The Value of the Plan

One of those statements that agencies make so often they’ve come to believe it themselves is that clients won’t pay for media planning. This may be so, although it’s not my experience – after all can you blame clients for not wanting to pay for a skill the agencies themselves treat with such disdain.

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Nostalgia in the World of Media Agencies (With Explanatory Notes)

It’s been a good week for fans of nostalgia (note to the digerati: that’s stuff that happened more than a week ago). First we had five old blokes on a stage at London’s O2 Arena talking about dead parrots and lumberjacks (note to the youth: that would be the Monty Python team’s last ever live show). Then we had Phil Georgiadis, Chairman of Walker Media, and Claire Beale, the fragrant and recently reinstated Editor of ‘Campaign’ coming over all misty eyed about media in the old full-service era.

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Time to Split Planning from Buying

In the beginning there were media buying agencies. In fact, somewhat disappointingly here we are 40 odd years later and this is still the descriptor used by most clients to describe the organisations responsible for handling their media budgets. All that investment in people, research, tools and techniques and they’re still ‘my media buyers’.

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Happy Birthday Cog Blog

Writing a blog is a self-indulgent activity. After all, what is the author doing except sharing his opinions on the assumption that anyone will be in the least bit interested in hearing them? Well, this post takes self-indulgence to a whole new level by being arrogant enough to reference the best bits of the Cog Blog. ‘Best’ in whose opinion? Mine of course. Why? Because last week the Cog Blog celebrated its first birthday.

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