwC work suggests that this trust is undeserved.

Indeed, ‘trust’ seems to be in short supply around our business.

Wherever you look, there’s a study providing further evidence to this trust shortage. The consultancy IDComms in the 2019 edition of their annual study amongst marketing and media professionals asked if agencies ‘Provide neutral and objective planning recommendations’.

Those within the sample with an overall marketing responsibility scored agencies at 2.47. Client media professionals scored them 2.35.

IDComms’s 5-point scale has 1 as ‘unacceptable’ and 3 as ‘below expectations’.

Advertisers think that agencies’ ability to act in a sufficiently neutral or objective fashion is ‘below expectations’. They don’t trust them to behave objectively.

Do consumers trust the industry’s output?

Trust in advertising as a whole has been hitting historic lows in studies by the Advertising Association amongst others. As Keith Weed, ex Unilever CMO put it on an AA stage, reported in the Financial Times (paywall) ‘advertising without trust is just noise.’

Earlier this week Kantar Media published the latest (fourth) version of its annual Dimension study. As in previous years this study combines consumer interviews (8,000 across 8 markets: France, Spain, Germany, Argentina, Brazil, USA, China, UK) with insights from industry leaders.

The consumer study asks: ‘which of the following do you use to get information about brands and services?’ followed by: ‘which of the following do you trust to get information about brands and services?’ Kantar Media calculates a ‘Trust Score’ from these two figures.

‘Advertising’ as a channel for information about brands and services scored lowest with an aggregated Trust Score across the 8 markets of 38.

In the UK the Trust Score for advertising is 29.

To put it another way, 14% of consumers across the eight markets trust advertising as a source of brand information.

In the UK that number reduces to 9%.

As comparisons for the global 38 number, news and information websites score 76; printed articles in newspapers and magazines, 73. This, remember for getting information about brands and services.

The Dimension work also asks consumers to score media channels on the basis of whether they trust them as sources of news and information.

Here Kantar Media has calculated a ‘Trust Gap’ the difference between those saying they trust a medium minus those who say they don’t trust it.

Newspapers come out best at plus 25; social media worst at minus 16.

There were some interesting differences by country, summarised here in The Drum.

For instance, newspapers score lowest comparatively in the UK (as against the other seven markets), where the Trust Gap is plus 9. TV programmes in the UK score highest at plus 26 (maybe the public trusts the BBC).

The Kantar Media data on the lack of trust in newspapers in the UK is not an outlier.

Every year Eurobarometer measures consumer trust in the written press across Europe. The UK has come bottom of this study 9 years out of the last 10. In 2019 we not only came bottom of the 33 countries covered but we also hit new lows with 15% saying they tend to trust the written press, versus 75% saying they tend not to trust it.

Summarised data is here in a tweet from the journalist Brian Cathcart. The UK’s net score of minus 60 is so far behind the next worst, Greece at minus 39 as to be almost out-of-sight.

Wherever you look you find a worrying lack of trust.

The online supply chain snaffles advertisers’ money, and our largest agencies fail to condemn or even comment on an issue that surely goes right to the heart of their most basic service – the management of their clients’ budgets. Credit to both Goodstuff, and The7Stars, independent agencies both for being amongst the very few to tackle the issues raised.

Advertisers don’t rate their agencies when it comes to giving them objective advice.

Consumers don’t trust advertising as a source of information on brands.

The UK public trusts newspapers less than their counterparts in other markets.

Thank goodness for bloggers, eh?!

I say the reaction has been extensive, although one group (media agency leaders) has remained remarkably silent.

Given that it is the agencies’ task to steward their clients’ budgets, to monitor what goes where and to take responsibility for the final outcome (or at least where the money finishes up being spent), this silence is strange.

Or perhaps not so strange. Back in 2017, in Australia MediaCom’s COO, Willie Pang took on Mark Ritson who had dared suggest that there was something a tad fishy going on with online placements. Pang was shredded in the comments to his piece – so maybe the lesson learnt by the big agency CEOs is to follow holding company orders, keep quiet and hope it all blows over.

But back to the present and the ISBA / PwC work. It might help to stick to the basics.

Fact One. 49% of money destined for the publisher never reaches the intended destination.

Fact Two. 15% of all money spent online vanishes – and not just from the sight of an ancient media guy like me, but from the sight of one of the world’s top auditing firms.

