#MediaSnack Podcast: Recent Episodes
ID Comms
Welcome to ID Comms #MediaSnack, a weekly series looking at the big trends and issues in the global media industry. Our aim is to help ambitious advertisers navigate the complexities of the changing media landscape. Each week we will give you a tasty, bite size tour of some of the most interesting stories, letting you know just what you need to know and providing our expert perspective where we can. We’ll also give you some of the inside gossip, word on the street and the upcoming things we see will be the big stories for the week ahead. Please subscribe to be updated with new content and leave your questions, we will respond to them in future episodes. ID Comms #MediaSnack - Get your fill each Friday, in just enough time it takes to eat a sandwich. Enjoy! About ID Comms:ID Comms is the award-winning growth consultancy specializing in media and advertising. Founded in 2009, ID Comms is a trusted media partner to the world's leading advertisers, helping them to navigate the complexities of the changing media landscape.Media is a very powerful lever for growth for brands, but the landscape is complicated, cluttered and confusing. Making sense of this and knowing what to focus on is a challenge for marketers.It comes down to having the right knowledge to make decisions with confidence and the right controls to implement them, and that's what we do.We provide clarity in this complex landscape by empowering our clients with the knowledge they need to take the right decisions and we provide the data and tools to give them more control over their media performance.Find more at www.idcomms.com
In this episode of #MediaSnack, titled "MEDIA PALOOZA: THE TIMELINE - Advice for Advertisers," I delve into the imminent phenomenon of MediaPalooza, where a surge of agency pitches is set to take place. Joined by David Indo from London, we explore the critical timeline marketers need to consider for successful pitches. We discuss the importance of preparation, covering everything from understanding current contracts to designing an effective operating model. With insights into the potential pitfalls of rushing into the marketplace too soon or too late, I outline a strategic approach to ensure your agency pitch stands out in a crowded field. Tune in for essential advice to navigate this complex landscape and optimize your media investments.
In this episode of MediaSnack, I delve into the upcoming Mediapalooza 2027, an anticipated event that could redefine the media landscape. With tens of billions in media spend set to pitch, I explore what Mediapalooza means for advertisers and how 2027 is poised to surpass previous years in scale and complexity. Join me as I unpack critical insights on the implications for media procurement, the role of AI in shaping agency capabilities, and strategies for marketers to navigate this evolving environment. This episode marks the beginning of a ten-part series aimed at equipping brands with the knowledge to thrive in a rapidly changing media landscape. Tune in to stay ahead of the curve and prepare for the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead.
In this episode of #MediaSnack, Tom Denford and David Indo explore one of the biggest challenges facing marketers today: how to build trust with media agencies while still maintaining independent oversight. They discuss why traditional auditing is no longer enough, how today's media ecosystem has created new layers of complexity, and why verification—not blind trust—is essential to protecting media investments. The conversation also covers the most common governance mistakes organizations make and practical strategies for creating greater transparency, accountability, and long-term value.What You'll Learn:-Why independent verification is more valuable than traditional media auditing-How changing agency commercial models have increased the need for stronger governance-The difference between benchmarking, auditing, and verificationCommon mistakes marketers make when overseeing media investmentsPractical ways to improve transparency, accountability, and media performanceSubscribe to #MediaSnack to stay informed, stay competitive, and stay winning. Let's all #GetGoodAtMedia together. #MediaSnack is presented by ID Comms, the award-winning global media advisory and analytics firm. We've been helping the world's most ambitious marketers #GetGoodAtMedia since 2009. Find out more at www.idcomms.com.
In this episode of #MediaSnack, we dive into the pressing question: Can agencies be trusted? Hosts Tom Denford and David Indo explore the evolving landscape of the media and marketing industry, addressing the complexities that have emerged since the landmark transparency report a decade ago. As marketers grapple with new technologies and shifting agency business models, the duo highlights the importance of building trust through effective governance and transparent partnerships. They emphasize that while agencies are invaluable strategic partners, it is essential for clients to set clear expectations and focus on outcomes that drive business growth. Tune in for insights on how to navigate this intricate relationship and what steps both marketers and agencies can take to foster a successful collaboration.
In this episode of #MediaSnack, Tom Denford and David Indo delve into the recent challenges faced by WPP, including major account losses and ongoing legal issues. They discuss the implications of WPP losing the Adidas account to Omnicom and what it signifies for the agency's future. The conversation also covers the significant legal trouble WPP is facing in China, where former executives have been sentenced for commercial bribery. Despite these setbacks, David offers a more optimistic view on WPP's strategic outlook under Cindy Rose’s leadership.What You'll Learn: - The impact of WPP losing the Adidas account to Omnicom - Insights into the legal challenges WPP faces in China - How these developments affect global marketers and advertisers - Cindy Rose’s strategic response and future plans for WPP Subscribe to #MediaSnack to stay informed, stay competitive, and stay winning. Let's all #GetGoodAtMedia together. #MediaSnack is presented by ID Comms, the award-winning global media advisory and analytics firm. We've been helping the world's most ambitious marketers #GetGoodAtMedia since 2009. Find out more at www.idcomms.com.
In this episode of #MediaSnack, Tom Denford and David Indo dive into the latest media industry buzz as the Cannes festival approaches. They explore Publicis's strategic moves, including their $2.2 billion acquisition of LiveRamp and a satirical AI-focused video that stirred industry waters. The duo also sheds light on Dentsu's resurgence, fueled by new leadership and the retention of Heineken's media business. Tune in to understand the implications of these developments for advertisers and what's next on the horizon for media agencies.What You'll Learn: - The impact of Publicis's acquisition of LiveRamp on the media landscape - How Publicis's video has sparked controversy in the industry - Insights into Dentsu's strategic moves and leadership change - What these shifts mean for advertisers and media buying Subscribe to #MediaSnack to stay informed, stay competitive, and stay winning. Let's all #GetGoodAtMedia together. #MediaSnack is presented by ID Comms, the award-winning global media advisory and analytics firm. We've been helping the world's most ambitious marketers #GetGoodAtMedia since 2009. Find out more at www.idcomms.com.
In this episode of #MediaSnack, Tom Denford sits down with Bill Tucker, CEO of Aquila LLC, to discuss the groundbreaking initiatives Aquila is bringing to the media measurement landscape. They delve into the intricacies of cross-media measurement and how Aquila's platform is set to revolutionize deduplicated reach and frequency across major platforms like YouTube and Meta. Bill shares insights on the challenges and triumphs of integrating data analytics and AI into media strategy, and the collaborative spirit driving these advancements. This episode promises a comprehensive look at how Aquila is poised to transform industry standards and empower advertisers with smarter data-driven decisions.What You'll Learn:- How Aquila is pioneering cross-platform media measurement.- The role of AI and data analytics in media planning and strategy.- Insights into Aquila's collaboration with major media platforms.- The anticipated industry impact of Aquila's new measurement tools.Subscribe to #MediaSnack to stay informed, stay competitive, and stay winning. Let's all #GetGoodAtMedia together. #MediaSnack is presented by ID Comms, the award-winning global media advisory and analytics firm. We've been helping the world's most ambitious marketers #GetGoodAtMedia since 2009. Find out more at www.idcomms.com
In this episode of #MediaSnack, I dive into the implications of a recent webinar celebrating ten years since the ANA's groundbreaking media transparency report. Join me as I explore the current state of transparency in the advertising industry, revealing that nearly half of advertisers still harbor serious concerns. I discuss the stagnation in progress over the last decade, despite initial excitement for change, and highlight key survey findings that underscore the need for immediate action. I also provide practical advice for marketers on how to enhance media governance, including updating contracts, asking the right questions, and verifying media spend effectiveness. Tune in for insights and strategies to ensure your media investments are optimized for maximum return.
In this episode of #MediaSnack, Tom Denford and pitch expert Yasmena, evaluate the ANA and 4A's new pitch principles, providing a tier ranking of each based on their relevance and impact. The discussion highlights the importance of mutual commitment, streamlined timelines, and the nuances of speculative work and compensation. Discover how these principles can transform your pitch process and lead to successful agency partnerships.What You'll Learn: - The significance of chemistry and transparency in agency pitches - How to prioritize and rank the ANA and 4A's pitch principles - Best practices for managing pitch timelines and stakeholder involvement - Insights on compensating for pitch labor and maintaining fair agreements Subscribe to #MediaSnack to stay informed, stay competitive, and stay winning. Let's all #GetGoodAtMedia together. #MediaSnack is presented by ID Comms, the award-winning global media advisory and analytics firm. We've been helping the world's most ambitious marketers #GetGoodAtMedia since 2009. Find out more at www.idcomms.com
In this episode of #MediaSnack, we explore the newly released principles for best practices in agency pitches, crafted in collaboration between the ANA and the 4As. Joining them are Greg Wright and Matt Kasindorf, who provide insights into the importance of transparency, fair timelines, and chemistry in fostering successful client-agency relationships. The discussion highlights the need for clear communication and mutual respect to ensure effective pitch processes and long-term partnerships. Tune in to discover how these guidelines can transform your approach to media procurement and marketing.What You'll Learn: - The significance of transparency and open communication in agency pitches - How to streamline the RFI process for more efficient selection - The role of chemistry and cultural alignment in successful partnerships - Best practices for pitch compensation and fair agreements https://www.aaaa.org/blog/ana-and-4as-10-principles-of-pitching/https://www.ana.net/miccontent/show/id/pulse-2026-05-ana-and-4as-positive-pitch-principlesSubscribe to #MediaSnack to stay informed, stay competitive, and stay winning. Let's all #GetGoodAtMedia together. #MediaSnack is presented by ID Comms the award-winning global media advisory and analytics firm. We've been helping the world's most ambitious marketers #GetGoodAtMedia since 2009. Find out more at www.idcomms.com
In this episode of #MediaSnack, Tom Denford and David Indo dive into the complexities of outcome-based pricing in the media marketing industry. They explore the benefits and challenges associated with this remuneration model, offering insights into how it can impact advertiser-agency relationships and media investment transparency. The duo also introduces Akila, a promising cross-media measurement solution, and discusses its potential to revolutionize how advertisers manage their campaigns. To wrap up, they share their thoughts on recent industry developments, including Dentsu's retention of the global Heineken account.What You'll Learn: - The pros and cons of outcome-based pricing models. - How Akila aims to transform cross-media measurement for advertisers. - The latest industry trends and their implications for media strategies. - Insights into Dentsu's recent successes and challenges.Subscribe to #MediaSnack to stay informed, stay competitive, and stay winning. Let's all #GetGoodAtMedia together. #MediaSnack is presented by ID Comms, the award-winning global media advisory and analytics firm. We've been helping the world's most ambitious marketers #GetGoodAtMedia since 2009. Find out more at www.idcomms.com.
In this episode, Tom Denford and David Indo dive into the biggest trends from the ANA's advertising financial management conference. They explore the complexities of outcome-based pricing and its implications for advertisers, highlighting both the opportunities and the risks involved. The duo also tackles the controversial topic of principle-based buying, questioning its impact on transparency and advertiser trust. Finally, they introduce the new ANA and 4As guidelines for pitch best practices, promising a deeper dive in the next episode.What You'll Learn:- The pros and cons of outcome-based pricing in media contracts.- Why principle-based buying is stirring debate in the industry.- Key insights from the ANA's latest report on media buying.- An introduction to pitch best practices guidelines by ANA and 4As.Subscribe to #MediaSnack to stay informed, stay competitive, and stay winning. Let's all #GetGoodAtMedia together. #MediaSnack is presented by ID Comms, the award-winning global media advisory and analytics firm. We've been helping the world's most ambitious marketers #GetGoodAtMedia since 2009. Find out more at www.idcomms.com
In this episode of #MediaSnack, Tom Denford and David Indo welcome Bill Duggan from the ANA to discuss the evolving landscape of marketing procurement and its implications for advertisers. They delve into the significance of the ANA's Advertising Financial Management Conference and explore the rising importance of principal media and AI in transforming agency operations. The conversation also highlights the need for transparency and governance in principal media, as well as the growing influence of AI on creative and media processes. Join the discussion to understand how these trends are reshaping the marketing industry.What You'll Learn: - Insights into the ANA Advertising Financial Management Conference - The role of principal media and its impact on agency-client relationships - How AI is restructuring agency operations and efficiency gains - The importance of transparency and governance in media procurement Subscribe to #MediaSnack to stay informed, stay competitive, and stay winning. Let's all #GetGoodAtMedia together. #MediaSnack is presented by ID Comms the award-winning global media advisory and analytics firm. We've been helping the world's most ambitious marketers #GetGoodAtMedia
In this episode of #MediaSnack, Tom Denford and David Indo delve into the recent FTC settlement with major advertising groups, discussing its implications for brand safety and advertisers. They explore the role of brand care, emphasizing the need for marketers to take ownership of where their brands appear. The conversation shifts to Publicis' impressive Q1 results and their strategic win of Microsoft's media business, highlighting the growing importance of tech partnerships in media planning. The episode wraps up with a tribute to Bob Liodice's impactful career at the Association for National Advertisers.What You'll Learn: - The implications of the FTC settlement on brand safety in advertising - Why brand care is essential for marketers - Insights into Publicis' strategies and success stories - How technology partnerships are reshaping media planning Subscribe to #MediaSnack to stay informed, stay competitive, and stay winning. Let's all #GetGoodAtMedia together. #MediaSnack is presented by ID Comms, the award-winning global media advisory and analytics firm. We've been helping the world's most ambitious marketers #GetGoodAtMedia since 2009. Find out more at www.idcomms.com
In this episode of #MediaSnack, Tom Denford and David Indo explore the complexities of media investment and its potential for driving business growth. They emphasize the importance of viewing media as an investment rather than a cost, highlighting the need for aligning internal media capabilities with external agency partners. The duo provides actionable insights on optimizing media strategies by focusing on internal capabilities, external partnerships, and paid media investments. With a trillion dollars spent annually on media, they stress the importance of leveraging this investment effectively to avoid wastage and gain a competitive advantage.What You'll Learn: - How to shift your mindset to see media as an investment in growth. - The three-step framework for optimizing internal and external media operations. - The importance of transparency and auditing in media spend. - How to align your organization and agency partners for maximum media effectiveness. Subscribe to #MediaSnack to stay informed, stay competitive, and stay winning. Let's all #GetGoodAtMedia together. #MediaSnack is presented by ID Comms the award-winning global media advisory and analytics firm. We've been helping the world's most ambitious marketers #GetGoodAtMedia since 2009. Find out more at www.idcomms.com.
In this episode of Media Snack, I delve into the ongoing tensions between media agencies and demand-side platforms (DSPs), focusing on the latest developments regarding The Trade Desk. With major holding companies like Publicis and Omnicom conducting audits and expressing concerns about transparency, I discuss the implications for advertisers and the critical need for clarity in media buying practices. Additionally, I explore insights from a new ANA report on principle-based media, revealing that many advertisers are still unaware of its presence in their contracts. Join me as I provide actionable advice for navigating these complex issues and ensuring your media investments are optimized for transparency and accountability.
In this episode of #MediaSnack, Tom Denford and David Indo dive into the high-stakes clash between Publicis and The Trade Desk, two giants in the media industry. They unravel the complex issues surrounding transparency, fees, and governance that have caused a significant rift. As they explore the implications for advertisers, they emphasize the urgency for marketers to take action and improve their digital governance. The episode concludes with actionable advice for CMOs to navigate this evolving landscape effectively.What You'll Learn: - The key issues at the heart of the Publicis and The Trade Desk conflict - Why digital transparency is critical for advertisers - Practical steps CMOs can take to mitigate risks and improve governance - Insights into optimizing media partnerships and contracts Subscribe to #MediaSnack to stay informed, stay competitive, and stay winning. Let's all #GetGoodAtMedia together. #MediaSnack is presented by ID Comms, the award-winning global media advisory and analytics firm. We've been helping the world's most ambitious marketers #GetGoodAtMedia since 2009. Find out more at www.idcomms.comWith Publicis urging clients to reconsider their relationship with The Trade Desk, we explore the three major allegations of fee mismanagement and the potential risks marketers face. I'll share insights on how to navigate this evolving situation, emphasizing the importance of transparency and governance in media investments. Tune in for practical advice on assessing your current contracts and optimizing your media strategies for competitive advantage amidst these industry shifts. Don't miss this essential discussion that could redefine how you manage your media budgets.
