A few days ago the US advertiser trade body the ANA (Association of National Advertisers) published Part Two of its magnum opus into media transparency and related matters. You can read the summary findings (and download the entire thing) here.

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In case we forget, advertising agencies used to be driven very largely by media availabilities. Buyers would visit well-known Fleet Street pubs, and negotiate space with the leading newspapers of the day. The question was less about what they paid and more about whether they got any of the restricted and rationed space at all.

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Imagine you’re running a media agency. You’re great at your job (the trade press and your peers within the industry tell you so); you’ve been doing it for a number of years and have delivered substantial success to your owners.

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Newspapers in the UK have had a good war; sales were reportedly up by about 20% at the height of the Brexit debate which rather gives the lie to those believing there is no role for the printed medium in this digital age. Unfortunately for newspapers, but very fortunately for the rest of us Brexit debates don’t come along all that often. Read more

This week I was looking forward to posting something uplifting and positive following the depressing litany of the agencies’ alleged misdemeanours as outlined in the ANA transparency report, and then along comes a far more serious threat to the industry’s well-being, as the UK votes to leave the European Union. Read more

Politicians of every persuasion have been popping up all over UK screens for weeks. These appearances have highlighted one reason why they are universally unpopular: they never seem to answer the question they’ve been asked, preferring to answer the question they want to answer. Read more

It’s been about a week since the ANA’s report into transparency hit the best seller lists. Lest we forget (and judging from some of the less temperate comments flying around some seem to have forgotten) the report was titled: ‘An Independent Study of Media Transparency in the U.S. Advertising Industry’. It was not titled ‘Why Advertisers Hate the Holding Companies’, nor ‘We Name the Guilty Parties’.

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A shorter version of this post appeared on Mediatel’s Newsline on 7^th June

The first of two ANA reports has landed, containing the results of 150 interviews conducted by the investigators K2 with ‘marketers, media suppliers, ad tech vendors, current and former advertising and media agency professionals, trade association executives, industry consultants, attorneys, barter company employees, and post-production professionals’. Read more

The ad business it is generally accepted is in a hole. A large part of the industry is not trusted by those who pay for it and whose interests it exists to serve. Digital advertising is generally so poor that consumers go out of their way to avoid it. So-called precision targeting starts to get close to an invasion of privacy. Fingers are being pointed, mud is being slung. How on earth did we get into this mess? Read more

One of the most common errors, and we all make it is failing to learn from history. Even if history isn’t quite as much bunk as Henry Ford would have had us believe, each generation decides that they know best and that this time it will be different.  Read more

Hello – no Cog Blog post this week as I am on holiday. Enjoy the break from being berated by me..

One of the reasons why this blog is read as often and as widely as it is comes down to the fact that I am in a position to express my views on anyone and everything. I’m lucky enough to be able to write things that others might very well think but feel unable to express, at least not publicly. Read more

It was 1993. Carat was the dominant agency in France, with 11 separate agencies in different central Paris locations. In the US (where I lived and worked at the time) the all-powerful full-service agencies’ media heads referred sneeringly to ‘the French disease’: buying media in bulk, packaging the inventory up and reselling it to clients without revealing the margin. Read more

On the back of their Procter and Gamble win last year, earlier this month Omnicom Media Group announced that it is opening a third media agency to sit alongside OMD and PHD. The new network called Hearts and Science is headed by Scott Hagedorn, who was until recently Annalect’s CEO. Read more

One of the questions that struck me at Mediatel’s recent event on planning was just why so many planners have left agencies over the last few years. Read more

A version of this post appeared on Mediatel’s Newsline on April 5th

Pity the poor communications planner, buffeted this way and that by the latest fads and the hottest trends, by variable research and more and more data, by clients who it seems want more and more for less and less, and by traders who ignore their beautifully crafted plans to buy whatever they fancy from anyone prepared to give them a deal.

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It’s become common-place to criticise agencies for not changing their business model, as if this was the sort of thing anyone could do between breakfast and lunchtime.

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It may just be my imagination but we haven’t been hearing quite so much from our old friends the agency trading desks lately.

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The media business really doesn’t do considered moderation. “Twitter is the marketing tool of the future.” “Twitter is finished.” “Social media marketing is the answer to all of mankind’s problems.” “Social media couldn’t sell an iceberg to a polar bear.” “TV is dead”. “TV revenues continue to grow.”

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The adblocking issue doesn’t look like it’s going away anytime soon. You can always tell when a subject is discussed at numerous conferences that it’s becoming a part of the furniture. Talking about it is so much easier than fixing it.

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