Comments from the digiterati have either been of the ‘this is old news, we all knew this’ variety, through to the insight that ‘ it’s all bloody complicated, scary headlines are misleading and it’s only right that everyone in the chain is paid’.

I may be a cynical old git (hence the title of this blog) but a couple of thoughts occur.

Why are there so many players in the chain? One of the ISBA findings was that the 15 advertisers who were a part of the study used 300 distinct supply chains to reach 12 publishers.

Participating advertisers appeared on an average of 40,524 sites, mostly non-premium.

Why?

19% of impressions, less than one-fifth appeared on the 12 super-premium publishers who were party to the research (these include News UK, Dennis, Haymarket, The Telegraph, The Mail and Bauer).

Clearly there are excellent premium publishers who did not participate in the study, so let’s bump that 19% up to 25%. 75% of impressions went elsewhere.

There has been much angst about the value chain, understanding the role of every player, and so on. And of course there are providers of valuable services in there who should be paid, but an end result of an average of 40,524 sites?

If we ignore those elements required by the publisher (and by the way it’s wrong to shrug that piece away given that there’s probably a fair bit of waste within publisher-side services) and focus on the advertiser, it seems clear that they don’t benefit from the current set-up.

Let’s assume that an advertiser is focussed on reaching people within a brand safe context a certain number of times with a certain number of customised messages. Are we to believe that you really need 40,524 sites to reach that goal?

And that by the way ignores the fact that these advertisers are almost certainly also using mass reach media forms like TV, OOH and so on which play a major part in the overall campaign and which need to be factored in to any assessment of a media plan.

Cross-media campaign measurement is of course a whole other topic for ISBA via their Origin initiative.

It seems to me most unlikely that any advertiser focussed on realistic business goals needs so many sites to reach his targets – and that’s not to decry all online media forms, many of which do reach a substantial audience of great relevance and value to many advertisers.

The bottom line is that the advertiser is paying around 50% commission to advertise on a load of sites most of which add next-to-nothing to the campaign’s audience (or come to that, any performance) objectives.

As Dr Augustine Fou, the online ad fraud specialist put it on LinkedIn: “Keep in mind that most of the so-called middlemen are arbitragers – they are adding NO value whatsoever, just extracting dollars for their own pockets.”

If I was an advertiser, I would be asking my agency to help me:

• Identify every player in the supply chain between me as advertiser and the end publisher.
• Understand what each does, in layman’s language.
• Tabulate how much, how, and by whom each gets paid.
• Confirm that you (and your holding company) have no financial interest in any of these players.
• Understand whether you (or your holding company) has any overarching deal with any of these players, and if so, how does it affect my activity?
• Quantify the benefit that each player brings me. Is it (for example) more audience reach, more frequency, the opportunity for customisation of the message, a reassurance as to the quality of sites, a reassurance as to how my message will be received, a history of site responsiveness?
• Decide which are indispensable / nice-to-have / un-necessary to the success of my campaign.

I know some advertisers, with smart, experienced in-house operations (including Nestle) have stated publicly that they’ve gone some way to cleaning up their specific issues, but for others there is a way to go.

What will happen as a result of the ISBA / PwC work? Give it time, watch this space.

One Cog Blog reader, a Mr N Manning from London (the majority of you will know Nick, founder of Manning Gottlieb OMD, and now a much lauded consultant) wrote in to make the point that agency leaders now keep such a low profile as to be almost invisible.

There was a time when agency media leaders could be relied upon to comment on anything and everything related to advertising and media matters. After all, we were supposed to have an opinion on the matters shaping our own business.

Nick himself was everywhere, as indeed were many others. Even I used to make regular appearances in national newspapers and on television (and this was in the days before niche TV channels).

But now? With one or two notable exceptions, like GroupM’s Karen Blackett and the7stars’ Jenny Biggam, we’ve become invisible beyond talking to ourselves at industry events and in the trade press.

We seem strangely reticent on industry matters too. For example, this week the ISBA and PwC released a thorough, and at first sight thoroughly excellent report into the online advertising supply chain. Two remarkable facts struck me.

First, 51% of advertiser spend ends up with the intended publisher. Half. We’re in Lord Leverhulme / John Wanamaker territory here (all depends where you were taught..) with the famous ‘half my adspend is wasted I just don’t know which half’ quote.

Well, if 49% never arrives in front of the intended audience then it’s pretty fair to say that half is indeed wasted.

At a time when publishers are struggling this is an outrageously high number.