In this episode of #MediaSnack, Tom Denford and David Indo delve into the latest trends and news impacting the global media and marketing industry. They spotlight the impressive growth of the Stagwell Group and its position as a challenger in the market landscape. The discussion also covers the potential impacts of geopolitical tensions on marketing strategies, particularly in media allocations and agency pitches. Finally, they touch on recent leadership changes and their implications for the media industry.What You'll Learn: - The strategic positioning and growth of the Stagwell Group. - How current geopolitical tensions could affect media planning and buying. - Insights into recent agency leadership changes and their potential impact. - Practical advice for CMOs on adapting media strategies in uncertain times.Subscribe to #MediaSnack to stay informed, stay competitive, and stay winning. Let's all #GetGoodAtMedia together. #MediaSnack is presented by ID Comms, the award-winning global media advisory and analytics firm. We've been helping the world's most ambitious marketers #GetGoodAtMedia since 2009. Find out more at www.idcomms.com
Welcome back to #MediaSnack LIVE with Tom Denford and David Indo. This week we are unpacking the ultimate battle for agency survival and the tech platforms claiming to save the day.Tom Denford dives into the agency 'Red Ocean'. With media agencies locked in a brutal fight for market share, what are the direct implications for CMOs and Procurement Directors negotiating fees today?David Indo reveals his insider review of 'WPP Open'. Is holding company tech delivering a true competitive advantage for brands, or is it just a retention tool? We separate the pragmatic reality from the sales pitch.
In this episode of #MediaSnack, Tom Denford and David Indo delve into the shifting landscape of media agencies, focusing on the transformation of major holding companies like WPP, Omnicom, and Publicis. They explore how these agencies are evolving from service-based models to sales-driven entities, impacting their relationships with marketers. David Indo provides an insider look into WPP's innovative technology platform, WPP Open, highlighting its potential efficiencies and challenges. The discussion also offers practical advice for marketers on navigating this evolving ecosystem while maintaining competitive advantage.What you will learn in this episode: - The transformation of media agencies from service to sales models. - Insights into WPP's new technology platform, WPP Open. - Challenges and opportunities in agency-client relationships. - Practical advice for marketers to maintain a competitive edge.Subscribe to #MediaSnack to stay informed, stay competitive, and stay winning. Let's all #GetGoodAtMedia together. #MediaSnack is presented by ID Comms, the award-winning global media advisory and analytics firm. We've been helping the world's most ambitious marketers #GetGoodAtMedia since 2009. Find out more at www.idcomms.com.
In this episode of #MediaSnack WINNERS, Tom Denford is joined by Fredrik Borestrom, President of the International Advertising Association (IAA) and a trusted voice in the global media and marketing community. With over 25 years of leadership experience at LinkedIn, Microsoft, and AOL, Fredrik brings a sharp, international perspective on the future of marketing.
Tom and Fredrik explore what the rest of the world can learn from Nordic markets — some of the most tech-forward and transparent media landscapes anywhere. They also dig into the gaps in measurement and why trust in the agency model is eroding. Fredrik shares his vision for developing the next generation of industry leaders and why local insights still matter more than ever, even in an AI-driven, global marketplace.
Learn more about IAA Global: https://iaaglobal.org
Want to stay ahead in media? Visit https://www.idcomms.com
Follow ID Comms on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/id-comms/
The media agency landscape has entered a true Red Ocean moment — consolidation, chaos, and disruption everywhere you look. The Omnicom–IPG merger is approaching the finish line, Dentsu is dealing with a damaging cyber breach, Publicis is surging ahead thanks to aggressive AI investment, and WPP just bet $400M on Google to catch up. The stakes have never been higher for marketers deciding who to trust with their media, their data, and their future.
In this episode of #MediaSnack, Tom and David break down the latest power shifts — from agency M&A to the AI arms race — and explain what this means for brands. They outline how advertisers can protect themselves from data-security risks, avoid being collateral damage during massive agency restructures, and ensure that AI and technology actually drive growth instead of adding complexity.
Most importantly, they reveal the critical clauses every marketer needs in their agency contracts to safeguard first-party data and limit legal liability. If your agency touches your data, you need this episode.
Timestamps
00:00 – Red Ocean chaos: mergers, breaches, disruption
04:12 – Omnicom + IPG: what happens on Day 1
10:28 – Dentsu’s data breach and the legal + brand risks
15:50 – Publicis surges ahead by betting early on AI
19:40 – WPP partners with Google — smart move or risky dependency?
24:55 – What marketers MUST do now: data liability, AI value, tech-debt risk
MediaSnack is presented by ID Comms, the global media consultancy helping brands achieve better media results.
Want to stay ahead in media? Visit https://www.idcomms.com
Follow ID Comms on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/id-comms/
In this episode of #MediaSnack WINNERS, Tom Denford is joined by Greg Stuart, CEO of MMA Global and one of the most influential figures in modern marketing. Greg has led two of the industry’s biggest trade association turnarounds—the IAB and now MMA—growing revenues, expanding global influence, and reshaping how CMOs and marketers elevate their impact.
They explore the legacy-shaping initiatives Greg has spearheaded, from co-founding multi-touch attribution to writing the digital viewability standard, and why he believes marketers are still “destroying value at epic proportions” by executing media strategies poorly. Greg also opens up about the challenges facing CMOs today, the opportunities in AI, and why learning and applying new technologies is now the ultimate career differentiator.
Learn more about MMA Global: https://www.mmaglobal.com
Want to stay ahead in media? Visit https://www.idcomms.com
Follow ID Comms on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/id-comms/
With Dentsu exploring a sale of its international business and Horizon teaming up with Havas in a new joint venture, the industry faces a pivotal moment. Job cuts, private equity interest, and consolidation are reshaping the second tier of holding companies — raising urgent questions for advertisers about stability, talent, and future-proof operating models.
In this episode of #MediaSnack, Tom and David unpack what these moves signal for the future of the agency landscape. They explore why Dentsu’s divestment could open the door to radical new ownership models, what the Horizon–Havas partnership really means, and how advertisers can cut through AI “noise” to focus on the decisions that matter most. Plus, they share practical steps for brands to ask sharper questions, renegotiate smarter terms, and adapt to the shifting market.
Timestamps 00:00 – Welcome to the “Love Boat”: breakups & hookups
03:12 – Dentsu explores a sale of its international business
09:45 – Who might buy Dentsu? Private equity, consulting, or rivals
15:08 – Horizon + Havas join forces: strategy or survival?
21:50 – The new two-tier market and Red Ocean disruption
27:35 – Advice for advertisers: operating models, tough questions & cutting AI noise
MediaSnack is presented by ID Comms, the global media consultancy helping brands achieve better media results.
Want to stay ahead in media? Visit https://www.idcomms.com
Follow ID Comms on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/id-comms/
Cindy Rose has officially stepped in as WPP’s new CEO at a pivotal moment for the world’s largest marketing services group. With the company’s share price down 50% since last year, mounting debt, and talent challenges, the stakes couldn’t be higher. But with her tech-driven background at Microsoft, Disney, and Virgin, Cindy brings fresh operational expertise — and potentially a bold blueprint to reinvent WPP’s future.
In this episode of #MediaSnack, Tom and David unpack what Cindy’s leadership could mean for advertisers, agencies, and the broader media landscape. They explore whether WPP can transform into a more agile, AI-powered powerhouse — or if this is a setup for a future acquisition. Plus, they share actionable advice for brands on how to renegotiate agency terms and future-proof their operating models in this shifting environment.
Timestamps 00:00 – Cindy Rose takes the helm at WPP
04:10 – Why WPP is vulnerable — and undervalued
09:32 – Can Cindy drive real transformation?
15:05 – Breaking silos and rebuilding talent
20:48 – What advertisers must do right now
MediaSnack is presented by ID Comms, the global media consultancy helping brands achieve better media results.
Want to stay ahead in media? Visit https://www.idcomms.com
Follow ID Comms on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/id-comms/
In this episode of MediaSnack WINNERS, Tom Denford sits down with Sorin Patilinet, PepsiCo’s Global Marketing Effectiveness Lead and author of Marketing Effectiveness: Applying Marketing Science for Brand Growth. Sorin shares his mission to elevate marketing's role in the boardroom by challenging narrow definitions of effectiveness and showing how real impact extends far beyond media ROI. Drawing on his 20-year career at Mars and now PepsiCo, he explains how brands can build stronger marketing organizations through rigorous measurement, cross-functional alignment, and analytical confidence—not just creativity.
They discuss the current state of marketing effectiveness, how AI is shaping analytics, and why understanding consumers matters more than obsessing over CPMs. Sorin also reflects on his legacy at Mars, the need for advertiser voices in industry discourse, and offers advice for future marketing leaders.
Get Sorin’s Book: Marketing Effectiveness: Applying Marketing Science for Brand Growth https://www.amazon.com/Marketing-Effectiveness-Applying-Science-Growth/dp/1398621056
Want to stay ahead in media? Visit https://www.idcomms.com
Follow ID Comms on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/id-comms/
In this episode of #MediaSnack Winners, Tom Denford sits down with Terence “Terry” Kawaja, Founder & CEO of LUMA Partners, the digital media M&A advisory firm famous for the LUMAscape. With over $300 billion in deal experience, Terry shares how he built a category-defining business at the intersection of media, marketing, and technology—offering strategic advice with a blend of deep industry insight and sharp humor.
They explore the three-tier landscape of AI adoption, the return of M&A activity after a three-year trough, and what separates successful companies from the pretenders. Terry also shares why psychology matters more than finance in dealmaking, how to spot real innovation in a sea of hype, and why America’s “innovation flywheel” is its biggest comparative advantage.
MediaSnack is presented by ID Comms, the global media consultancy helping brands achieve better media results.
Find Terry Kawaja on LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/terencekawaja/
Learn more about LUMA Partners: https://www.lumapartners.com/
Want to stay ahead in media? Visit https://www.idcomms.com
Follow ID Comms on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/id-comms/
Tom and David map the future of the global media agency landscape, asking a provocative question: who will survive the coming consolidation? With Omnicom poised to acquire IPG and Accenture lurking in the shadows, the industry is entering what they call a “red ocean”—an era of brutal competition, strategic mergers, and existential decisions.
In this special episode of MediaSnack, they dissect the business models of the Big Three (Omnicom, WPP, Publicis), challenge the strategic positioning of smaller players like Stagwell and Havas, and predict whether Accenture might make a bold acquisition play that reshapes the category entirely. From platform power plays to exclusive content deals with brands like NFL and Netflix, Tom and David make sharp predictions for the next 12 months—and the next five years.
In this conversation, you’ll hear:
- What the Omnicom–IPG deal signals about agency consolidation
- Why WPP may be undervalued—and a prime target
- How principal-based buying is reshaping agency business models
- What smaller holding companies must do to survive
- Why Accenture could emerge as a fourth force—and redefine transparency
With the sharks circling, marketers and procurement leaders need to rethink how they plan and buy media—and who they trust to do it.
Subscribe and follow MediaSnack on YouTube and your favorite podcast platform
MediaSnack is presented by ID Comms, the global media consultancy helping brands achieve better media results.
Want to stay ahead in media? Visit https://www.idcomms.com
Follow ID Comms on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/id-comms/
Cindy Rose is stepping in as WPP’s new CEO — and with the holding group’s share price at a 16-year low and recent client losses piling up, this isn’t just a leadership change — it’s an inflection point. Tom and David break down what her appointment really signals: a shift toward AI-led operational transformation — and what that means for creativity, agencies, and advertisers alike. Drawing from their inside knowledge of WPP, they explore whether Rose can leapfrog the competition or if this is simply a safe, stabilizing move for a leaking ship. In this episode, you’ll hear:
- What Cindy Rose’s hiring really says about WPP’s future
- Why “leapfrog time” means moving beyond catch-up strategy
- The legacy of Mark Read and where he fell short
- What’s at stake for agencies in a red ocean landscape
- A candid look at whether creativity will still matter in an AI-led WPP
MediaSnack is presented by ID Comms, the global media consultancy helping brands achieve better media results. Want to stay ahead in media? Visit https://www.idcomms.com
Back from the Croisette, Tom shares his first-hand takeaways from Cannes Lions 2025 with David. While the festival had all the usual glamor and platform presence, this year’s true themes came down to three A’s: Appreciation for the power of community, a renewed focus on Agencies and their evolving role, and the real-world applications (and noise) surrounding AI. Together, they unpack what stood out, what fell flat, and what media leaders should really be paying attention to as the second half of the year kicks off.
00:00 – Setting the Stage: Why Cannes Still Matters
03:32 – Appreciation: The Role of Creativity and Craft
07:29 – Agencies: Still Central to Media’s Future
13:48 – AI: From Sizzle to Substance
18:15 – Final Reflections and What Comes Next
MediaSnack is presented by ID Comms, the global media consultancy helping brands achieve better media results.
Related links:
The New Vibe: Cannes 2025 and the Evolving Landscape of Agency and AI https://www.idcomms.com/blog/the-new-vibe-cannes-2025-and-the-evolving-landscape-of-agency-ai
Want to stay ahead in media? Visit https://www.idcomms.com
Follow ID Comms on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/id-comms/
In this special #MediaSnack episode, Tom Denford and David Indo revisit one of their boldest predictions: the WPP 2.0 Playbook. Originally recorded when Mark Read stepped in as CEO, the episode laid out a proposed restructure of WPP’s sprawling agency network. Now, with major changes finally underway—including the retirement of the GroupM brand—Tom and David break down what they got right, where they missed, and what it all means for media leaders today. It’s a rare moment of reflection in an industry that’s always sprinting forward—plus insight into how the same themes now shape the Omnicom-IPG merger and the future of agency holding companies.
Watch the original WPP 2.0 Playbook episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KSdrpMylNrE
How to Navigate Media Chaos and Come Out Ahead: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vXT0eLAI4KA
Why a Renegotiation Might Be Your Next Winning Move: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cWR5nZkgndM
MediaSnack is presented by ID Comms, the global media consultancy helping brands achieve better media results.
Explore more: https://www.idcomms.com
Follow ID Comms on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/id-comms/
In this episode of #MediaSnack MEETS, Tom Denford and Mark Ritson discuss:
- The state of media and advertising today—and why marketers are getting it wrong
- The power of consistency and why sticking with what works beats chasing the new
- Why too much change is killing marketing effectiveness
MediaSnack is presented by ID Comms, the global media consultancy helping brands achieve better media results.
Mark Ritson Mini MBA: https://mba.marketingweek.com/?cmpid=...
Want to stay ahead in media? Visit https://www.idcomms.com/
Follow ID Comms on LinkedIn: / id-comms
As the Omnicom-IPG merger continues to reshape the media landscape, Tom Denford and David Indo return with critical insights for advertisers. In this episode of #MediaSnack, they explore how the traditional agency model is shifting from service to sales, and why advertisers need to rethink their media strategies now. They break down how to update contracts, renegotiate for better value, and protect agency relationships in a post-merger world. In the How to Win segment, they reveal how even big brands are losing competitive advantage by relying on outdated media auditing and platform-driven results, and what smart marketers must do to take control, boost outcomes, and future-proof their investments.
00:14 – How Not to Lose
Why media agencies are moving from service to sales
What advertisers must renegotiate in 2025 contracts
How to protect your brand’s talent and agency relationships
10:05 – How to Win
Why big spenders are seeing small results
The three hidden risks hurting media performance
How smarter audit strategies can drive real business growth
MediaSnack is presented by ID Comms, the global media consultancy helping brands achieve better media results.
Learn more about navigating the Omnicom-IPG Merger: https://www.idcomms.com/omnicom
Explore Digital Control and Modern Media Auditing: https://www.idcomms.com/digital-control
Winning the Digital Pitch: https://www.idcomms.com/blog/winning-...
Want to stay ahead in media? Visit https://www.idcomms.com/
In this episode of #MediaSnack Meets, Tom Denford sits down with Vinny Rinaldi, VP of Media and Marketing Technology at The Hershey Company, where he oversees media planning, buying, martech, and digital innovation across one of the world’s most iconic brand portfolios. Vinny shares what it takes to build a high-performing, forward-thinking media function inside a modern CPG organization—and why success comes down to aligning media strategy with real business goals. They explore the biggest challenges facing marketers today, from the myth of cheap reach to the need for effectiveness-focused measurement. Vinny also reflects on taking the leap from agency to client-side leadership, shares advice on patience and curiosity, and explains why redefining partnerships will be key to the industry's future.
00:30 – Meet Vinny Rinaldi
01:04 – What Vinny Does at Hershey
03:17 – How to Succeed in Modern Media
07:31 – Big Challenges in Media Today
09:49 – Solve Business Problems, Not Media Problems
10:45 – Leadership Advice: Patience and Curiosity
12:10 – Life Outside Media: Hockey Dreams
13:28 – Rethinking Media Partnerships
MediaSnack is presented by ID Comms, the global media consultancy helping brands achieve better media results.
