These are not happy times for agencies, or indeed for the ad industry as a whole. Wherever you look you fall over issues: agencies not trusted, META et al offering to handle all activities, in-housing on the rise, creative slop, fraud (both consumer and advertiser), local CEOs being thrown in prison. It’s hardly a laugh a minute in adland at the moment.

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.

During her presentation to the Advertising: Who Cares? event last month, IPSOS’ Samira Brophy quoted Charles Vallance, Founder of VCCP in a piece he called The Tyranny of Targeting:

“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.”

Last Thursday, Advertising: Who Cares? organised a 3-hour event called Who Cares Wins. The centrepiece was two long-form discussions, one on ‘content’, the other on ‘safety’, preceded by a review of research that concludes, over and over again that the context within which an ad appears impacts its performance.

The first Cog Blog post appeared on 2^nd July 2013. There have been over 450 posts since. I don’t think any have been on as important a topic as this one.

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?

The fifth chart in Caroline Johnson’s and Nick Manning’s opening presentation at last October’s Advertising: Who Cares? Summit contained four words.

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

‘May you live in interesting times’ is often quoted as an ancient Chinese curse. Google’s AI facility questions that, claiming it is more likely British, and not a curse. Whatever, the word ‘interesting’ is in some interpretations seen as suggesting a time not only of instability but of creativity and growth.

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

Last week two court cases in the US went against the social media platforms. The first, in New Mexico found META guilty of misleading users over the safety of its platforms for children. The second, in Los Angeles found META and YouTube guilty of building addictive social media platforms that harm children’s mental health.

It’s the oldest trick in the book. Threaten everyone with extinction; convince them that only you have the answer / ultimate weapon; deploy your weapon; save the world; lead your ecstatic followers into the land of plenty. Everyone lives happily ever after.

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

There’s a group of individuals that’s grown both in numbers and influence across the industry over the last ten years or so. They have no trade body, no corporate structure, no common goal. They deal in ideas and opinions. We need them and their ideas more than ever, and yet they’re subject to rudeness, criticism, sneery little digs from those they dare to criticise.

“The circumstances of Molly’s death are far from unique. Technology plays a role in almost one-quarter (24%) of deaths by suicide among young people aged 10 to 19, equivalent to a lost young life every week.” ‘Pervasive by Design’: The Molly Rose Foundation.

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.

I suppose this moment had to come eventually. This blog has steered away from the ‘Is YouTube TV or not’ debate on the basis that to me it makes as much sense as arguing whether or not a direct mail piece for my local pizza place is a newspaper, given that both are printed on paper.

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.

The great Bob Hoffman referred in his AdContrarian blog to ‘informed guessing’. His point being that despite wrapping ourselves in scientific-sounding words and phrases there is precious little in the advertising world that a qualified scientist would recognise as ‘science’.

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

An old golf joke. A wealthy tourist is playing one of the iconic Scottish courses, accompanied by an ancient caddy. The golfer hits a truly awful shot. Silence from the caddy. ‘Funny old game, golf’ says the player. ‘Aye, but it’s not meant to be’ comes the caddy’s reply.

A couple of weeks ago the Cog Blog published ‘Thought Leaders; Thought Followers’ highlighting how rarely our largest media agency leaders participate in open discussion. Several commentators duly discovered the American author (and failed politician) Upton Sinclair: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it”.

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?

A substantial disconnect (one of many to be fair) between advertising people and financial commentators and investors is the degree of (dis)comfort with the old notion that 70% of an agency’s assets go up and down in the lift every day.

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.

I don’t much like this time of year. In London it’s wet, dreary, cold, dark, that’s true, but far worse this seems to be the time of year for memorials and saying goodbye.

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.

The fact that the ad industry is in a mess isn’t in doubt. We operate a business model no longer fit for purpose. We face substantial job losses. Creativity in advertising is in retreat. Original content creation is under threat. Direct political interference in how budgets are spent is real. Audience definitions and numbers are no longer verified.

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