Given recent events in the US, a debate on ‘what is the ad business for’ is overdue. Is it about creating messages and experiences (including ads), designed specifically to help drive clients’ businesses and placed in environments that will help achieve that aim? Or is it about producing ads quickly, and cheaply, to be placed automatically, using spurious metrics, regardless of client needs?

The ad industry has always been framed by different factions shouting ever louder – from the pages of the trades and conference platforms. No change there then – from the days of arguments around commission versus fees, to the ‘no longer a need for account people’ and the merits and demerits of social media this has always been a business fuelled by strong, imaginative opinions.

Taken from ‘The Attention Economy: A Category Blueprint’ by Dr Karen Nelson-Field. What follows is based on my 1½ page contribution to an excellent 371 page book

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.” 

Leo Burnett is no more, the agency now part of Publicis Groupe is being merged with Publicis Worldwide to form Leo.

So what?

In my office hangs a six-word, framed message. It was given to me in 1990 at a Leo Burnett company strategy meeting at which I had spoken about the threat to the traditional advertising ecosystem posed by what were then known as media independents. The message was written by the agency’s creative leadership, after Ogden Nash. In its entirety it reads:

“Don’t worry media. We need ya.”

Back in the day when newspapers were newspapers a good media quiz question was: Who has the most upscale male readers? ‘The Financial Times’ or ‘The Sun’?

In April, Nick Manning and I started a grassroots movement called ‘Advertising: Who Cares?’ (AWC) because of a number of serious, even existential, threats to not only the craft but ultimately the business of advertising.

About a month ago (September 12^th) we launched the Advertising: Who Cares? movement with a 4-hour long event at London’s Royal Society of Arts. We had an exceptional speaker line up; we sold every seat; we paid no-one and spent nothing. We took no sponsorship money. We raised money for NABS, the advertising industry charity.

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.

Advertising reflects society, it doesn’t drive it, which would go some way to explaining why the industry today is so divisive. Everything is black or white, you’re for me or against me. You love or you hate. Compromise is for wimps. Discussion wastes time, debate is the enemy of progress.

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.

Elon Musk’s decision to start legal action against the World Federation of Advertisers (the WFA) and their working group the now-sadly-departed Global Alliance for Responsible Media (X was a proud GARM member) on the basis that advertisers are not advertising on X is, to use a word of the moment, ‘weird’.

Last week the ad business came together to celebrate creative excellence at the annual Cannes Festival.

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.

Since Nick Manning and I started what has become the Who Cares? movement we have been asked by various people what our motivation is, and why such a thing is necessary.

Prose.

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.

… at the very beginning. A very good place to start”. [Oscar Hammerstein and Richard Rodgers]

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.

The craft of advertising faces a crisis. And without the craft the business per se is in trouble, adrift in a sea of creative and media sameness without verifiable, solid data to cling on to.

During a video interview with Havas Global’s Managing Director Jon Waite (soon to be released as an asiCast, watch this space) Jon referenced an event he had been at during which a poll of the audience revealed that 79% were familiar with attention metrics. When members of the audience were asked how many adopted an ‘always on’ approach when it came to using these data the number dropped to 1. Not even 1%, just 1.

Harold Macmillan, UK Prime Minister in the 1960s was once asked by a journalist what was the most difficult thing about being Prime Minister. His reply: “Events dear boy, events.” It may be unfashionable to say so but the most difficult thing about being a media agency in the 2020s is not systems, algorithms or even blog posts from smarty-arsed consultants but relationships with clients.

This post is made up of elements that have appeared previously on ‘The Media Leader’ in two separate pieces in February 2024

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.

Opening one of the sessions at last November’s asi Conference in Nice, Richard Marks (who, with Mike Sainsbury does a sterling job putting the event together each year) made the point that he has never known a time when the politics of measurement is so all-pervasive.

He’s right – and it is disturbing.

One of the unintentionally hilarious things about LinkedIn is the number of earnest posts telling us all what we can learn from this event or that occurrence. ‘5 Things Every Marketer Should Take From King Charles’ Coronation’. The fact that I feel the need to explain I made this up says it all.