You can find Vinny Rinaldi on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vinny-rinaldi-62953610/
Learn more about The Hershey Company: https://www.thehersheycompany.com
Want to stay ahead in media? Visit https://www.idcomms.com
Follow ID Comms on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/id-comms
As the media industry braces for the impact of the Omnicom-IPG merger, advertisers face a shifting landscape filled with both risk and opportunity. In this episode of #MediaSnack, Tom and David unpack the real implications of the merger—whether you're with Omnicom, IPG, or any other agency group. They introduce a practical four-quadrant framework to help advertisers understand where they stand and what actions to take. Then, in the How to Win segment, they tackle why brands need to shift their thinking from chasing cheap media to prioritizing quality and effectiveness—and how to stress-test your agency relationships and audit practices to make smarter media decisions in 2025 and beyond.
01:04 – How Not to Lose
- What the Omnicom-IPG merger means for advertisers of all types
- A strategic framework for navigating uncertainty
- Why most advertisers should renegotiate—not pitch
12:04 – How to Win
- How to avoid the hidden costs of cheap media
- Modern media audit strategies that actually work
- Why effectiveness—not discount—is the new metric for success
MediaSnack is presented by ID Comms, the global media consultancy helping brands achieve better media results.
Explore the Omnicom-IPG Merger Hub: https://www.idcomms.com/omnicom
The High Cost of Cheap Media: https://www.idcomms.com/blog/the-high-cost-of-cheap-media
Winning the Digital Pitch: https://www.idcomms.com/blog/winning-the-digital-pitch
💡 Want to stay ahead in media? Visit https://www.idcomms.com
🔗 Follow ID Comms on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/id-comms/
In this episode of #MediaSnack Meets, Tom Denford sits down with DJ Perera, Chief Media Officer at the Ad Council, the nonprofit behind some of the most iconic social impact campaigns in the U.S. With a background in both agency and corporate media, DJ brings a unique perspective to what it takes to build high-impact, message-driven campaigns in today’s evolving media environment. She shares insights on navigating the shift from commercial to purpose-driven media, how to drive results with donated inventory, and what media leaders can learn from the nonprofit world. DJ also reflects on the launch of Love Your Mind World—an innovative mental health campaign on Roblox—and offers thoughtful advice on leadership, change, and finding joy in the work.
00:00 - DJ’s Role at the Ad Council
02:14 - Career Highlights and Big Wins
03:55 - Challenges in the Media Industry
05:23 - Leadership and Career Advice
06:46 - Outside the Office
07:32 - Looking Ahead
MediaSnack is presented by ID Comms, the global media consultancy helping brands achieve better media results.
You can find DJ Perera on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/djperera
Learn more about the Ad Council: https://www.adcouncil.org/
Want to stay ahead in media? Visit https://www.idcomms.com/
Follow ID Comms on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/id-comms/
The biggest media deal in a decade is here—Omnicom’s proposed $13 billion acquisition of IPG—and it’s set to reshape the industry. In this episode of #MediaSnack, Tom Denford and David Indo break down what this consolidation means for advertisers, agencies, and media buying power. With exclusive insights from a private meeting with Omnicom and IPG leadership, they unpack the risks, opportunities, and strategies advertisers should consider as the industry braces for change. Plus, in our #MediaSnack Meets segment, marketing legend Mark Ritson shares his no-BS take on why marketers are addicted to change, why it’s hurting them, and what they should do instead.
01:15 - How Not to Lose
-What the Omnicom-IPG merger means for advertisers and media buying power
-Key regulatory hurdles and potential industry ripple effects
-What non-Omnicom/IPG clients should be doing right now
12:50 - How to Win
-How brands can leverage industry consolidation for better deals
-Key negotiation strategies in a competitive agency landscape
- Why now is the time to stress-test agency capabilities
20:39 - #MediaSnack Meets: Mark Ritson
- The state of media and advertising today—and why marketers are getting it wrong
- The power of consistency and why sticking with what works beats chasing the new
- Why too much change is killing marketing effectiveness
MediaSnack is presented by ID Comms, the global media consultancy helping brands achieve better media results.
-What the Omnicom-IPG Merger Means for Advertisers: https://www.idcomms.com/blog/what-the-omnicom-ipg-merger-means-for-advertisers
-Winning the Digital Pitch https://www.idcomms.com/blog/winning-the-digital-pitch
-20 Must-Ask Questions for Digital Media Pitches: https://www.idcomms.com/20-must-ask-questions-for-digital-media-pitches
-Mark Ritson Mini MBA: https://mba.marketingweek.com/?cmpid=251_se_go_res_tx_nonbrk&utm_medium=search_paid&creative=718241472628&keyword=ritson%20mini%20mba&matchtype=e&network=g&device=c&gad_source=1&gclid=CjwKCAiAw5W-BhAhEiwApv4goDF1xYqVWC59gfNIqb5OGxwknHUzV3DxlTw8i1zzveKrCWgAXNj3LhoC6e0QAvD_BwE
Want to stay ahead in media? Visit https://www.idcomms.com/
Follow ID Comms on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/id-comms/
MediaSnack is BACK and better than ever with #MediaSnack WINNING ✨
Tom and David are returning to share the next evolution of our podcast, designed to help you stay ahead, make smarter decisions, and, most importantly, win in media.
Each episode, we'll break it down into three key segments:
👉 How Not to Lose – We break down the Omnicom x IPG merger and what it means for brands and agencies. Plus, we explore the potential US TikTok ban and the steps brands should take to future-proof their businesses.
👉 How to Win – It’s time to talk renegotiation. We share practical tips on how advertisers can get the best outcomes when revisiting their agency contracts.
👉 Who’s Winning in Media? – Tom sits down with Evan Shapiro, the “media cartographer,” for a fascinating conversation on where the industry is heading.
--
Links
“To Pitch or Not to Pitch”:
https://www.idcomms.com/blog/to-pitch-or-not-to-pitch
Follow Evan on LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/eshap-media-cartographer/
--
Enjoyed this episode? Make sure to subscribe to #MediaSnack for more insights and actions for more effective media.
Don’t forget to leave a review and follow us to stay updated with the latest episodes.
🌐 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@mediasnack
🟢 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/7FFN3ME1ZwVAiDhGAMRc66
🍎 Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/mediasnack-podcast/id1072144223
MediaSnack is brought to you by ID Comms, the global media consultancy dedicated to helping brands achieve better media results. Want to use media to drive brand growth? Visit https://www.idcomms.com/
Evan Shapiro, Owner and Media Cartographer at ESHAP, joins Tom this week to unpack his biggest insights, challenges, and advice for media teams in 2025.
--
Links:
Follow Evan on LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/eshap-media-cartographer/
--
Enjoyed this episode? Make sure to subscribe to #MediaSnack for more insights and actions for more effective media.
Don’t forget to leave a review and follow us to stay updated with the latest episodes.
🌐 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@mediasnack
🟢 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/7FFN3ME1ZwVAiDhGAMRc66
🍎 Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/mediasnack-podcast/id1072144223
--
MediaSnack is brought to you by ID Comms, the global media consultancy dedicated to helping brands achieve better media results. Want to use media to drive brand growth? Visit https://www.idcomms.com/
MediaSnack’s most anticipated episode is BACK for 2024!
Tom and David review this year’s 10 biggest moments in media and predict what’s to come for brands and agencies in 2025.
--
Links
- What the Omnicom-IPG Merger Means for Advertisers: https://www.idcomms.com/blog/what-the-omnicom-ipg-merger-means-for-advertisers
--
Enjoyed this episode? Make sure to subscribe to #MediaSnack for more insights and actions for more effective media.
Don’t forget to leave a review and follow us to stay updated with the latest episodes.
🌐 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@mediasnack
🟢 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/7FFN3ME1ZwVAiDhGAMRc66
🍎 Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/mediasnack-podcast/id1072144223
--
MediaSnack is brought to you by ID Comms, the global media consultancy dedicated to helping brands achieve better media results. Want to use media to drive brand growth? Visit https://www.idcomms.com/
Mark Ritson, Founder of the Marketing Week Mini MBA, joins host Tom Denford to discuss the state of today’s media, including:
- This year’s biggest problems in media and marketing
- The media mistakes that are still being made today
- Who’s been winning (and NOT winning) in marketing and media
- The role of AI in the future of marketing and advertising
--
Links
MediaSnack MEETS with Prof. Mark Ritson (2017): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2xADmpd3J8U
The Marketing Week Mini MBA: https://mba.marketingweek.com/
Follow Mark Ritson on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/markritson/
--
Enjoyed this episode? Make sure to subscribe to #MediaSnack for more media & advertising insights.
Don’t forget to leave a review and follow us to stay updated with the latest episodes.
🌐 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@mediasnack
🟢 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/7FFN3ME1ZwVAiDhGAMRc66
🍎 Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/mediasnack-podcast/id1072144223
--
MediaSnack is brought to you by ID Comms, the global media consultancy dedicated to helping brands achieve better media results. Want to use media to drive brand growth? Visit https://www.idcomms.com/
Welcome to #MediaSnack Meets where we meet the individuals and organizations doing great work to inspire success and drive change within the global media and marketing industry.
My guest for this #MediaSnackMeets episode is Christine Guilfoyle, President of SeeHer
You can find Christine here: / christine-guilfoyle
Welcome to #MediaSnack Meets where we meet the individuals and organizations doing great work to inspire success and drive change within the global media and marketing industry.
My guest for this #MediaSnackMeets episode is Brad Moranchek, Senior Director of Global Media at Kimberly-Clark
Find out:
- What is Brad's experience in the industry?
- What he sees are the industry's biggest challenges and how we might address them?
- What does he do to unwind and recharge?
- Plus best industry leadership tips and more!
You can find Brad here: linkedin.com/in/brad-moranchek-a4110818
MediaSnack Meets is a regular interview with the curious media professionals who are reshaping the global industry.
Thanks for watching, if you enjoy #MediaSnack Meets please give us a thumbs up (it really helps) and do share links and tell others. Subscribe to our channel to stay updated.
Marketer?
For tips, guides & other amazing free resources for marketers, get started at: www.idcomms.com
Welcome to #MediaSnack Meets where we meet the individuals and organizations doing great work to inspire success and drive change within the global media and marketing industry.
My guest for this #MediaSnackMeets episode is Lauren Hanrahan, US CEO of Zenith.
Listen to find more about:
- Lauren's experience in the industry and what is she most proud of professionally
- What she sees are the industry's biggest challenges and how we might address them
- What does she do to unwind and recharge?
- Plus best industry leadership tips and more!
You can find Lauren here.
MediaSnack Meets is an interview with the curious media professionals who are reshaping the global industry.
Thanks for watching, if you enjoy #MediaSnack Meets please give us a thumbs up (it really helps) and do share links and tell others. Subscribe to our channel to stay updated.
Marketer?
For tips, guides & other amazing free resources for marketers, get started at: www.idcomms.com
Navigating Programmatic Media with the ANA’s Programmatic Media Supply Chain Transparency Study
The ANA released its full Programmatic Media Supply Chain Transparency Study and once again, it is full of thorough and detailed research with actionable recommendations for advertisers.
The key headline: “There is some $22 billion in efficiency gains available to the client-side marketer community.”
The report outlines 12 categories with detailed findings and provides recommendations for improvement across all 12. It has been described as a 'playbook for advertisers wanting to understand and improve results in programmatic'.
With all this insight, the challenge for advertisers is not what to do (the report provides plenty of guidance), the challenge is to know where to start.
There’s no obvious 'one size fits all' solution. Where your brand needs to focus will undoubtedly look different from other brands.
On this episode of #MediaSnack LIVE, we were joined once again by Bill Duggan from the ANA and were thrilled to welcome special guest Brad Moranchek, Sr. Director of Global Media at Kimberly Clark and one of the brand leaders who participated in the study.
We answered questions advertisers have about the report findings and got a closer look at how this study helped inspire change at Kimberly Clark.
We also gave steps advertisers can take to discover how much of that $22 BILLION pie could be theirs for the taking!
Download the full ANA report for FREE HERE.
At ID Comms, we believe that Brands Deserve Better Media. For more on how we can help your brand get more value from your media investments, visit www.idcomms.com
Marketers want better agency pitches; ones that are value-creation exercises and where everyone joins together in a race to the top.
Agency CEOs take pitching for new clients very seriously. Some might argue its actually what motivates them more than anything else. Most agency leaders are judged by their ability to grow and the best way to do that of course is to win lots of new clients and so they build big teams and apply big resources to do just that.
Agencies make huge investments in winning new clients, involving many hours of management, finance, strategy, buying and support teams. A lot of the (carbon-intensive) business travel has thankfully been cut from the pitch process, but they can still take a lot of people’s time. Usually, the CEO sees this as the cost of the pitch, but its not wasted, as pitches can have a momentum effect in the agency; they bring diverse teams together to solve problems, they build relationships, trust and positivity, no matter what the end result.
Poor feedback leaves agency leaders frustrated and a little embarrassed; they have no words of encouragement for their tired teams, they have no awareness of where they left gaps and they have no idea how to do things differently in the future. This is a failure of a pitch process for everyone.
Better Pitches = Better Partnerships!
On this episode of #MediaSnack LIVE, we explore some key questions around the future of the creative and media agency pitch.
Featuring guest speakers from leading trade associations, agency leadership and major advertisers:
- Matt Kasindorf -- SVP, Business Intelligence & Insight at the 4A's
- Nicholas Louisson -- Director of Agency Services at ISBA
- Greg Wright -- SVP, Brand & Media at the ANA
We give listeners some tips on improving the pitch experience for all.
At ID Comms, we believe that Brands Deserve Better Media. 📈
Find out more at www.idcomms.com
Welcome to #MediaSnack Meets where we meet the individuals and organizations doing great work to inspire success and drive change within the global media and marketing industry.
My guest for this #MediaSnackMeets episode is Brian O'Kelley, CEO and Co-Founder of Scope3
Find out:
- What is Brian's experience in the industry?
- What he sees are the industry's biggest challenges and how we might address them?
- What does he do to unwind and recharge?
- Plus best industry leadership tips and more!
You can find Brian here: linkedin.com/in/brianokelley
MediaSnack Meets is a regular interview with the curious media professionals who are reshaping the global industry.
Thanks for watching, if you enjoy #MediaSnack Meets please give us a thumbs up (it really helps) and do share links and tell others. Subscribe to our channel to stay updated.
Marketer?
For tips, guides & other amazing free resources for marketers, get started at: www.idcomms.com
Welcome to #MediaSnack Meets where we meet the individuals and organizations doing great work to inspire success and drive change within the global media and marketing industry.
My guest for this #MediaSnackMeets episode is Florian Adamski, Global CEO of Omnicom Media Group.
Find out:
- What is Florian's experience in the industry?
- What he sees are the industry's biggest challenges and how we might address them?
- What does he do to unwind and recharge?
- Plus best industry leadership tips and more!
You can find Florian here.
MediaSnack Meets is a regular interview with the curious media professionals who are reshaping the global industry.
Thanks for listening, if you enjoy #MediaSnack Meets please give us a thumbs up (it really helps) and do share links and tell others. Subscribe to our channel to stay updated.
Marketer?
For tips, guides & other amazing free resources for marketers, get started at: www.idcomms.com
Welcome to #MediaSnack Meets where we meet the individuals and organizations doing great work to inspire success and drive change within the global media and marketing industry.
My guest for this #MediaSnackMeets episode is Freddie Liversidge, VP of Global Media at HP
Find out:
- What is Freddie's experience in the industry?
- What he sees are the industry's biggest challenges and how we might address them?
- What does he do to unwind and recharge?
- Plus best industry leadership tips and more!
You can find Freddie here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/freddie-l...
MediaSnack Meets is a regular interview with the curious media professionals who are reshaping the global industry.
Thanks for watching, if you enjoy #MediaSnack Meets please give us a thumbs up (it really helps) and do share links and tell others. Subscribe to our channel to stay updated.
Marketer?
For tips, guides & other amazing free resources for marketers, get started at: www.idcomms.com
You’ve hopefully already read the facts. Programmatic is still a MESS.
But there are people, companies, behaviors and practices behind all this mess that we have yet to fully understand. Until now…
On this #MediaSnack LIVE we were joined by the expert team from Kroll, the investigative firm that conducted the qualitative parts of the ANA’s study.
In case you missed it, earlier this year The Association of National Advertisers published the 'first look' of their study into the programmatic media supply chain.
As part of the study Kroll was tasked with “illuminating, clarifying, and demystifying the U.S-based programmatic media supply chain”
In other words, getting to understand the dominant behaviors and practices that exist behind programmatic today.
In particular, Kroll sought to gain insights into the following key areas:
1️⃣ The flow of dollars from advertiser to publisher
2️⃣ The value exchanged for those dollars at each link in the chain
3️⃣ Whether any nontransparent practices or behaviors exist that have the potential to create unnecessary cost or waste for advertisers
Kroll’s part of the report, ‘ANA Programmatic Media Supply Chain Transparency Study - Qualitative Insights’ has just been released and is available for free download at www.ana.net/kroll
If you care about understanding programmatic and maybe making it better, you won't want to miss this podcast.