And then, PwC concluded that “taking other visible costs such as DSP/SSP fees and other technology costs, 15% of advertiser spend – an “unknown delta”, representing around one-third of supply chain costs – could not be attributed.”

So, 15% vanished. And after 18 months work even PwC, even 15 of the world’s biggest advertisers, 8 of the (presumably) largest agencies, 12 of the largest publishers, 5 DSP’s and 6 SSP’s couldn’t cast any light on where it might have gone.

My LinkedIn and Twitter feeds lit up. From a digital journalist claiming PwC are somehow conflicted (presumably because they sell stuff), through to numerous members of the digiterati shrugging this off as ‘old news we all already know’ (not sure that that makes it alright) through to people lecturing us on how players in the banana supply chain need to be paid (no, really).

In amongst the nonsense was a strong piece from someone who genuinely knows what he’s talking about, Wayne Blodwell from The Programmatic Advisory.

Wayne made the following extraordinary point (extraordinary in that it had to be made at all): “Good contractual frameworks mean that brands can get insight into how their agency makes money from their media spend.”

Now, it may be that I follow all the wrong people, but as of now I haven’t noticed a single agency CEO commenting for good or ill on ISBA’s work.

If you’ve noticed otherwise, and I’m wrong then do please let me know and I’ll issue a correction.

If agencies want to be seen as strong strategic partners, if they want to be mentioned in the same breath as the management consultancies then thought leadership is important.

To restate – here’s the UK’s advertiser trade body, a well-funded and respected organisation, along with their appointed consultancy, PwC finding that the current online advertising eco-system manages to cream off 49% of a client’s adspend before it reaches its intended destination, and literally lose 15% of it.

And no agency has an opinion on this?

This silence is nothing new (think back to the ANA’s work on transparency and the lack of comment from agencies besides complaining that research into their behaviours was being done in the first place), or the WFA’s work on online transparency, or egta’s initiative on audience measurement, or indeed ISBA’s Project Origin.

Zippo.

Is it perhaps that the holding companies are frightened of upsetting the mighty platforms (remember this, when IPG publicly rebuked Initiative’s CEO for daring to criticise Facebook)?

Or is it that the current breed of media agency leaders are comfortable debating high concepts amongst themselves and less prepared to discuss the channels themselves?

To paraphrase the late great Kenneth Williams, we’ve all become specialists in less and less. Eventually we’ll be experts in nothing.

There is a flaw in this argument – if everyone follows the advice then SoV remains as is, whilst the industry enjoys a boom period which we all know isn’t going to happen.

The advice therefore only works on the assumption that most won’t follow it.

One thing that’s missing is any discussion around lessons the organisations dispensing the advice can themselves draw from previous experiences.

I have been around long enough to have worked through recessions going back to the 1970’s. I haven’t seen one anything like the one that’s coming at us. This one is unique for reasons I’ve tried to explain here.

One common factor though is that the agency sector seems to learn little; maybe this time will be different, it’s just that I doubt it.

We are very quick to offer advice to others but, like the cobbler whose children went without shoes we are less good when it comes to our own industry.

For instance, it is often argued that brands need to communicate their relevance even in these difficult times. There are plenty of examples of this around at the moment – some good, some cringe-worthy.

Are agencies communicating the relevance of their services? Are they stepping up to offer businesses general advice and guidance along the lines of, say, an Ebiquity or the management consultancies?

Charles Talbot, a digital sales head by background has started a useful service called Viral Knowledge (not sure about the name, mind you) which aims to pull together lists of relevant webinars. Earlier this week he had listed 60 such events from March 18^th to May 19^th, under the broad topic of digital marketing.

Three of the 60 were from agencies – two from Ogilvy and one from Dentsu Aegis.

I’m sure Charles wouldn’t claim that his list is definitive, nor are webinars the only means to communicate of course, (and it’s quite probable that agencies are busy running sessions for their clients), but it is a little odd that individual agencies are not more vocal (kudos, by the way to the IPA for all that they’re doing to promote advertising as an industry during this crisis).

This would be a good time to remind the business community of why your particular agency is well-placed to help them. Raise your own share-of-voice in other words whilst your competitors are silent.

In past recessions agency staff numbers dropped considerably, hardly surprising given that reducing headcount is one of the few levers agencies have to reduce costs.

Once the situation improves, the numbers inevitably creep back up again, often as a result of agencies adding new services. This may not be the best approach.

