The ad news this weekend was full of the planned Publicis/Omnicom merger. WPP’s Martin Sorrell went on the BBC this morning sounding strangely flustered, having lost his crown as the leader of the world’s largest marketing services group. Commentators didn’t really know what to make of the news besides talking about scale; admittedly they were hardly helped by the fact that neither Omnicom nor Publicis has to date said anything of substance about the benefits of a merger to clients.

So what to make of it all?

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Media agencies seem to be suffering from something of an identity crisis these days. What are they really for? On the one hand they promote themselves as guardians of the brand, of innovators in research and data analytics, as creators of stand-out communication plans.

And on the other they compromise the thinking bit by throwing their media muscle around with gay abandon. They terrorise media owners by threatening to pull their budgets (I always thought they were clients’ budgets, but no matter), they compromise their objectivity by sitting on suppliers’  Boards, they broker digital ad space to the obvious dismay of their larger, more sophisticated clients.

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As an addendum to yesterday’s Cog Blog post, here’s a link to some of the topical ads appearing in today’s UK newspapers.
http://www.brandrepublic.com/bulletin/brandrepublicnewsbulletin/article/1192301/warburtons-coca-cola-ryanair-among-brands-making-royal-arrival/?DCMP=EMC-CONBrandRepublicdailynewsbulletin

As the world waits for the arrival of a royal baby, it must be a pound to a penny that advertisers are finalising their highly topical ad plans. Does context matter? I believe it does, as two examples from commercial TV’s coverage of cricket and golf illustrate. Read more

If there’s one topic guaranteed to raise the average media agency manager’s hackles that topic is media auditors.

‘Old fashioned’, ‘reliant on out-of-date media metrics’, ‘ill-informed’, ‘measuring the wrong thing’ are some of the phrases chucked around by agency CEO’s who are themselves about as close to the planning, buying and reporting of campaigns as the average bank CEO is to his customer service centre.

‘Not as smart as us’ seems to me to sum up the average agency’s attitude towards the average auditor.

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Nick Emery of Mindshare was commenting recently in the press about how unfair life is given that he has to deal with advertisers’ procurement officers. His point was that his agency spends months with his marketing clients discussing strategy, and using research to come up with great communications solutions, and then it all comes down to a procurement led pitch.

Whilst Nick isn’t by any means in a minority in his concerns about procurement’s influence in the media business, I would question why this is still an issue. How come, 35+ years on from the first media agencies we have all failed to convince advertisers to move this debate along?

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Sky, via their spokesman Jonathan Ross was for a while all over our screens, and all manner of outdoor sites promoting the wonders of the Sky catch-up service. Actually I haven’t seen him for months but as this is a new blog I’m playing catch-up too.

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‘Gottlieb slams arcane media metrics’ shouted the headline in ‘Campaign’ the other week (yes, this is a new blog and we’re playing catch up). For those of you who missed it, Colin Gottlieb of Omnicom Media Group was speaking at some media conference or other. True to form he was soon joined on this particular bandwagon by sundry other agency principals.

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Hello and welcome to this first edition of the BJ&A blog written by me, Brian Jacobs. As this is the first ever a few words of introduction seem appropriate. My aim is to produce one edition a week – an aim that might appear modest to you but I can assure you seems from here to be suitably challenging.

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