Joining me as special guests on this extended edition of #MediaSnack LIVE:
Richard Plansky - Regional Managing Director, North America, Forensic Investigations and Intelligence, Kroll
Sherine Ebadi - Managing Director, Forensic Investigations & Intelligence, Kroll
Kelley Elizabeth Train - Programmatic Consultant and Advisor
We gave listeners some tips on different routes you can take to improve your programmatic performance and reduce waste, tailored to the specific programmatic investment profile that best describes you as an advertiser. Listen in to find out more.
At ID Comms, we believe that Brands Deserve Better Media. 📈
Find out more at www.idcomms.com
The Association of National Advertisers recently published the 'first look' of their study into the programmatic media supply chain.
No surprises, it is still a mess...
However, this report strikes differently:
- It's actually starting to put real numbers on the dollars wasted (and its in the BILLIONS)
- It's actually calling it WASTE (rather than an unknown delta, whatever that it is);
- It's from the ANA the single most credible and objective source of advertising insights. They literally funded the study themselves, with no conflict or commercial interests on behalf of their members who are America's leading brands and marketers.
Joining Tom Denford (CEO of ID Comms) on this special extended edition of #MediaSnack LIVE is Bill Duggan from the ANA and Tom Triscari, one of the architects of the report and a general programmatic boffin.
Tom is also joined by a selection of the ID Comms programmatic consulting team, on hand to share our experiences working with brands and CMOs through some of the challenges highlighted in the report.
We give listeners some tips on different routes you can take to improve your programmatic performance and reduce waste, depending on what type of programmatic advertiser you are.
Recorded on July 28, 2023.
At ID Comms, we believe that Brands Deserve Better Media. Find out more at www.idcomms.com
A LIVE discussion with leading industry figures to discuss the current state of in-housing, to find out:
- who is in-housing?
- what scope are brands mostly in-housing?
- what works well and what has failed?
- are marketers satisfied with their in-housing progress?
- is it saving money or costing more?
- how do you measure the success of an in-house operation?
MediaSnack LIVE on LinkedIn Audio - Fri May 26 at 11am ET / 4pm UK
We will also review findings from an excellent recent report on in-housing by the Association of National Advertisers and joined by ANA exec's Bill Duggan and Greg Wright.
MediaSnack LIVE is hosted monthly on LinkedIn Audio. We gather the best and brightest from media and advertising to talk about the latest trends and topics, with the goal of working together toward Better Media for Brands We Love.
Be sure to follow us on LinkedIn for info on upcoming shows.
Who's going to #ANAAFM this year?
It is STILL the best #marketing #procurement stage in the world, hosted by the Association of National Advertisers
In this episode of #MedisSnack LIVE, we are giving listeners the 'unofficial' AFM preview.
We’re featuring many of this year's AFM speakers, conference hosts and happy delegates including Conference Host Katherine Freely, the ANA’s Bill Duggan, and many more.
The AFM conference is happening April 30 - May 3 in Phoenix, AZ. Full agenda and tickets available here: https://www.ana.net/content/show/id/ms-afm-apr23-agenda
Welcome to #MediaSnack Meets where we meet the individuals and organizations doing great work to inspire success and drive change within the global media and marketing industry.
My guest for this #MediaSnackMeets episode is Brian Wieser, Principal at Madison and Wall
Find out:
- What is Brian's experience in the industry and what is he most proud of professionally?
- What he sees are the industry's biggest challenges and how we might address them?
- What does he do to unwind and recharge?
- Plus his best industry leadership tips and more!
You can find Brian here: linkedin.com/in/brian-wieser-cfa-0a32b5
MediaSnack Meets is a regular interview with the curious media professionals who are reshaping the global industry.
Thanks for watching, if you enjoy #MediaSnack Meets please give us a thumbs up (it really helps) and do share links and tell others. Subscribe to our channel to stay updated.
Marketer?
For tips, guides & other amazing free resources for marketers, get started at: www.idcomms.com
Welcome to #MediaSnack Meets where we meet the individuals and organizations doing great work to inspire success and drive change within the global media and marketing industry.
My guest for this #MediaSnackMeets episode is Evan Kory, Executive Director of Global Media at Audible.
Find out:
- What is Evan's role at Audible and what is he most proud of professionally?
- What does he see are the industry's biggest challenges and how we might address them?
- What does he do to unwind and recharge?
- Plus his best industry leadership tips and more!
You can find Evan here: linkedin.com/in/evan-kory-35774a61
MediaSnack Meets is a regular interview with the curious media professionals who are reshaping the global industry.
Thanks for watching, if you enjoy #MediaSnack Meets please give us a thumbs up (it really helps) and do share links and tell others. Subscribe to our channel to stay updated.
Marketer?
For tips, guides & other amazing free resources for marketers, get started at: www.idcomms.com
Is there anything in marketing more misunderstood than procurement?
Reports and guidelines published recently by WFA and Association of National Advertisers illustrate the evolving and increasingly influential role played by procurement in marketing success.
For this episode of #MediaSnack LIVE, we joined with the industry's leading marketers and procurement experts on LinkedIn Audio to unpack the role of procurement and its blossoming partnership with astute marketing leaders.
Our show is LIVE and we invite anyone that joins to ask questions and share perspectives. In this show, we covered how the view of procurement continues to change, why 2023 is procurement's year to shine, how we can all grow in our understanding of procurement's role in marketing, and much, much more.
MediaSnack LIVE is hosted monthly on LinkedIn Audio. We gather the best and brightest from media and advertising to talk about the latest trends and topics, with the goal of working together toward Better Media for Brands We Love.
Be sure to follow us on LinkedIn for info on upcoming shows.
In this episode:
Buying Less for Less by Gerry Preece
Madison Avenue Manslaughter by Michael Farmer
Magic and Logic from CIPS, the IPA and ISBA
Welcome to #MediaSnack Meets where we meet the individuals and organizations doing great work to inspire success and drive change within the global media and marketing industry.
My guest for this #MediaSnackMeets episode is Anthony Martinez, SVP of Media and Growth Marketing at Serta Simmons Bedding.
Find out:
- What is Anthony's role at Serta Simmons and what is he most proud of professionally?
- What does he see are the industry's biggest challenges and how we might address them?
- What does he do to unwind and recharge?
- Plus Anthony's best industry leadership tips and more!
You can find Anthony here: linkedin.com/in/anthonypmartinez/
MediaSnack Meets is a regular interview with the curious media professionals who are reshaping the global industry.
Thanks for watching, if you enjoy #MediaSnack Meets please give us a thumbs up (it really helps) and do share links and tell others. Subscribe to our channel to stay updated.
Marketer?
For tips, guides & other amazing free resources for marketers, get started at: www.idcomms.com
Welcome to #MediaSnack Meets where we meet the individuals and organizations doing great work to inspire success and drive change within the global media and marketing industry.
My guest for this #MediaSnackMeets episode, is Amy Williams, Founder and CEO at Good-Loop
Find out:
- What is Amy's role at Good-Loop and what is she most proud of professionally?
- What does she see are the industry's biggest challenges and how we might address them?
- What does she do to unwind and recharge?
- Plus Amy's best industry leadership tips and more!
You can find Amy here: linkedin.com/in/amy-williams-
And more about Good-Loop here: good-loop.com
MediaSnack Meets is a regular interview with the curious media professionals who are reshaping the global industry.
Thanks for watching, if you enjoy #MediaSnack Meets please give us a thumbs up (it really helps) and do share links and tell others. Subscribe to our channel to stay updated.
Marketer?
For tips, guides & other amazing free resources for marketers, get started at: www.idcomms.com
Our most anticipated episode every year! We review 2022's top 10 standout moments in media and advertising. What were the most interesting stories of the year? Stay with us to the end where we name #MediaSnack's person of the year and we look ahead to 2023.
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Episode links:
MediaSnack Meets with Wendy Clark: • Wendy Clark, CEO ...
Rob Rakowitz Festival of Media 2019: • Media Sustainabil...
About GARM: https://wfanet.org/leadership/garm/ab...
GARM, Twitter accelerated brand safety agenda: https://wfanet.org/knowledge/item/202...
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MediaSnack is a show for curious media professionals who are shaping the global media industry today. Each episode, we invite you to join in the conversation as we discuss various topics and trends in media and advertising. We keep our positive, can-do attitude while facilitating a lively discussion, all with the hope of making the industry a little better for generations to come.
MediaSnack is hosted by Tom Denford and David Indo, Co-Founders ID Comms where we help brands get the media they deserve.
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https://www.idcomms.com/
mediaforgrowth
bettermedia
My guest for this #MediaSnackMeets episode, is Samuel Rueff, Global Media Director at Bayer.
Find out:
- What is Sam's role at Bayer and what is he most proud of professionally?
- What does he see are the industry's biggest challenges and how we might address them?
- What does he do to unwind and recharge (which includes supporting a good cause through The Distinguished Gentleman's Ride -- https://www.gentlemansride.com/)
- Plus Sam's best industry leadership tips
Welcome to #MediaSnack Meets where we meet the individuals and organizations doing great work to inspire success and drive change within the global media and marketing industry.
Because the best are short of time, our guests answer only 6 questions in 20 minutes
We get to learn what is behind their success, what it takes to make change in the industry and what the rest of us can learn from that experience.
We ask:
1. What do you do, and what you are most proud of?
2. What is the best thing about working in media?
3. What do you think is the biggest challenge for the industry right now?
4. What is your favorite piece of business/leadership advice?
5. What is your passion outside of media?
6. Your hopes for the year ahead?
MediaSnack Meets is a regular interview with the curious media professionals who are reshaping the global industry.
Thanks for watching, if you enjoy #MediaSnack Meets please give us a thumbs up (it really helps) and do share links and tell others. Subscribe to our channel to stay updated.
Marketer?
For tips, guides & other amazing free resources for marketers, get started at: www.IDComms.com/GROWTH
My guest for this special, extended edition of #MediaSnack Meets episode is Andrew Susman, Co-Founder and COO of The Institute for Advertising Ethics.
I ask Andrew our usual questions about his role and his view on the industry's successes and challenges, and then we spend a few minute talking about Andrew's great work in advertising ethics.
You can learn more about The Institute of Advertising Ethics here: https://www.iaethics.org/
Get certified as an Ethical Advertising Executive here: https://www.iaethics.org/get-certified
MediaSnack Meets is a regular interview with the curious media professionals who are reshaping the global industry.
Because the best are short of time, our guests answer only 6 questions in 20 minutes
We get to learn what is behind their success, what it takes to make change in the industry and what the rest of us can learn from that experience.
We ask:
1. What do you do, and what you are most proud of?
2. What is the best thing about working in media?
3. What do you think is the biggest challenge for the industry right now?
4. What is your favorite piece of business/leadership advice?
5. What is your passion outside of media?
6. Your hopes for the year ahead?
Thanks for watching, if you enjoy #MediaSnack Meets please give us a thumbs up (it really helps) and do share links and tell others. Subscribe to our channel to stay updated.
Marketer?
For tips, guides & other amazing free resources for marketers, get started at: www.IDComms.com/GROWTH
After more than five years and over 200 #MediaSnack episodes on YouTube, we are migrating the show to LinkedIn. Now you can all participate in every show!
Over the years we have really enjoyed getting live questions from viewers during the show, in fact its really our favorite part of #MediaSnack so we wanted to change the format and open up the show to be more inclusive and discursive.
The global media industry has faced innumerable challenges, many of which we have documented and discussed on #MediaSnack over the years.
Now the industry is at an inflection point, new ideas are emerging, new leaders, new companies, new techniques. We believe we can all build a better media industry and a better media solution for the brands we all love.
Our focus for each show will be an angle or trend on the media industry, always with a positive and optimistic spirit. We keep our can-do attitude, driven by a belief that we can all be doing things a little better, improving the industry for the next generations.
MediaSnack on LinkedIn audio is a powerful forum to share ideas, build relationships and grow the media industry for us all.
Bring your ideas and be a part of the show!
For this launch show I'm inviting a whole family of previous #MediaSnack guests so we can all find out...
"WHAT ARE THE BIGGEST CHALLENGES THE MEDIA INDUSTRY NEEDS TO ADDRESS?"
In this episode of #MediaSnack we are joined by Bill Duggan, Group EVP at the ANA, to hear more about the recent report, ANA Procurement 2022: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.
Bill shares how this year's report highlights changes in marketing procurement since the last report in 2010 and how advertisers can use these findings to continue improving procurement processes.
Download the report here: https://www.ana.net/miccontent/show/i...
MediaForGrowth
MediaSnack is brought to you by ID Comms, the award-winning growth consultancy specializing in media and advertising. Advisors to the world's most ambitious brands.
Welcome to #MediaSnack, if you are new to the channel it's great to have you join us!
MediaSnack is a LIVE weekly show where we unpack questions you all have about media, agencies, marketing, and more.
Please subscribe above to get alerts of all upcoming weekly episodes.
If you liked this episode please give us a thumbs up, it really helps other people like you find this channel.
My guest for this episode is Adam Benaroya, Director, Global Media Capabilities & Operations at Johnson & Johnson Consumer Health.
Welcome to #MediaSnack Meets where we meet the individuals and organizations doing great work to inspire success and drive change within the global media and marketing industry.
Three tips on how to write the best agency pitch brief.
If you are an advertiser planning an agency pitch, or an agency receiving pitch briefs you’ll appreciate how important it is to get the pitch brief right.
At ID Comms we believe the pitch process should be transparent and the advertiser should provide the clearest brief they can, to direct the competing agencies.
It can make the difference between a great agency relationship and a bad experience. Reputations are on the line.
On this episode of #MediaSnack we unpack what are the main components of an agency pitch brief and give you THREE TIPS to make your pitch brief amazing.
Join us this Friday for a special MS before we take our summer break.
A look at what we’ve learned in the last 18 months, trends for advertisers & agencies
Reflect on the accelerated changes
Where we are heading for the rest of 2021 and beyond
What implications for advertisers, agencies and everyone else.
If you are a Media Director, what's the SINGLE critical priority for your attention in Q1?
Heading into a new year there are always lots of things demanding the limited attention of the Media Director; budget allocations, KPIs, measurement, internal team goals, process improvements, innovation, ad fraud, am I going to the Superbowl...?
On today's #MediaSnack we unpack some of the critical areas of focus and share with you what we believe is the NUMBER ONE PRIORITY for your attention in Q1, to set up for a successful year ahead.
Don't hesitate or you risk losing your competitive advantage. Remember, "the squeaky wheel gets the oil and the early bird gets the worm"
If you are an agency, watch to learn more and be on alert that this question is coming...
MediaForGrowth
MediaSnack is brought to you by ID Comms, the award-winning growth consultancy specializing in media and advertising. Advisors to the world's most ambitious brands.
30, 60, 90, 120 days or more??
What is the MAGIC number for payment terms and how do you balance the needs of finance with the ambitions of marketing?
This is THE most loaded question for marketing and procurement to ask their agencies.
Here's the #MediaSnack alternative perspective on what are the right payment terms for media, plus we share #ThreeGreatTips for advertisers on how to align your stakeholders on that magic number, in order to balance the needs of finance with the ambitions and objectives of marketing.
This episode needs to be a catalyst for constructive discussion; understanding the drivers of advertiser payment terms and also the implications for pushing payment terms beyond reasonable levels and how that can negatively impact marketing effectiveness. Please leave your comments below!
MediaForGrowth
MediaSnack is brought to you by ID Comms, the award-winning growth consultancy specializing in media and advertising. Advisors to the world's most ambitious brands.
Think you know what the modern media director's role is? You might be surprised.
The job has changed a lot in recent years.
Here's the #MediaSnack alternative perspective on what makes a successful media director plus we share THREE GREAT TIPS on how to be a star media director and some insights about how you can work more productively with a media director.
MediaForGrowth
MediaSnack is brought to you by ID Comms, the award-winning growth consultancy specializing in media and advertising. Advisors to the world's most ambitious brands.
The marketing organization is changing and nowhere more than in the media team. So what internal capabilities are needed to give your brands the competitive edge in media?
Here's the #MediaSnack alternative perspective on what makes a successful media team plus we share THREE GREAT TIPS on how to ensure your organization stays on the top of the capabilities race.
MediaForGrowth
MediaSnack is brought to you by ID Comms, the award-winning growth consultancy specializing in media and advertising. Advisors to the world's most ambitious brands.
Many of the world's most successful marketing teams have a secret...