In bad times (and good..) the focus has to be on excellent delivery of those services of greatest client value. This may mean dumping in-house offerings that are done better elsewhere by specialists. It may also mean taking a long hard look at senior people not directly attached to the meeting of client needs.

This can and will be painful but it would make a lot more sense than the knee-jerk reaction which is to lose junior, often very talented people on some misplaced ‘last in, first out’ principle.

There will rarely be a better time to discuss with clients what they might expect from their agencies, both now (given the circumstances) and into the future, and to use this framework to open-up a conversation on business terms.

Agencies can have these current and future expectations conversations themselves although it is often more revealing to use an external, objective organisation. There are plenty who offer this service (including, to be transparent, BJ&A).

Agencies of all shapes and sizes are quick to advise their clients on how best to navigate their way through the present and future crisis.

Hopefully this generation will prove more adept than their predecessors at plotting their own way through.

One (a genuinely useful one) comes from the American politician Rahm Emanuel, during the 2008 financial crisis: “You never let a serious crisis go to waste. And what I mean by that it’s an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before”.

Eventually agencies will emerge from the current dreadful situation. As I said last week, they’ll be leaner, fitter and raring to go.

What will they look like?

The Cog Blog has been churning out weekly posts for almost 7 years. I say ‘weekly’ – even allowing for holidays (and laziness) I still average about 46 a year. Out of interest (almost certainly to no-one except me) this is post number 318.

For a large number of those I’ve been boring on about the need for media agencies to refocus their resources and efforts away from buying cheap stuff to solving clients’ business problems through a creative approach to communications planning.

Buying cheap stuff was at the start attractive as an offering. First, it’s easy to explain. Secondly it’s a compelling proposition. Thirdly, it’s measurable via audits. Fourthly it affords the agencies the opportunity to make money for themselves via rebates, kickbacks and the rest.

But there was always a huge downside – and that was that one day, for whatever reason that particular train would hit the buffers. The reason could have been through the advent of technology, the growth in online media forms, the obsession with immediate measurement and, eventually automated buying. Or it could have been that someone eventually would whistle-blow – and of course we all know that such a person emerged in Jon Mandel.

So the agencies have had to regroup. Revenue and margins were bound to fall. The difficulty in charging for services, like planning and consultancy that had been given away in the era of plenty was always going to be an issue.

And then along came this crisis.

The agencies now have a chance to reinvent themselves, to ‘do things you think you could not do before.’

It is actually an even better opportunity than that. There is now a major client demand for assistance – assistance in helping them climb out of the hole so many of them find themselves in. How, or indeed should they communicate? Where? When? Using advertising, PR, sponsorships? What should they say? And so on.

A good piece in ‘Campaign’ asked five leaders what skills they felt agencies needed to offer their clients the most, given that they will almost inevitably have to downsize.

Here are some of the words these five used (for who said what I urge you to spend two minutes reading the article): ‘Creative problem solvers’; ‘strategic and pragmatic’; ‘the ability to adapt’; ‘exceptional creative and strategic problem-solvers’; ‘bigger strategic thinking’.

Not, you will notice, ‘the supply of cheap media’.

Media agencies are full of smart problem solvers. There are also unfortunately still a fair few bullshit-artists who spend their days obfuscating and confusing everyone around them (including their clients).

Tough times are ahead, and not all agencies will survive in their current form. There will no doubt be some centralising of non-client-facing functions amongst the big holding companies.

Clients need certain agency skills more than ever before.

Now would be a very good time to work through what those needs are, how your agency can deliver to them, and what your priorities might be in transforming the business to make sure it’s fit for future purpose.

It’s also time for those Heads of Transformation to step up. I’ve often idly wondered what they do – well, I’m about to find out.

There are two schools of thought on the effect that this crisis will have on us all, depending on the broadness of the question. When it comes to society as a whole (‘will we all hang on to this new-found kindness and respect for others?’) Bob Hoffman (in an asicast interview with me) thinks we won’t.

In a similar vein (‘will marketers learn the lessons of the pandemic?’) Mark Ritson (in his Marketing Week webinar) thinks not, and that most will revert to making the same old mistakes.

More parochially, and relevantly for most of us, agency leaders, including MediaHub’s Danny Donovan and WPP’s Lindsay Pattison (brought together by Mediatel) are rather more positive, believing that we will learn to be less selfish, that social media platforms will become kinder places, and that we will all by necessity come to appreciate how technology can help us through what will no doubt be a period of great economic difficulty.