They have internal MEDIA COUNCILS dedicated to sharing innovation, best-practices and good governance of the company's media investments. It's no coincidence they also tend to be the best clients for their agencies.
Here's the #MediaSnack alternative perspective on what makes a successful internal media community plus we share THREE GREAT TIPS for media and procurement leaders on how to set up a successful media council in your own company.
MediaForGrowth
MediaSnack is brought to you by ID Comms, the award-winning growth consultancy specializing in media and advertising. Advisors to the world's most ambitious brands.
Think you know marketing procurement? All about cost-savings right? Not any more.
The modern media procurement leader is focused on company growth and partners with their marketing colleagues to build long-term value. The role is very different now.
Here's the #MediaSnack alternative perspective on what makes a successful media procurement leader plus we share THREE GREAT TIPS from the best media procurement experts on how to succeed in media procurement and how you can work more productively with media procurement.
MediaForGrowth
MediaSnack is brought to you by ID Comms, the award-winning growth consultancy specializing in media and advertising. Advisors to the world's most ambitious brands.
Over the last few years, the advertising industry has been witnessing how media agencies were pushing new trading models to increase their revenue while advertisers raise their concerns about the lack of transparency within the digital media value chain. The ANA report increased tensions and the global industry has been looking for innovative ways of self-regulation.
Latin America as a region, was far from the US or Europe. The two biggest markets had opposite realities: Brazil has legislation that prevents the operation of media agencies, allowing creative agencies to perpetuate an obsolete model that allows remuneration at standard commissions based on media investment and media rebates from media owners. On the other hand, Mexico saw the peak of new trading models pushed by media agencies. The rest of the region will follow between these two different realities.
In April 2021, Mexico approved a 13 article Law that aims to eliminate and prosecute non-transparent media practices between advertisers, media owners and agencies. The Law has been approved by the senate and it is yet to be published in the official book to be effective.
Are remote agency pitches here to stay?
They've been a necessity over the last year, but savvy advertisers are seeing many benefits, so will we ever have in-person pitches again?
Here's the #MediaSnack alternative perspective on how the best remote pitches work plus we share THREE GREAT TIPS for advertisers on how to plan the most effective agency pitch, based on our recent experiences (good and bad) designing and managing agency pitches for some of the world's leading advertisers.
MediaForGrowth
MediaSnack is brought to you by ID Comms, the award-winning growth consultancy specializing in media and advertising. Advisors to the world's most ambitious brands.
All agencies are complaining of a 'TALENT CRISIS'
So what's causing this and how is it affecting advertisers?
Here's the #MediaSnack alternative perspective on the causes and implications plus we share THREE GREAT TIPS for advertisers on how to protect your best agency talent and keep your competitive advantage.
MediaForGrowth
MediaSnack is brought to you by ID Comms, the award-winning growth consultancy specializing in media and advertising. Advisors to the world's most ambitious brands.
My guest for this episode is Hermann Hassenstein, Senior Head of Marketing Operations at Puma.
Welcome to #MediaSnack Meets where we meet the individuals and organizations doing great work to inspire success and drive change within the global media and marketing industry.
My guest for this episode is Tom Kuhn, Vice President of Marketing at PGA Tour.
Tom Kuhn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tomwkuhn/
Welcome to #MediaSnack Meets where we meet the individuals and organizations doing great work to inspire success and drive change within the global media and marketing industry.
MediaForGrowth
MediaSnack is brought to you by ID Comms, the award-winning growth consultancy specializing in media and advertising. Advisors to the world's most ambitious brands.
Welcome to #MediaSnack, if you are new to the channel it's great to have you join us!
MediaSnack is a LIVE weekly show where we unpack questions you all have about media, agencies, marketing, and more.
Please subscribe above to get alerts of all upcoming weekly episodes.
If you liked this episode please give us a thumbs up, it really helps other people like you find this channel.
What do you think about this episode? Please leave your comments down below and send us a question you’d like us to cover on a future show.
Finding The Right Media Agency PART 2 - Investment Exercise: #MediaSnack 140 by ID Comms
Never miss your #MediaSnack - subscribe for updates (and click the bell icon to get alerted to every new episode!)On this week's #MediaSnack we continue our look into the comparative advertising businesses of rivals Facebook and Amazon. Last years, viewers will remember we dissected both companies' advertising business and predicted that Amazon would overtake Facebook in 2020. We revisit this prediction and see if that has become more or less likely since November 2017 when we said: "Facebook had peaked". This week both companies reported their 2018 Q2 numbers.REMINDER! Please take part in "Making a Better Media Pitch" a research collaboration with ID Comms and 4As: https://aaaa.co1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_22YjpRbCBmTaGH3
Never miss your #MediaSnack - subscribe for updates (and click the bell icon to get alerted to every new episode!)Take part in the "Media Pitch Process in the US" survey:https://aaaa.co1.qualtrics.com/jfe/fo...Read Mark Ritson's piece here: https://www.marketingweek.com/2018/07/17/ritson-digital-prefix-stunt-career/
Never miss your #MediaSnack - subscribe for updates every FridayOn this week's #MediaSnack we review the major media events of 2017 in our annual rooftop review (this year from our fancy new roof terrace)Watch to find out what makes out #MediaSnack Top 10 for 2017The #MediaSnack Media Person of the Year 2017:Marc Pritchard from P&G The #MediaSnack Word of the Year for 2018: ACTION2017: CHANGE2016: CONTROL
Never miss your #MediaSnack - subscribe for updates every FridayOn this week's #MediaSnack we look at the phenomenon of British Christmas TV ads, kickstarted by John Lewis, now a dozen or so retailers are investing large sums in building anthemic, must-see TV adverts focused on brands rather than products. We discuss how the Christmas TV advertising market is starting to show similar behaviours from both advertisers and consumers as that of the Superbowl in the US. Some brands have begun teasing their ads before release and people are searching for Christmas ads on YouTube before they are even released. We are agreed that the Christmas TV excitement shows that good advertising works and gets people excited, remembering ads and talking about them. John Lewis has shown how this drives business success. The heightened competition amongst brands creates pressure with produces amazing work. Perhaps this can spread further across the year and improve quality of advertising generally.Here are some of the best worth watching:JOHN LEWIShttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jw1Y-zhQURUTESCOhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qSUkAURUU1IALDIhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJGpOYKXcSEM&Shttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KfaSxIkLslEAMAZONhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H9SCZwh8TvgEDEKA 2014 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jxVcgDMBU94&t2015 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V6-0kYhqoRo2017 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aknucxb0xSoGood Christmas Advertising Week:BBChttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8PstSiTCk74Bad Week:Sainsbury's https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WU50dLLy7CwQuestion of the Week: Are Christmas Ads the Superbowl of the UK? Yes, No, Whatever.... Please vote. Check back for the results next Friday.
Never miss your #MediaSnack - subscribe for updates every FridayOn this week's #MediaSnack we provide our version of the popular British TV game show called Room 101. Room 101 is a BBC comedy television series in which celebrities are invited to discuss their pet hates and persuade the host to consign those hates to oblivion in Room 101, a location whose name is inspired by the torture room in the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four which reputedly contained "the worst thing in the world". George Orwell himself named it after a meeting room in Broadcasting House [the BBC's offices] where he would sit through tedious meetings. (Wikipedia)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_101_(TV_series)On the #MediaSnack version of Room 101, both Tom and David compete to banish some of their greatest media industry annoyances into oblivion, in 4 categories:1. Behaviours of marketers2. Behaviours of agencies or vendors3. Advertising format4. TechnologyNadia, from behind the camera, will be the judge and the winner will get to pick one thing to enter The Room 101 for Media.
Never miss your #MediaSnack - subscribe for new episodes every FridayOn this #MediaSnack special we celebrate the 100th episode by looking ahead at some major trends for 2018. First we quickly look back on what’s happened in the last two years and then lay down three big predictions for media in 2018, from a marketers perspective. It goes without saying that a lot has changed in the media industry in the last two years, but we say it anyway. It’s been a challenging time all around in many respects but the major positive that we’ve seen has been that media has risen higher on the corporate agenda. Marketers are taking media more seriously and applying resources internally to manage this last amount of money. Hopefully, more are seeing media as an investment rather than a cost. This has happened for two reasons. Firstly, marketers are seeing the power media has to drive their business outcomes and therefore striving to make it more accountable and more effective. At the same time media has become hugely more complex and needs more governance and resource to manage it. Second, concerns over the supply chain of media especially in digital has caused marketers themselves to become more accountable and demand greater transparency of how their money flows through the supply chain. This has been highlighted by significant milestones over the last two years notably the work done by the WFA, ANA and ISBA to shine a light on the supply chain, the speeches by P&Gs Marc Pritchard outlining an action plan for media transparency and thirdly the ongoing worries about ad fraud and brand safety. So onto our predictions - here are 3 behaviours that we think will be at the forefront of #MediaChange in 20181. Operating Models for Media - advertisers will define long term internal strategies for media management and build capabilities and process into an operating model for media. This means being clear the value of media, not just the price of media, and determining what resources are required internally and externally. We reference some great research by Matt Green and the team at WFA which highlights the progress that has been made and the clear intentions of WFA members to build up media capabilities and define an operating model.2. Fragmentation of Media Scope - marketers will want to understand the entire process of media activation from data and analytics, insight and strategy through to media activation and tactics. We expect more advertisers to interrogate these processes and identify which parts they need to exert more control over and then build an operating model for media which gives them controls they need. Driving greater accountability and transparency over media budgets to consider them an investment not a cost. This may lead more advertisers to bring some of that capability internally but its more likely to be the upfront data and strategy scope rather than the media buying. 3. Action Plan for Media - we expect many more brands will follow P&Gs lead to define an action plan to reduce wastage of media dollars and implement greater accountability and transparency from the media supply chain. We close episode 100 with some clips from our recent #MediaSnack 100 party where we gathered clients colleagues partners and friends from across the industry to celebrate.
Never miss your #MediaSnack - subscribe for updates every Friday"It is the media mess that is distracting marketers from being great marketers" - that is the hypothesis of this week's #MediaSnack episode.We discuss a hypothesis of how media mess keeps distracting marketers. Over the past couple of years, we've seen a significant decrease in the quality of advertising. Recent reports from publishers, content companies and other ad-funded businesses show that they are now struggling to hit their financial targets. The latest report from GroupM called 'The State of Video' suggests that we are now becoming more intolerant towards advertising. And the biggest indicator if this is the raise of ad-blocking technology. Ad blocker usage surged 30% in 2016, according to a new report from PageFair, a company that helps publishers regain revenue lost to the software. There were 615 million devices blocking ads worldwide by the end of 2016, 62% (308 million) of those mobile. Desktop ad blocker usage grew 17% year-on-year to 236 million. The other interesting piece of research from Harvard Business School shows a negative trends in the audience's attention to TV advertising. The report highlights that the percentage of ads considered fully viewed and getting high attention has decreased dramatically, from 97% in the early 1990s to less than 20% 2012 and so the trend continues. And the trend continues nowadays, as the viewers now have an ability to skip commercials on smart TVs and other devices.The desire to escape from advertising by fast-forwarding commercials and installing ad-blocking software is perhaps a symptom of the poor quality and viewer experience of ads today. Many content businesses have seen the opportunity in offering ad-free experience and built their business models around that. People subscribe to the premium version of Amazon, or get Netflix accounts and watch their favourite shows without ads. A large number of mobile games are also offering ad-free experience in exchange for paid version of the apps.Spotify was also a pioneer in an ad-funded versus a subscription model. Last week, AdAge published an article suggesting that Amazon is developing a free, ad-supported complement to its Prime streaming video service, according to people familiar with its plans. After publication, an Amazon spokeswoman said the company has no plans to create a free, ad-supported version of Prime Video. But if not Amazon then we expect that one of the OTT TV companies will offer an advertising funded free version. This brings to life the concept by Prof. Scott Galloway that "advertising is a tax that only poor people will pay" and you can see how that becomes the reality in this situation. That clearly defines advertising as an irritant to be avoided if you can, which is a damning indictment on the global commutations industry. What has lead us there? The crappy media supply chain is likely the guilty party and has distracted marketers and encouraged then to be lazy in reducing the quality of the advertising experience but targeting more closely, expecting the same results. People accept good quality advertising, what if the deal was, whatever you wanted to do, watch a movie, login to Facebook, play a game that there would always be one great advert? We think that would be a good model and puts the onus on the advert and the placement to be more relevant and of better quality. Next year, following P&Gs lead, more company CMOs will want to stop being distracted by media mess and allow their organisations to focus back on the craft of advertising.
Never miss your #MediaSnack - subscribe for updates every FridayOn this week's #MediaSnack we look at the challenging past year for Facebook and consider exactly how they can maintain their incredible rate of growth. This is going to be hard for a business for which advertising revenue accounts for over 98% of their total revenues. Their growth continues to be meteoric in spite of their scale, with revenues in 2016 growing over 50% year on year. Monthly average users now exceed 2 billion which makes Facebook one of the most adopted inventions in the history of mankind. Where do they go from here? In the last year, alongside this growth has come some dark clouds on the horizon for Facebook in a few key places:1. Metrics - the almost monthly revelations that Facebook has overstated the effectiveness of their advertising products, often shared in2. Accountability - calls for Facebook to drop the walled garden and stop "marking their own homework" and get MRC accredited. 3. Fake news - Facebook being used to manipulate voting in the US4. Censorship - a seemingly confused policy around what is acceptable, behaving like a media company rather than a technology company 5. Data and privacy concerns - recent reporting raised the concern that Facebook is the worlds most sophisticated surveillance operation and their vast revenues from advertising suggest that this ability to monetize user data for targeting advertising is Facebook's greatest value. So, has Facebook's value peaked? We think there are a few important indicators for this. - Will they decide to be a media company?- Have they reached saturation and when do you get the next billion users from?- Minimising the churn of users, especially at the younger end where companies like Snapchat and Musicly are receiving investment t grow which will be focused on stealing away Facebook users.- Amazon - they are chasing ad revenue from Facebook which could be damaging because Facebook maintains a large share (along with Google) of digital advertising in many major Western markets, with Amazon providing a hugely compelling alternative, you'd imagine the risk that Facebook's advertising revenues can only go in one direction. - Data regulations like GDPR will cause users to be more aware of the data they give up to companies like Facebook and get more savvy about the terms and conditions. On this week's Good Week Bad Week we celebrate the amazing Singles Day on Alibaba who posted $25bn revenues in one day, so a great week for them. A Bad Week for anyone hoping to budget for their 2018 trip to Cannes Lions Festival (of creativity and expensive everything) as the owners of Cannes revealed, after some apparent consultation with agencies, the new 'slimmed down" version of Cannes. It appears to be far more of a token trim than a haircut and won't make any perceptible difference to the vast costs endured by agencies and vendors attending en masse. A missed opportunity to make Cannes more relevant to the next generation in our industry.
Never miss your #MediaSnack - subscribe for updates every FridayOn this week's #MediaSnack we take a look at what it takes to market successfully in China and how the landscape is increasingly dominated by platform giants such as Tencent, Alibaba and Baidu. These three giants are frequently compared to the famous Western (American) platforms like Google, Facebook and Amazon but there lies the challenge. China is a major consideration for most global marketers, not least because it represents still a significant growth opportunity, averaging 7% GDP growth per year and with the total spending power of middle class growing even faster still. Goldman Sachs estimate that China's online retail market will more than double in size by 2020 - to $1.7trn so for western marketers this growth is too good not to take seriously, but for China the same rules of digital marketing do not apply largely because the platforms you need to use are different in China that most Western markets. We consider what's commonly referred to as BAT:Baidu - web services (search engine / video / translations/ mapping) - valued $64.7 billionAlibaba -E-commerce - c2c + b2b + b2c - valued $424 billionTencent - investment holding corp (social networks/ gaming/ e-commerce/ web portals) - valued $469 billionThe 3 Chinese tech giants are broader business than their Western counterparts, notably perhaps because they face less internal competition, largely because the Western brands themselves (particularly Google, Facebook are not active in China). For example, Tencent's business splits out into many other operations including:Social NetworksPaymentEntertainmentInformationUtilitiesPlatformsArtificial IntelligenceThe other main differentiator is their scale, Alibaba dwarfs Amazon in so many metrics:Alibaba, China’s biggest e-commerce group, handles more transactions each year than do eBay and Amazon combined 2016 Prime Day vs. Singles Day = $1 billion rev vs. $17.8 billionAdding revenues from Prime day + Black Friday + Cyber Monday = 43% of Singles' Day revenueFurther reading:https://www.warc.com/NewsAndOpinion/News/Alibaba_takes_on_Amazon/39449https://digiday.com/marketing/chinese-tech-companies-venture-unmanned-convenience-stores/?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=digidaydis&utm_source=uk&utm_content=171023https://www.ft.com/content/d5397a08-4667-11e7-8d27-59b4dd6296b8?mhq5j=e7http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/world/china-watch/technology/new-technology-giants/http://www.campaignasia.com/article/alibaba-looks-to-cross-border-orders-as-next-avenue-of-singles-day-growth/440730Good Week:It's a great week for media transparency in the UK - https://gcs.civilservice.gov.uk/news/media-buying-framework-update-draft-framework-agreement-shared/Bad Week:A bad week for you digital evangelists, prophets or whatever you tiresome echo-chamber dwellers call yourselves now. Watch out you crazy kids, Professor Byron Sharp has you firmly in his sights. In an awesome paper Prof Sharp and friends dispel some of the myths you’ve been spouting on conferences stages and in agency pitches for years. Including ACTUAL FACTS! Read this and hang your well-gelled heads https://www.marketingscience.info/are-big-brands-dying/
Never miss your #MediaSnack - subscribe for updates every Friday On this week's #MediaSnack we look at the sudden wave of CEOs departing UK media agencies, 4 big names in one week left their respective media leadership positions. All 4 of the stories seemed to be exclusives to the team at Campaign, links below. What's causing this rush to depart/escape/fire [delete as appropriate]? There may be something in the water, its a good time of year for change of leadership as it allows new blood to impact the next calendar year's planning. But why are the rates of churn amongst agency CEO's increasing and why are the average tenures of agency CEOs decreasing in both London and New York? We consider what is it that makes the media agency CEO job so tough these days and what kinds of skills might be required of the future media agency leadership. 'Its Time For a Change of the Guard at Media Agencies' (Oct 2016)https://blog.idcomms.com/its-time-for-a-changing-of-the-guard-at-media-agenciesOn this week's Good Week/Bad Week we think that its a good week for the UK media industry (despite the leadership losses) as two of the UK's major advertisers launch reviews of their media activity: The UK Government's £150m media investment (currently with Dentsu Aegis in the UK) and SKY's £400m media investment (currently with Mediacom in the UK) will stress test agency capability in Q1 2018, just in time for new agency to prove their mettle. Both pitches have been launched with clear messages of change and demanding greater accountability from media agencies. Further reading:The media agency exodus and an absence of industry leadership by Gideon Spanierhttp://www.campaignlive.co.uk/article/media-agency-exodus-absence-industry-leadership/1447328Media Agencies Facing Leadership Crisis by Seb Josephhttps://digiday.com/media/media-agencies-facing-leadership-crisis/Tracy De Groose from CEO of Dentsu Aegis Networkhttp://www.campaignlive.co.uk/article/tracy-de-groose-step-down-dentsu-aegis-network-uk-ceo/1446922Paul Frampton CEO of Havas Media http://www.campaignlive.co.uk/article/paul-frampton-leave-havas-media-group/1447177Pippa Glucklich, CEO of Starcom http://www.campaignlive.co.uk/article/glucklich-steps-down-starcom-uk-ceo/1446692Nikki Mendonca, CEO OMD http://www.campaignlive.co.uk/article/accenture-hires-omd-emea-boss-mendonca-global-role/1446892Good Week:UK Government Media Reviewhttp://www.campaignlive.com/article/government-launch-140m-media-buying-review-with-transparency-heart/1446551http://www.campaignlive.co.uk/article/building-media-partnership-future/1446546SKY Media Reviewhttp://www.campaignlive.co.uk/article/sky-calls-400m-media-review/1447794Bad Week:http://adage.com/article/media/ana-pulls-ad-mistakenly-landed-breitbart/310867/Question of the Week:
Never miss your #MediaSnack - subscribe for updates every FridayOn this week's #MediaSnack we look at the gathering rumours (and plausible evidence) that one of the major advertising holding companies will be an acquisition target by one of the big consultant or audit firms. These whispers first became acknowledged in Cannes this year when a few people were suggesting a WPP / Accenture merger was being discussed, which WPP quickly refuted. We take a look at two companies that might be in the mix of acquisition talk, Accenture Interactive the 'agency'-like division which has been on an acquisition spree in recent years, most notably buying some creative agencies like Karmarama outright.We compare the relative sizes of Accenture and Publicis to highlight that the consulting giant does indeed dwarf the French marketing services group both in revenues and headcount by more than 4 times. The fortunes of the company are equally different, Accenture has seen a progressive rise in share price over recent years in a straight line that has seen 70% growth, whilst Publicis is at the same level today as it was two years ago. Publicis is likely to be one of the major holding companies which are best positioned to sell, or be bought. The challenge and arguments over leadership which caused 2013's failed Publicis Omnicom merger would seem to be removed with the departure this year of long-standing CEO Maurice Lévy. His successor Arthur Sadoun, who has continued Levy's restructure of the group and is understood to be readying the business for a leaner future, is less likely to be an obstacle to a merger or acquisition. The due diligence prepared ahead of the failed Omnicom deal from 2013 would have given Publicis Groupe a good insight into their business, its strengths and weaknesses and synergies of integration. They will know that the consulting groups still covet Sapient their digital consulting business and would also be keen to acquire stellar agency brand names like Saatchi, BBH and Burnett. We would anticipate a deal like this within the next 6-12 months. But if Accenture is the most likely to buy and Publicis the most likely to sell then is this the perfect marriage? Cultural alignment could be a barrier, although the fact that Accenture has a French CEO might alleviate Publicis shareholder concerns. An alternative might be for Accenture to look at fellow American IPG, whilst the French consultancy Cap Gemini has made noises of their interest in a future acquisition and so might make a better suitor for Publicis. On this week's Good Week Bad Week we celebrate the fact that its a good week for the eager next generation of media agency leadership as 4 agency CEO's announced their departures in the same week leaving gaps for fresh new ideas and new leaders. It has been a bad week for Dentsu-Aegis Network in the UK as their largest client, and one of the UK's largest advertisers, the UK Government announced a review of the contract and a £140m buying pitch planned to start in February next year. The government's lead marketer Alex Aitken has laid out a bold agenda to drive greater transparency this time around and focus on greater value creation from media buying not cost price reduction. ID Comms attended the initial agency briefing on Thursday at HM Treasury with leaders of the UK's major networks agencies and independents, we were pleased to see the government open to a more collaborative approach, setting up a process which will seek input from agencies on the process itself in advance. Question of the Week: Who will Accenture buy next? Publicis, IPG, Whatever.... Please vote. Check back for the results next Friday.
Never miss your #MediaSnack - subscribe for updates every FridayOn this week’s #MediaSnack we reflect on what's driving media pitches in 2017 and what to expect to be figuring in pitch briefs in 2018.*Thank you to COMvergence for sharing some of their data on the global pitch activity this year. You can find out more about them and their research into the global media industry here:http://comvergence.net/***At this time of year, as we enter Q4 it's a good time to reflect on the global media pitch market; the major ones are concluding and marketers begin to refine their thinking for reviewing agency contracts for the year ahead. Tom and David consider the trend of pitches since 2015 which you will remember became known as 'MediaPalooza' because of the unusual volume of media pitches triggered, especially in the USA. The subsequent years have been relatively quieter, driven by marketers reflecting on powerful insights provided by 2016's ANA media transparency report and P&G's Marc Pritchard making a rallying cry to the industry to clean up its act in January 2017. Tom and David are anticipating all this marketer reflection to result in 2018 being another busy year. Some pitches will occur due to natural 3 years cycles following the 2015 gold rush, but other major advertisers will be considering 2018 as the year in which they put their new knowledge and oversight of their media investments to the test. Expect that 2018 pitches focus less on cost savings and more on defining a long-term constructive relationship with a media agency as a business partner, built on principles of trust and transparency and shared values and objectives. With reference to data from a great study called 'Global Media Governance & Guardianship' by the WFA published in August 2017 - #MediaSnack predicts that 5 key themes will become part of 2018 media pitches:1. Liability for fraudulent inventory2. Brand safety3. Control of programmatic4. Data ownership5. Fair agency compensationSome #MediaSnack tips for those advertisers preparing 2018 media pitches: Prepare, think long-term, set a clear vision, create a strong contract, drive better accountabilityOn this week's Good Week Bad Week, we congratulate independent media agencies in the UK, who last week made up 5 of the top 10 most successful agencies in new business in 2017 so far. Its a Bad Week for the ID Comms Library Shelves, who have featured in all 94 episodes so far but will be replaced next week as we move into our new, bigger office in London. Can a shelf itself be left on the shelf....?Further reading:WFA Report: https://www.wfanet.org/news-centre/global-marketers-making-radical-changes-to-media-management/Good Week: Bad Week:RIP the ID Comms Library Shelves...QOTW: What will dominate 2018 media pitch briefs? Talent, Fraud or Pricing?
Never miss your #MediaSnack - subscribe for updates every FridayOn this week’s #MediaSnack we stare into the gigantic dark abyss that is ad fraud. So often quoted in surveys as the thing that worries marketers the most, it remains a mystery and takes many guises, in fact there are over 30 types of ad fraud identified, so far. We consider the scale of the problem, which is difficult to be very precise, and ask the big question most often troubling marketers; who should actually be accountable for tackling ad fraud? We’ve seen some companies, most notably P&G, make their unhappiness with ad fraud very clear and very public. Others have taken more conservative and private approaches. This week in fact we've seen a significant milestone in answering the big question. Taxi app Uber filed a claim against their mobile agency Fetch for losses they claim were caused by ad fraud. If that goes to trial it will test in court, in a very public way and based on evidence, the true accountability of ad fraud. In some ways this represents all advertisers versus all agencies. It will be the jury find that get to review the evidence and decide if it is the advertiser or the agency who is responsible for the undeniable impact of fraudulent traffic and results.In the meantime, we can simply offer our perspective and so on #MediaSnack we look at the three main parties; the marketer, the agency/vendor and the publisher and share what specifically we think they should be doing to help combat the threat and impact of ad fraud. * Methodology for agency ad fraud content assessment:The scores were calculated by an ID Comms assessment of agency published information on ad fraud online on their main website address. Each agency researched was scored out of 25 based on ID Comms assessment criteria below. The areas investigated included accessibility of information, volume of resources and quality of resources5 part assessment criteria as follows, each graded out of 5. Is ad fraud mentioned clearly on agency website home page?Is an agency POV searchable or easy to find on website?What volume of resources are there on ad fraud?What are quality of resources on ad fraud? Ease of next steps to find out more from agencyOn this week's Good Week Bad Week we celebrate the appointment of Annette King as CEO of Publicis Groupe UK, having made a rare move from WPP to their French rivals. Meanwhile, its a bad week for Verizon's Oath we think who, after shelling out billions to pull together the collection of tarnished media assets such as Yahoo!, Tumblr and Tech Crunch launched a brand campaign aimed at advertisers which many thought was a spoof ad. It is so painfully cringeworthy it may do more harm than good. In fact, it resembles an (earlier) spoof ad so closely that it seems that Oath may have inadvertently created a spoof of a spoof ad but done so with serious intent. Is that a double negative? Perhaps its the coolest thing ever made and we are wrong... Further reading:http://www.thedrum.com/opinion/2017/09/25/why-the-fetch-and-uber-lawsuits-should-be-wake-up-call-the-ad-industryhttps://digiday.com/media/ft-warns-advertisers-discovering-ad-fraud-site/https://www.wsj.com/articles/spoofed-online-ads-irk-publishers-and-marketers-1506603602?mod=djemCMOTodayLaunch of Nameles:http://nameles.org/Good Week:http://www.thedrum.com/news/2017/09/27/ogilvy-uk-chief-annette-king-makes-shock-exit-publicis-after-18-yearsBad Week:OATH's new brand spot "Madness"https://youtu.be/t-MfMoTNY5sThe "Generic Millenial Ad"https://youtu.be/KG_i7oWzTyU
Never miss your #MediaSnack - subscribe for updates every FridayOn this week's #MediaSnack we look at the giant opportunity ahead of Amazon to bust the much-feared 'duopoly' of Google and Facebook. So-called because of their dominance of digital marketing spend, the duopoly has accounted for almost all growth in digital media spend in recent years and looked unstoppable. Some have speculated that Snapchat would be the company to break this up but it is becoming clear that Amazon is taking their advertising business seriously at last and have seen rapid growth, albeit from a small base. We look at the comparative sizes of these three tech giants and compare their ad revenue businesses, their opportunities and predict their respective fortunes across the coming 3 years. In short, we predict that Amazon's advertising business will overtake that of Facebook in revenue terms in 2020 and take a huge chunk out of Google's search revenues in the process. Why? Because they have all the pieces of the puzzle ready: They watch and learn before they disrupt and they will have learned a lot in the last couple of years as Google and Facebook have been subject to far greater scrutiny from advertisers. Amazon has secured a share of promotional budgets (rather than advertising budgets) and have permission over user purchase data which is highly valuable to many advertisers. They are beginning to dominate product search in some markets and this will grow through the growth of the Alexa network. Important for many marketers will be Amazon's reassurance over brand safe environments and controls on ad placements. Finally, and probably the winning ingredient is Amazon's total commitment to market orientation (that is being wholly customer focused) which means reinvesting all profits back into products which delight customers (in this case the advertisers) so we expect full transparency and market leading people, service and tools. On this week's Good Week Bad Week we celebrate the latest update from UK marketing trade body ISBA who have revealed that a large cohort of their members have implemented their rigorous media agency contract template and many more are expecting to do so soon. A very bad week for mobile agency Fetch (owned by Dentsu) who have been subject to a lawsuit filed in San Francisco claiming breach of contract. The claim list is brutal, accusing the agency of fraudulent practice and demanding damages to be set by jury trial. If this goes to trial it may expose some of the intricacies and methods employed by agencies to deliver results for advertisers. Whether this goes to trial or not, it looks to be highly damaging for Fetch's reputation unless they can fully and quickly address the claims in public. Good Week:http://www.campaignlive.co.uk/article/isba-claims-brands-using-tougher-agency-contract-review-6bn-media-spend/1444971Bad Week:https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-09-18/uber-goes-on-rare-legal-offensive-suing-dentsu-unit-for-fraudhttp://www.campaignlive.co.uk/article/uber-sues-dentsus-fetch-media-fake-clicks/1444941http://www.campaignlive.co.uk/article/fetch-strikes-back-uber-lawsuit-claims-non-payment/1444989https://digiday.com/marketing/industrial-complex-uber-fetch-lawsuit-wont-change-anything/Question of the Week: Will Amazon build the biggest ad revenue business in the world? Yes, No, Whatever.... Please vote. Check back for the results next Friday.
Never miss your #MediaSnack - subscribe for updates every FridayOn this week's #MediaSnack we look at the Q2 results published by the marketing services groups over the summer and consider the causes and implications. Is this downturn a blip or the new normal? Are the days of holding company dominance and stellar growth rates over? Probably, but we have some ideas how things might play out. On this week's Good Week Bad Week we celebrate the launch of GroupM's new agency, the merger of MEC and Maxus, called WaveMaker. It's a bad week for the "crappy media supply chain" as P&G's Marc Pritchard gives an update on his 5 point media transparency action plan and heads to DMExco next week to share the progress they've made and to issue a rallying cry to the stragglers to shape up or miss out on P&G's vast media investment. Oh, and Bell Pottinger, once one of the world's most powerful PR forces has ruined its own reputation and faces meltdown this week. A very bad week indeed. Further reading:http://adage.com/article/agency-news/invisible-hand-wpp-wednesday-transparency-takes-toll/310217/http://www.moreaboutadvertising.com/2017/08/heres-a-turn-up-is-publicis-on-the-right-track-while-wpp-has-lost-its-way/http://www.campaignlive.co.uk/article/omnicom-continues-organic-growth-lead-rivals/1443022https://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/306145/wpp-reports-organic-decline-shares-tumble.htmlGood Week:http://www.campaignlive.co.uk/article/wpp-unveils-wavemaker-name-merged-mec-maxus-agency/1443769Bad Week:http://www.adweek.com/digital/digital-advertising-is-facing-its-ultimate-moment-of-truth-and-billions-of-dollars-are-at-stake/https://www.theguardian.com/media/2017/sep/07/bell-pottinger-could-go-under-within-days-sources-claimQuestion of the Week: What do you think about the new #MediaSnack? Worse, Better, Whatever.... Please vote. Check back for the results next Friday.
On this week's #MediaSnack we vent a little about the consistently underwhelming experience of seeing companies try and pitch technology solutions to marketers. We make three simple recommendations to help any company to improve the way they sell technology ideas. If you have been on the receiving end of any technology pitches you will probably recognize them. 1. Focus 100% on the client benefit from the start2. Don't forget to be a human. People still buy people even if they are selling technology. 3. Care about the client's business. Sounds obvious? You'd be amazed how many times none of these are considered. Question of the Day: Who delivered the worst technology sales pitch you've seen this year? [just the type of business...]We are taking a little summer break from #MediaSnack and we will be back in Sept with a new office and a new format, have a good August.