The great thing is that in even a few weeks no-one will remember a word any of these guys said – and anyway the whole situation is so fluid and so nuanced that even if someone did think to ask any of them everyone involved will be able to point to something that proves that they did indeed read it correctly.

Will agencies and life in agencies change? On the basis that I may as well join in, given our collective short memories, my answers are ‘yes’ and ‘yes’. And, I’m afraid it won’t be pretty.

There are some uncomfortable (and uncontested) truths. Money will be in short supply, with adspend diving, and even if/when it recovers and even if there are more smart marketers around to listen to Mark Ritson, agency revenues will fall.

Clients, like the rest of us will be looking to save on fees as well as on what too many of them still see as frivolous activities like advertising.

There are still too many agencies, it’s still a buyer’s market, and so those looking for a bargain will find plenty of agencies stupid enough to give it to them for the sake of a ‘Campaign’ headline and a position near the top of the new business league table.

The cycle of: ‘pitch low, win, over-service, lose money, under-service, pitch again, lose’ will certainly not disappear.

With less money, and by far the majority of their costs in staff agencies will have to cut back. There are already signs of this with the holding companies preparing themselves, the markets, and their staff for redundancies.

Tough questions will no doubt be asked within the large holding groups. For example – is there really any need for so many individual operating units? The original argument for multiple agencies under a holding company, as per the inventor of these things Phil Geier of Interpublic was to provide alternatives for clients.

So if you didn’t like Agency A Phil could always offer Agency B.

Then there was the matter of competitive clashes. Agency A and Agency B could handle competing brands, in theory at least.

But this competitive clash matter has subsided and with some technological ingenuity on behalf of the agencies could be quietly kicked even further into the long grass.

These days the holding companies are of course more than a collection of ad agencies. But even the best of them duplicate services and are generally wasteful.

Why on earth do the large holding companies need quite so many media agency operating units? Is MediaCom really that different from Wavemaker from Mindshare? Can clients tell the difference?

You don’t have to go through all the grief of closing one or more agency; there is a halfway house.

As a start, it’s not a bad principle to think about things from the client’s point-of-view. Clients care about relationships, and planning and consultancy skills. Yes, they want lower fees too – but if you excel at the first bit you can more easily justify higher fees.

And of course they want cheap media prices. The old ‘deal mentality’ lives on in most client’s description of their media agency partner as ‘my media buyer..’

If media agencies in the future are to be more about planning excellence supported by hugely efficient buying capabilities, and if buying is all about to become automated anyway, why does a group’s agencies all need buying departments?

Or, come to that modellers and researchers?

Why not one massive buying operation, accessed by the planners who use it to deliver their plans (as opposed to having it dictate what their plans should look like)?

Why not a properly funded and well-staffed research unit, encompassing media researchers, market mix modellers, analysts and data scientists and available to all of a group’s planners?

Why not follow the lead of outfits like VCCP, and Mullen Lowe / MediaHub and create strong synergies between creative and media specialists, with some media buying done elsewhere?

Central group services would provide a superior resource to the client-facing planners, who become true communication consultants operating across all channels (not just advertising). Such a move could save money, lead to a greater value add, and ultimately to higher fees.

Eventually there will be fewer pitches, as clients become more wedded to an agency’s services and less bothered about one agency’s claims to be able to buy TV cheaper than the next guy.

Driven by harder times, agencies will become more like true consultancies. Now there’s an unoriginal thought.

The evidence, even back 100-odd years ago is clear. Those brands that continue to advertise throughout a recession, at a time when the less-well-informed competition is pulling back emerge stronger as a result.

This is hardly surprising – there’s less clutter, the brands that advertise increase their share-of-voice and build on what Professor Ritson calls their ESOV (excessive share-of-voice) and are thus in a great position to hit the ground running when the economic climate improves.

But evidence from past recessions is not the whole answer, although certain principles still hold.

First, what we are in now isn’t anything like any other recession. I have some qualifications in saying this, given I’ve been through a few, going back to the three-day week of the 1970’s.

I also worked with and learnt from Dr Simon Broadbent who did splendid work advancing the ‘why brands should continue to advertise’ case in the 1980’s.

Plus I lived and worked through the 1990’s, and the 2008 versions.

I’m not saying I have the data or the perspicacity of Mark Ritson, but I have experienced recessions from inside the ad industry.

And – I can tell you this is nothing like anything I’ve ever seen before.