In this weeks episode of #MediaSnack Tom and David talk about changes that took place on the advertiser side 12 months after the release of the ANA report.So, everyone has been curious what the ANA's members are actually doing with these insights. Was anyone taking any action? Where was the impact being felt? Well, now we know, because the ANA have surveyed 190 of their members and asked them what they've actually been doing in the year since the report came out. http://www.ana.net/blogs/show/id/45345In the recent survey of its members, ANA found that over 60% of the respondents have taken steps to tackle media transparency in their organisation in some form. One of the key actions was revision and update of the contract terms. There was also a big improvement in the area of media auditing: more advertisers have started to audit their media agencies in the last year. This is a massive improvement, however, there is still a lot of work to be done. David argues that changes like this will gradually get greater traction. "The industry is on the road to restoring trust, but has a long way to go. To preserve marketplace integrity and protect shareholder values, advertisers cannot let up and must continue to pressure agencies for complete transparency. The delays and public denials by agencies (despite reality) cannot continue."http://www.thedrum.com/news/2017/07/20/three-things-the-ana-proposing-advertisers-do-gain-transparency-their-agenciesAt the back of the transparency report, the Department of Justice in the US started to look more closely into media production industry. This investigation is in progress right now, and we think that at some point move to other areas of the industry.That leads us to our question of the day:Will the US Department of Justice investigation into advertising production will move into media at some point?-----Finally, on 31st of July, we are sending out 100 invitations to our #MediaSnack 100 party in London in September. Keep an eye on your inbox.If you think you should be invited, let us know quickly!
On this week's #MediaSnack we just think about Chief Marketing Officer, typically the company's most senior marketer.Check out the Harvard Business Review recent paper "Why CMOs never last"https://hbr.org/2017/07/the-trouble-with-cmosAccording to HBR, 80% of CEOs don't trust their CMO - you can see the pressure that a CMO is under when they don't have the trust of the C-Suite and perhaps that's why their tenure is often shorter than anyone else at that level. HBR also clarify different types of CMO and a framework (presumably for CEOs) to identify which type of CMO you might need for your business. Recently Coca-Cola replaced their departing CMO with a Chief Growth Officer which seems to be blending a sales and marketing role with more pointed focus on making marketing investment more accountable. Its also a reflection on the pressures on the businesses to deliver more short term results and growth. With perhaps less focus on long term brand building. Other companies like Colgate, Coty, Mondelez have also moved to this Growth Officer role - interesting to note that these are large consumer FMCG / CPG businesses. Is this because these companies can often have rather large gaps between marketing and sales culture. Alison Lewis, the CMO of J&J argues in Marketing Week that there is always a need for a senior executive in charge of the brand and that the CMO has always been in charge of growth. So why would you need a new title?https://www.marketingweek.com/2017/07/18/chief-growth-officer-johnson-johnsoThe evolution of the CMO role has got to be a good thing, improving accountability and placing far more scrutiny over marketing investments, especially the huge media budgets. Question of the Day: Will we see more Chief Growth Officers replacing the traditional CMO?
In this week’s #MediaSnack, Tom and David discuss the role pitch consultants at an important time of the year for new business. The start of the summer is traditionally the time when clients announce reviews just before they go away on holiday as well as the moment when pitches announced in Q2 start to approach decision time.Tom also reveals that he’s taking part in a session for the International Advertising Association, alongside Credit Suisse and OMD in a session called Behind the Curtain of Pitching. Tom and David explain how they are engaged by advertisers and what their role is as a strategic consultancy.David argues that the most important role for the pitch consultant is to provide clarity. To work closely with the advertiser to understand their objectives because that will determine how the agencies are stress tested. ID, he says, demands really clear briefings so that each pitch can be designed from the bottom up.He adds that the consultants typically add the greatest value at the beginning of the process because they make the sure that the deliverables are specific so that that goal of the review are precise and accountable.Briefing a consultant requires the advertiser to know four key things: clarity on objectives and outcomes, who the key stakeholders are, what are key timings for the business and where are the barriers to success.Tom says that pitches are about change management – that doesn’t mean the incumbent agency will change – but that they should deliver improvements on both sides whateve the result. These are often complex processes with multiple stakeholders, many of whom haven’t experienced a pitch before, and there can be many millions of pounds, dollars or Euros at stake.This week’s question of the day is: Who works hardest in a pitch?Finally, Tom and David reveal plans for a #MediaSnack 100 party to celebrate the 100th episode in roughly 14 weeks. Contact the ID Comms team if you want to attend.
In this week’s #MediaSnack, Tom and David discuss the issue of awards, and more particularly, the challenges of creating media awards that advertisers really care about.The topic has been triggered by conversations in Cannes, where Publicis announced that it wouldn’t enter any awards for a year, saving a reported $20m (on Cannes solely), and where WPP has also mulled a rethink on its approach.http://uk.businessinsider.com/martin-sorrell-says-people-ripped-off-by-the-cannes-lions-2017-6In part, they argue, the awards backlash was really a backlash against the current Cannes environment, which is overblown and overpriced.However, Tom and David say there is a real issue when it comes to media awards. They are notoriously difficult to judge, and where many awards fail to answer the key question: did the media activity deliver a clear business result.David reveals that during his time working at brands there was a reluctance to release such information because it was simply too sensitive. A lot of brands, he argues, are very uncomfortable about submitting business success data.Many clients don’t really care if they (or their agency) win awards because they are too busy focusing on day job, even if the idea of celebrating success is enticing.Both Tom and David have been judges and say that most entries are quite underwhelming, with little substance. Even those that show how the agency has been insightful and used that to drive strategy can often contain little to demonstrate how effective the plan was for the business.Their solution is to create awards that read more like a business case, shrink the number of categories and reward really disciplined work. What really matters are effectiveness innovation, integration, showcasing brilliant talent and creativity; the ideal category list.At a time when media is so interesting and exciting, they say, now is the time for some business/organisation to take ownership of media awards in its truest form. Brands and marketers will want to contribute – if the definition becomes more celebrated in the right way – where campaigns demonstrate delivery of business KPIs.Finally, Tom and David sign off with a new feature: Question of the Day, this week’s is: Who benefits from the awards, is it the agency or the advertiser? Comments can be left below the line for discussion in future #MediaSnacks.
On this week’s Episode of #MediaSnack Tom and David discuss the value of Cannes and review the most bizarre media pitch that they have ever seen.They start off by sharing some observations from their trip to the Cannes Lions, also known as the Festival of Creativity. Every year, pretty much the entire global advertising industry travels to the south of France to celebrate but actually it’s a good place to meet a lot of clients, outside of the office environment and have some really interesting conversations.David points out that it was very rare that there were any conversations about pitches or about agency structures. Most of the conversations, he says reflected each client’s internal operational requirements; “How should they look to design their own internal structures and ways of working to get the most of out media.”Tom and David argue that these conversations, in one way or another, have been provoked by last year’s ANA report, which encouraged marketers to take control of their media. And that’s exactly what’s happening because those are the questions being asked by CMOs, Marketing/ Media directors responsible for media investments. They realise that it’s not a question of changing the scope of the agency immediately nor about changing agencies/running pitches. They are now focused on the internal operating model and ways of working around media.And that’s where the biggest challenge of all lies, because smart marketers are also considering how to organise themselves better to get the most out of media. They are thinking about ways of taking greater control before thinking about agency rosters. The most important question is: “How should we be operating and where do we start?”Tom and David argue that marketers have to understand the strengths and weakness of their current operating structure and the way that they manage media now. This will help them to identify both the easy wins and the greater opportunities for improvement. Whatever the structure/framework you have, you need to understand where you currently stand, identify they key areas for improvement and then develop a roadmap. Only then can they can go to market and identify the right marketing services, solutions and agency solution but getting that structure properly designed internally is vital. Despite this, we still see advertisers who launch media reviews driven by an opportunity to save money solely and without necessarily strategic ambition. The recent pitch by Sainsbury’s, a UK large supermarket/retail/grocer is a good example. Sainsbury’s has now reversed their decision and will no longer be working with m/SIX (the agency that won the account in Q1). Instead they will be going back to PHD, the incumbent agency that had the account for over 20 years. Tom and David suggest that, perhaps, due to the recent purchase of the Home Retail Group, Sainsbury’s wanted to immediately realise some synergy savings.It is a common situation, which we see a lot when big mergers happen. We often decline such pitch projects because we know it’s going to become a race to the bottom on cost without defined strategic ambition. In the last few years we’ve just seen a whole number of these where the internal operating model, the structure, the actual requirements of a media agency have not been defined at all. Our approach is always to go back to the client and offer to help them get their own internal house in order. If you’re going to pitch media, prepare, get some advice, do it properly and involve your stakeholders throughout the business.
On this week's #MediaSnack we are talking about training, knowledge and skills in media. In the last of 7 episodes dedicated to looking at the impact of the 2016 Media Transparency Report from the ANA we pick up on one of the ANA's biggest recommendations: Advertisers should plug gaps in media knowledge. Tom and David discuss the types of training they have been delivering to major advertisers and members of the major advertising trade bodies. We've seen some good progress in this area, especially amongst procurement stakeholders keen to better understand the processes around media, where the opportunities are for improvement and particularly the technical language and concepts of media. Tom has just completed learning of his own on the Marketing MBA with Prof Mark Ritson and shares that it highlights a big gap across the industry that many in the more executional (and more modern) disciplines like Social and programmatic often don't have basic understanding of strategic marketing principles. ID Comms published a report into Global Media Training last year, you can download the report for free here:https://blog.idcomms.com/brands-failing-to-provide-quality-training-in-media-skills
On this week's #MediaSnack we consider how strategy is more important these days than media buying in determining success and giving a competitive advantage to marketers. As we continue our theme of looking at the key areas of change a year after the ANA's Media Transparency Report, this week we focus on 'Media Thinking', which includes a strategic approach to media, the quality and process of good strategy and planning and what actually drives business success for marketers. For the last decade, the media industry has been on a race to the bottom, obsessed about lowering the price of media and treating it more like a commodity rather than a lever for growth. The entire media industry has been largely engineered around this concept: Giant media buying agencies, giant media selling companies and giant media auditing companies. This has created an asymmetric marketplace with far more many advertisers on the 'buy' side than there are agencies and vendors (who have largely consolidated into a handful of dominant players and in some places may operate more like a cartel than an open market). This asymmetry is about to change. What's changing all that is technology: Tech which is empowering marketers with access to information and the tools to take a more active role in media decision making, and forcing a more transparent marketplace to evolve (we are still some way of that, give it a few years). We consider if, once a marketer is empowered with data and analytics, that they become the smartest component of an asymmetric system, they become the ultimate decision maker (its their money after all) and therefore will be able to control more media buying decisions, ultimately setting the price of media based on how they value it. This requires a fully open and democratic marketplace, but that's just a matter of time before the legacy conflict of interest and resistance from the larger players in the supply chain to be eroded. Next up, we consider a report from EACA (the European Association of Communications Agencies) which has just published a report into the standards of media auditing, calling for anyone in the broad space of advising advertisers (media audits, contract compliance, price benchmarking, pitch management and other advisory services). You can access the full report here and its well worth a read. http://eaca.eu/media-auditing-report/Next, and somewhat related to thoughts about media audit practice, we read a great thought piece by Dan Gilbert, CEO of BrainLabs written in The Drum about how TV will actually become fully able to be bought programmatically. This has been a lingering question and for many an indication of how Programmatic might only be 'one' way that media will be bought. Dan shares our perspective that ALL media will be bought programmatically at some point soon. His piece is an excellent case for HOW the world's biggest and richest media (yes, that's TV) will shift to a fully programmatic model soon. Well worth a read. Tom and David consider how this will completely change the media auditing business, because when all media is traded in an auction style, then there is zero need for pool benchmarking of media pricing (actually it becomes impossible to do) and little need for historic media performance audits. So what happens to the media auditors then? Well, like everyone else they adapt or die. http://www.thedrum.com/opinion/2017/0...Finally, we are off to Cannes next week, see you on the beach.
On this week’s #MediaSnack we mark the one-year anniversary of the landmark Media Transparency Report published by the Association of National Advertisers on 7th June 2016. In the last few weeks, we’ve been counting down to this date and considering the various impacts and changes that have been triggered by the report. This week we devote the episode to Media Technology and consider what’s happened in the previous 12 months and what are likely to be the changes we will see for the future. It is hard to think of anything that is transforming marketing and media more than technology, and the last year has seen some dramatic changes both in the technology market and also interestingly the attitude and behaviours of marketers towards data and technology. We discuss how data and analytics are no longer a fringe consideration or something which marketers are happy to automatically outsource to third parties, we have observed and consulted with many advertisers this year looking to get control of their own data, build analytics capabilities and start to understand the impact that media investments make on business outcomes. Tom and David can see a clear trend for advertisers wanting these skills to be far more within their own control, blending customer data, marketing campaign data and their own business KPIs to have (sometimes for the first time) a perspective on the VALUE of media not just the price. This has a beautiful knock on effect into how media will be bought and sold in the future, because once the buyer (the advertiser) knows the value of media then they know clearly the price they are prepared to pay for it. In a world where technology is also transforming the media buying market, making it more transparent and subject to supply and demand (auction) pricing, then the buyer demand can properly set the price. We expect that technology will slowly revolutionise the media buying market to a point where is becomes fully open, democratic and transparent – a simple auction based marketplace where buyers and sellers interact to set a price defined only by supply and demand, rather than a vendor’s rate-card or agency mark-up. In that world, buying at scale ceases to give competitive advantage, whilst buying smarter (by using data and analytics) is where competitive advantage in media will lie. In the last year we have also seen massive progress in accountability and measurement for media investments. The ANA report triggered more interest amongst senior marketers for media dollars to be held to account and that has required better standards and processes for measurement. The most vocal advocate for improved measurement has been Marc Pritchard at P&G who has suggested that the company will not be placing media dollars into companies that cannot be measured according to third party verification and consistent standards. This has led many vendors and technologies to seek accreditation from companies like the Media Rating Council (MRC). We have also seen more consistent use of viewability standards and platforms like Google and Facebook opening up to third party audit and not “marking their own homework” The greater demand for transparency and disclosure has lead to changes across the media supply chain, with many of the large agency groups also making moves to provide more transparency operating models, notably Havas’ recent launch of a fully disclosed media buying model, which has met with mixed support from across the industry but a sign that agencies are listening to the new demands for accountability and transparency from advertisers.