An economic recession is of course a dreadful thing. People have less money to spend, services are cut, people lose their jobs. It impacts many – but in a way that they themselves cannot impact. It is something that happens to you, over which you have zero control.

Life continues. Advertising, as part of life continues. Yes, you may see fewer ads, yes the content of the ads may be tweaked, but I have never seen data suggesting that the average consumer thinks: why is Brand A advertising during a recession?

Look around you now. People you know, and I know are getting sick. Some, tragically are dying, alone and frightened. Very many of us are in some form of lock-down, being told when we can go out, where, what for and for how long.

Of course we cannot see or control the virus but we can act to do something to limit its spread. We are all invested in the process.

Life is most definitely not continuing largely as before.

This is a global health crisis which no doubt will metamorphose into an economic recession, but right now and I suggest for the foreseeable future it’s about health. It’s about doing what we can to stay alive, and to help others stay alive.

In these circumstances is it right for brands to advertise at all? I would say it is, as long as the tone and the approach are very carefully thought through. I suspect that unlike in the past consumers will certainly question the wisdom of brands advertising whilst their owners are laying off staff, and whilst the future is so uncertain.

We all preach the importance of empathy, of appealing to those we wish to reach and influence in a tone of voice that reflects the audience’s priorities and values, but those priorities are very different from what they were just a few short months ago.

Now is the time for advertisers to offer help, to do good. Advertising alone cannot do that – so a bank saying in an ad that they’re there for me is one thing, but if I cannot get through to them, or if I do get through and the call centre is obtuse and confusing in the messages it sends out then the ads backfire, spectacularly.

A supermarket can send out all the ‘we’re here for you’ emails it wants but if you cannot get a delivery slot for love nor money the mails will count for nothing.

What will be remembered is that the bank couldn’t help, or the supermarket couldn’t deliver, not the warm, fluffy ads saying they were there by your side when you needed them.

Remember we are living through a time when advertising per se is not trusted. How consumers perceive ads, what they think of them, the extent that they empathise with them, the degree that they believe them, the fact that they increasingly don’t trust many of the media forms in which they appear, all of these are comparatively recent phenomena.

Consumer attitudes towards the media, and the advertising within those media have to be factored in to the ‘lessons learned from past recessions’ articles and webinars. The SoV / SoM numbers alone are nothing like enough.

We also need to consider more marketing levers than advertising. Most commentators focus on ad spend and related data points as that’s the data they have.

But – today we have many more outlets, more techniques, and a far greater range of communication options than in past recessions (even 2008).

All of which means we need to take the ‘lessons from past recessions’ pieces with a pinch of salt. This is a whole new ball of wax, for all of us. How consumers see advertising and ads (indeed, how they consume commercial messages beyond ads) aren’t the same as even 12 years ago. And that matters.

Last week I interviewed Bob Hoffman, the AdContrarian on behalf of asi and asked him for his thoughts on advertising in a time of crisis. You can listen to the interview here.

Bob’s always great value so give yourselves a break from your busy day of staying at home and enjoy.

Stay safe, people and stay well.

If this weren’t so serious it would be a fascinating social experiment – but the fact is, it is awful and no amount of social media posts of families playing, or singing, or making amusing models out of their pets can mask the fact that people are becoming very ill, and are dying.

In the middle of all this, how should advertisers behave? How are we all behaving?

The first thing we are all doing is becoming obsessed with the news. Overall TV viewing figures in the UK are up by around 32% year-on-year. That’s not Netflix. Not YouTube. Not Facebook video. TV.

Whilst we’re on TV, we seem to have stopped the war on the BBC. Possibly because when the nation comes together it comes together in front of the BBC. Hopefully we won’t immediately forget the good work the BBC is doing keeping the nation informed, on local services, local radio and so on as well as on the national feeds.

Newspapers off and online seem to be doing well but not as well as might be expected.

This would seem to be as a result of something rather interesting – advertisers not wanting their ads appearing within any story containing the word ‘Coronavirus’. The argument being that it can’t be a good thing to be associated with bad news. In online media this means that the programmatic algorithms are set to blacklist any sites or elements of sites where the banned word appears.

This is so absurd as to be almost comical.

First, surely even online evangelists would concede that leaving everything up to an algorithm with no human intervention, as certainly seems to be the case here is crazy.

Yes, it makes sense to blacklist a site spreading false facts and rumours, but presumably kosher news sites are blacklisted too?

Certainly that’s what Newsworks, the UK trade body responsible for marketing the newspapers and their associated websites is getting at in their campaign to back not block news, and to support journalism.

As Tracey de Groose, Executive Chair at Newsworks says:

“Against a backdrop of Brexit, climate change and the current coronavirus pandemic, we are living in unprecedented and anxious times and the news industry is playing a vital role in people’s lives by providing information and advice they can rely on. Amid a growing awareness of the pervasiveness of fake news and misinformation the nation’s appetite for trusted news is at an all-time high.”

Newsworks are calling on advertisers to back journalism, an admirable sentiment, although quite why advertisers should back any newspaper (like the Daily and Sunday Telegraph) refusing to publish their sales data through the official channels is not clear.

I don’t remember Newsworks being quite so vehement in advising advertisers how to behave on that occasion, although I think they’ve had a word or two to say about the efficacy of Facebook’s data .

To repeat Tracey: “Amid a growing awareness of the pervasiveness of fake news and misinformation…”

Aren’t Newswork members (well, some of them at least) just as guilty? Here’s the centre spread from last weekend’s ‘Mail on Sunday’ (and be assured I could have chosen any number of images here).

The point is surely that the context within which ads are seen does matter.

Advertisers can make up their own minds whether they wish to advertise within content that seeks to monster someone or some organisation without due cause (for the benefit of the many Cog Blog readers not in Europe, Michel Barnier is the European Union’s chief Brexit negotiator, and as such not our tabloid newspapers’ favourite person).

Fake news and misinformation, along with content created to scaremonger is not unknown territory for the gentlemen of the UK press (nor indeed for several other mainstream media channels I could mention).

Context matters – but context matters always, not just when our national newspapers and their trade body decide that it does.

It always used to be said that everyone is an expert in two things: his or her own job, and advertising.

We’ve all had experience of this, ranging from the aspiring copywriter who just had to share a line that his mates thought was fantastic, through to the guy who’s convinced advertising doesn’t work on him.

We all know this guy. He usually prefaces his remarks with ‘advertising has no effect on me’ before telling us all that of course Guinness is good for you as he sinks his third pint.

A more recent manifestation of this came during the Brexit debate when thousands insisted that they were swayed by the factual arguments behind the leave or remain case, and certainly not by any ad. Although of course he or she was looking forward to having a vast amount to redirect to the NHS, and we should all be on the lookout for the 70 million Turks who were about to land on our shores.

But back to the current crisis. It’s scary, and it’s reassuring to have expert advice, from experts. It would be even more useful to have the space to listen to what the real experts have to say without the clamour and background noise from the rest.

What is not helpful at all are the armchair health professionals telling us that someone they know knows someone who once met a nurse on a bus who told him that we should all wear hats to stop the virus entering our system through our hair follicles. (Fake News Alert).

It’s only a short step to the charmer who sent me an email threatening me with the coronavirus, which he would transmit to me via my laptop unless I immediately transferred some large number of bitcoins to him.

The point is that someone will believe this and will bankrupt themselves paying the guy out of sheer terror.

Or at the very least will buy a hat.

Social media is wonderful in a crisis; nobody needs me to extol its benefits. But it’s also full of people who think they’re being clever, or (worse) helping by spreading false rumours.

This is an inflection point. Life will change, for some more than others it’s true.

Take our little bubble and remote working. Yes, it is great – for some people in some organisations. So is hot-desking. And open plan offices. And shared spaces. And flexible working hours. And video conferencing. All are great. But there are some organisations where working together in the same space works well, and maybe even better.

It’s nothing to do with being old-fashioned or a luddite. It’s just that we’re social creatures and a single solution is very rarely the answer. Even if it involves the internet.

We change, we absorb, we adapt. This happens with media forms. Live streaming from theatres to cinemas hasn’t wiped out the theatre; DVDs didn’t wipe out the cinema; TV didn’t wipe out radio.

The situation we are all in will test our ability to adapt and absorb. Remote working, working from home, more flexible working arrangements all are being tried and many will be appealing and efficient.

It will be fascinating to see how the HR business absorbs these changes once we are through the other side of this emergency. They’re the guys we need to blend the ingredients together to create a modern, fair, flexible workplace whilst maintaining company culture and ultimately business performance. They should be listened to, and their advice heeded.

Meantime, for now we should beware those sounding off about things they know little about to an audience far too ready to believe what they read and far too keen on easy solutions.