On this week’s #MediaSnack we start with news that GroupM, the world’s largest media buyer and ‘parent’ to four of the world’s leading media agency networks is going to merge two of them, creating a group of three agencies and making room for recent digital agency acquisition Essence to become a more focused part of GroupM service offering to advertisers. We continue our countdown to the one year anniversary of the ANA’s Media Transparency Report , this week looking at Media Trading, that is the buying and paying for media inventory and we consider how that has evolved and what, if anything, might be as a result of the ANA media reports and guidelines. So, firstly, what has actually changed in the world of media buying? The ANA report was really largely about media buying and they drew attention specifically to the WAY media is bought in the US. The ANA report highlights that in some places, agencies might be making additional undisclosed income from vendor side, which was steering media buying decisions. A lot of the issues highlighted pointed to the need to clearly define whether the media agency acted as Principal or Agent under the contract. And we know, a few companies now have made public statements in this area, notably P&G revealing that they are changing all media agency contracts to ensure the agency always acts as agent not principal. Chief Brand Officer Marc Pritchard admitted even P&G been surprised when they found out income places the agency was acting as principal. This is probably the biggest impact to the way media is bought, directly attributable to the findings of the ANA Media Transparency Report. We are seeing that more and more advertisers are firstly aware of the distinction of agent versus principal and the implications of both, then making clear decisions which approach suits them best. We are observing clearer language in contracts with media agencies to determines principal or agent status. In the last 12 months since the ANA report was published we’ve also observed clearer differences in how advertisers view the resources they need to buy media in traditional (old world legacy) media and digital (future) media, (with some blurring of boundaries taking place with regard to those "digitising channels" such as DigitalOOH). What we observe is that advertisers big and small are starting to make strategic plans for the longer term future of media buying. Nothing is certain but increasingly advertisers are seeing that their requirements for media buying services will be met from a number of different sources, some a network media agency, some might be a programmatic specialist for example, some might be activated internally via better self service tools, some might be negotiated direct with vendor. Whatever the right model for you, its a sure bet that media buying is about to become more open, fragmented and more automated, so hence advertisers are investing time and resources to plan for that future and create a model which gives them the flexibility to adjust over time. Still, there are some pitches which are still attracting negative headlines for appearing to be focused largely on reducing the cost of media. One example from this week is the coverage US TelCo 'Sprint Mobile’ attracted after their recent media pitch. The AdWeek headline “To Cut Costs, Sprint Picks Horizon Media to Handle $700m Media Business”
On this week's #MediaSnack we continue our countdown to the one year anniversary of the ANA's media transparency report, looking at the significant areas of change in the industry that we believe have been impacted by the ANA's findings. Tom is in San Diego this week attending the ANA's big marketing procurement conference called 'Advertising Financial Management' and reviews some of the early conference sessions. We focus on this episode on Media Terms of Business, specifically around agency payment models. Tom and David review recent reports in this area issued by the Association of National Advertisers, the US marketers trade body, representing 750+ brands, $200bn of media investment and a strong proponent of greater agency accountability. You can download a 7 page summary of the report here:http://www.ana.net/miccontent/show/id/kf-2017-trends-agency-compensationThe findings are equally insightful and puzzling in some key areas:1. Suggests a decline in the use of performance-based models, not sure we agree with that trend based on our experience working with large advertisers around the world in the last 12 months 2. Good to hear of more senior executive involvement in decision making around how to pay for external resources, which we believe will lead to more progressive payment models and more scrutiny given to how external agencies are performing and held accountable for performance 3. One alarming statistic suggested that 50% of ANA members we not aware of the 2016 media transparency report. Perhaps the data is not truly reflective of sentiment, we encourage ANA to qualify this, it got a lot of attention and an update of how effective the report has been would be helpful. 4. The report suggests a rise in commission payments for media agencies, but this is from a low base and likely to be driven by the way advertisers are paying for some programmatic media buying services. The rise doesn't suggest advertisers are shifting from fee to commission as a trend. We close this episode reviewing the news that the world's largest advertiser P&G has concluded their long-running media agency pitches across Europe. Not huge changes (as we anticipated, it's hard to move such large accounts, so if it ain't massively broke...). This review was under huge scrutiny and gathered a lot of industry attention not just because of P&Gs scale and influence but also because this was the first test of the media agency community since P&G's Chief Brand Officer Marc Pritchard laid out his Media Transparency Action Plan in January this year. In addition, it was to be the first major test in Europe of Omnicom's new media agency Hearts & Science (which was created around P&Gs brief in 2015 in US). As it transpired Hearts & Science was not successful in exporting their US model into Europe and P&G opted to consolidate media in the U.K. into Publicis Media which is actually a cross group solution including a number of Publicis media, creative, digital and data companies. This is a major victory for Publicis (and perhaps a perfect swan song for departing CEO Maurice Levy) and a huge blow to Omnicom's Hearts & Science because it calls into question the validity of the "groundbreaking" agency model. Hearts & Science was developed in the US for P&G, and for them to now reject that model in Europe suggests there's maybe nothing special (or especially innovative) about the model after all. Either that or Publicis have managed to iterate the innovative agency model further in a way more convincing to the world's most influential and demanding advertiser.
On this week's #MediaSnack we continue our countdown to the one year anniversary of the ANA's Media Transparency Report by looking at another area of significant change, this week we are looking at Media Talent. We consider whether brands have heeded the ANA's recommendations and installed senior media leadership (such as the Chief Media Officer, per Bill Duggan's article in AdAge). How have agency structures and hires changed in the last 12 months? We also report on the launch of a new LinkedIn Group called The Chief Media Officers (get in contact for an invitation to the group, meet your peers and join the discussion). The Group is dedicated to advance the definition and profile of media leadership. David reports on what he's seeing in major media agency pitches and if agency talent is shining through or being lost somewhere. Finally, Tom and David consider what kind of agency talent the big consulting firms might be eyeing up as they move more into the media buying space.
On this week's #MediaSnack we begin a countdown to the one year anniversary of the Media Transparency Report published by the Association of National Advertisers on 7th June 2016. So across the coming weeks on #MediaSnack we will look into some areas that we think have shown significant changes in the 12 months since that report. First up we look at MEDIA TRANSPARENCY and bring news of a session which Tom Denford hosted at the Festival of Media in Rome on 9th May with Gerry D'Angelo, the recently appointed Global Media Director of P&G, the world's largest advertiser. Tom shares details of his fireside chat with Gerry and notes that this Q&A is a continuation of the narrative started by P&G's Chief Brand Officer Marc Pritchard in a series of keynote speeches on Media Transparency earlier this year. Also discussed within the theme of MEDIA TRANSPARENCY is news that Vivendi has bid to acquire a controlling stake (60%) of the Havas Group which has raised some eyebrows and concern over whether a major content business (selling advertising inventory) should also own a media buying business which perhaps should be acting wholly neutrally and objectively from the supply side. Is this a conflict of interest and to what extent will the new Vivendi owned Havas Group need to reassure the market of their integrity? We expect this will lead to a big play on media transparency from Havas to position this deal as a positive one for advertisers.
In this week’s #Mediasnack Tom and David discuss the rise of the consultants and ask where do they go next in the battle against the holding companies.They look at the latest Ad Age analysis of the advertising market. The figures show the speed at which the management consultants have gained revenue from marketing services. In just five years, they have moved from 0.6% share to a 12% share.The management consultancies are also growing significantly faster than the holding companies so would expect to continue to gain share in the year to come.Tom and David point out that this growth comes entirely from strategic thinking and creativity, arguably commercialising an area where the holding companies have failed.These numbers come out at the same time as the big holding companies announce their Q1 results. By contrast, they are a mixed bag with an average 1.7% organic growth year on year. Sir Martin Sorrell warned that competitors had been making commitments to advertisers that were unrealistic.The next step for the consultancies is to start buying media. Tom and David argue that they are likely to come up with a smart and more transparent offer than what is currently on offer from the holding companies.However, they will have to address some perceived conflicts. Tom and David believe that their current business of auditing is unlikely to be commercially attractive enough to stop them making the decision to move towards buying.The result of all this change, they argue, is more choice for CMOs. The challenge for brands will be to be much clearer about their scope of work and the way they chose to stress test new and old entrants to the market.Ultimately, the holding companies will have to raise their game because the rules and the competitive set are changing dramatically.
What DOES it take to write the perfect media brief? We were inspired to focus on agency briefing by a piece of recent research issued by the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA) the global marketing trade body. The research asked leading marketing and agency professionals to rate the quality of briefing. It was a revisit from the same study in 2014 and shows a small but positive improvement in sentiment around the quality of briefings. You can read the full research in a blog post by WFA Head of Marketing Capabilities Rob Dreblow here:http://www.wfanet.org/blog/knowledge/how-does-your-agency-rate-your-brief/It prompted Tom and David to consider what is required to succeed in briefing agencies, especially in media which, as a marketing discipline, has got way more complex. They suggest that writing briefs according to a good template and format itself is not the major challenge and is just the tip of the pyramid. The real challenge is engineering an agency (or a roster of agencies) to be properly set up for success. This involves defining a clear scope of work, setting realistic KPIs and paying for agencies based on performance and delivering against KPIs. For example, if a media agency is just scoped to buy media and is paid on commission and the only KPI is a good audit result, then they won't be able to respond appropriately to an integrated brief or even a more progressive media brief. These governance elements form the 'base' of the pyramid and enable good quality briefing to produce the best work. Writing an integrated brief is easy, running an integrated roster of agencies is hard and takes a lot of work to set up for success. Once you have all these elements in place, you then need to be able to properly evaluate the work coming back from the agency or agencies. An integrated brief requires you to provide direction without being prescriptive, you are giving your agencies permission to recommend solutions and so you have to be capable of making decisions. We find that often, especially regarding media, this is a gap in capabilities within marketing teams, having the depth of media knowledge to be able to decipher media strategies and plans and make the right investment decisions. It all starts with a commitment to brief better and understand the value that can be unlocked by briefing properly. It takes some work to be great at briefing, it's more than a template.
Despite all the noise and negativity around programmatic, the narrative is slowly changing. Advertisers understand that programmatic is a marketing technique not a technology. In this week’s #MediaSnack Tom and David discuss three thoughts on the NEXT step for Programmatic:1. It is not going away. Start getting excited about the opportunity of programmatic and believe that it will become simpler, easier and more empowering and inspiring, stop fearing the noise and the complexity, lean-in and be prepared to take some control. 2. Start refining a simple strategy now which will prepare you for success in a simpler programmatic future. We do this in a 4 part framework (Data, Knowledge, KPIs & Culture). This is still a nascent industry, everyone is still in a test and learn loop of continuous improvement and nobody should consider themselves “behind the curve” 3. Consider the barriers and silos internally that are going to hinder your success in programmatic. These could be fundamental, such as aligning marketing and sales. In a Programmatic future, both sales and marketing need to influence and guide Programmatic together. The closer these disciplines are aligned now the easier it will be to succeed in future. Continued silo thinking will lead to disadvantage, this needs to be addressed. In many ways, the programmatic sub-industry today is like the early Personal Computer market, complex and technical, obsessed with features rather than benefits, layered, commoditized selling, vendor driven and price focused. Tom and David argue that marketers should prepare themselves for the "Apple Mac of programmatic", a future market which is simple, intuitive, plug-and-play, trusted, focussed on the 'what not the how' and is empowering for marketers, to inspire and facilitate better marketing.When Programmatic is as easy as plug-and-play, advertisers will be ready to self-serve, self-buy, self-manage. That doesn't mean everyone will in-house it all, but it will be far easier for advertisers to take increasing control of media buying themselves. This, in turn, will change the shape of the industry and the role that agencies, vendors, ad-tech and others will play.
In this week’s #MediaSnack, Tom and David focus on the third and most recent speech by P&G marketing boss Marc Pritchard. This time out Marc addressed the leaders of the world’s agency community at the 4As ‘Transformation’ conference in Los Angeles. The 4A’s is the US trade association for agencies and this their big agency conference.http://www.thedrum.com/news/2017/04/04/pg-s-marc-pritchard-says-ad-landscape-needs-get-simpler-and-consolidate His message to US media agencies was very clear “We want you to innovate but right now, job one is leading media transparency. We need to clean up - now” By choosing to deliver the third part of this media transparency action plan right ‘in the lion’s den’ of the agencies’ own conference platform, Marc Pritchard was making sure there was no room for misunderstanding.http://blog.idcomms.com/the-week-that-changed-media-forever Like in his previous keynotes at IAB and ANA conferences, his language is plain, unambiguous and compelling. This was a powerful message not just because P&G is the world’s biggest advertiser but also because he was clearly channelling the collective frustrations of many of the world’s advertisers. Tom and David argue that the power of his message was its beautiful simplicity. With the wisdom and clarity of someone who truly understands the challenges of marketing in the digital era, Marc was able to condense industry jargon into some clear, direct messages to the agency community. He laid out clear expectations of action he thinks they need to make.http://content.idcomms.com/mediachange-webinar-marc-pritchard-of-pgs-media-transparency-action-plan-what-now The first was that the complexity of the media supply chain was not P&Gs problem to fix, it is the agencies’ problem. He didn’t want to know about it, he just wanted them to solve it so that marketers could be freed up to make smart decisions. The second was that they needed to solve the transparency issue. Only then would his olive branch that agencies would be trusted much more and become true partners start to bear fruit. David and Tom highlight the fact that nowhere in this presentation (or the previous two) did Marc actually talk about saving money or reducing costs, in fact he talked about rewarding agencies for the talent they bring to the table. They argue that Pritchard’s three speeches this year – before this he spoke at the IAB and ANA – have encouraged advertisers to take greater control of their media, to have a view of what it can do for their business. Hopefully the medium to long-term impact of Marc’s action plans and call to action, will be fewer brands who merely think media is a cost and think it’s a good idea to commoditise agency scope, fees and payment terms through blind eAuctions. Those short-sighted brands looking to evaluate agencies largely on these commercial terms are missing the opportunity Marc is describing, to unlock a new level of trust, transparency and partnership with their media agencies, which actually focuses on growing brands and driving a business outcome, rather than a race to the bottom.
We are on YouTube. Is anyone still there....? So, on this weeks’ #MediaSnack (not that anyone in adland will see it having decided to boycott of YouTube), Tom and David sink their teeth into the big juicy story that won't go away, the ‘scandal’ of Google allowing advertisers to be placed against extremist and unsavory content. So, who is actually to blame? Well, its marketers of course. Really. We will explain why and what can be done about it.
ID Comms is hiring!We are expanding fast and are looking for brilliant people in all positions to grow our teams in London and New York. If you are interested to join our company please click and send us your details.http://idcomms.com/contacts/#join-us-...ID Comms Summer InternshipOur annual internship programme opens for registration in April, get in early if you are at college or recently left and want to gain rich experience in marketing consulting.http://idcomms.com/contacts/#join-us-...#MediaChange Webinar Weds 22nd March 17Register Herehttp://content.idcomms.com/webinar-id...In this episode of #MediaSnack Tom and David are looking into more #MediaChange taking place, specifically within the agency landscape. They discuss recent news about Havas merging media and creative companies into a single P&L, is this a move back to full-service management? Also, Accenture Interactive are providing services for advertisers to in-house programmatic media buying.You may recall, that in January, on the first #MediaSnack episode of 2017 David and Tom announced that CHANGE is their media word of the year. And they discussed how this change will affect the industry from change amongst advertisers, media agencies and greater accountability.Last week Havas Group announced that they are merging their media and creative services under single P&L. We have seen other holding groups gathering their divisions in single locations, but the Havas move goes further, fully aligning full marketing services, in theory making it easier for those clients wanted an integrated service.Tom and David suggest that this may be a response to advertisers fragmenting their media scopes of work. Advertisers are increasingly looking to identify best in class suppliers along the entire marketing communications chain. Allowing clients to access best talent and solutions without any commercial barriers gives Havas Group more flexibility in theory.We live now in a “Post-consolidation” worldIn the last couple of years, major advertisers have gone through some form of consolidation. The most recent example is PSA’s global media review that was announced this week looking to consolidate media spending into a single agency globally. Over the last few years ID Comms has helped many advertisers to manage agency pitches where clients were looking to gather their billings together and work with one or two media agency partners in a consolidated way. We are now seeing more advertisers looking beyond that, having driven cost-efficiency from consolidation the new question is “how to we improve effectiveness?” and that requires a different brief, a different agency scope and a different type of pitch.Moving media buying away from media buying agencies?Next, Tom and David discuss a comment from Accenture Interactive that they are now helping advertisers to move programmatic buying services away from agencies and to in-house teams. This is a big play and makes a lot of sense as a natural extension service based on Accenture’s expertise with IT systems, their high-level consulting relationships and increasing capabilities in marketing services.
In this week’s #MediaSnack, Tom Denford and David Indo reflect on last week’s ANA Media Conference in Orlando. They talk about discussions around media pitches, the impact of P&G’s Marc Pritchard’s presentation and the wider changes that it is driving.First, Tom was part of a panel that discussed media reviews. Also featured were Kathleen Brookbanks, COO at Hearts&Science and Kelly Colbert, VP Social media at US Banks.For him the most interesting questions were around agency evaluation. These indicated that brands are moving away from purely looking at the commercial elements, but also testing agency capabilities and cultural fit.Next, Tom talks about the keynote from Marc Pritchard. It was very quick, almost impatient, as if he was briefing the attendees, rather than delivering a speech.Essentially his message was that we’re all in this together and everyone needs to take action. Don’t be put off by “head fakes" – his sporting analogy for rubbish excuses not to take action. For more details of Marc's keynote, read here http://blog.idcomms.com/the-week-that-changed-media-forever.The audience of US marketers were clearly enthused by the presentation and when attendees were asked if they were going to take action, all the advertisers raised their hands.Pritchard’s pressure is clearly starting to have an impact but there was also a note of caution from the CEO of the MRC. Despite Google and Facebook saying they are open for the audit, the process of accreditation could take some time. In short it is too early to get excited.Finally, Tom and David announce their next #MediaChange webinar on March 15 – 3PM GMT 11AM ET. The webinar will discuss the results of ID Comms’ 2017 Global Media Thinking survey which highlights the perceived failures of advertisers take a lead on media and of agencies to offer media neutral planning.Sign up here http://content.idcomms.com/webinar-id-comms-strategic-media-thinking
In this special episode of #MediaSnack Tom is joined by Bill Ryerson, founder and president of Population Media Center. Population Media Canter is a non-profit organisation that uses media to change lives of people around the world. It works to educate people about health, social norms and environment by creating entertaining serial dramas. It works to change social norms on key issues related to women’s rights and reproductive health by creating long-running series featuring characters that evolve into role models for the watching audience. In African countries, where radio is the most consumed media, PMC works with local production companies to create relevant radio dramas. Listeners are getting so emotionally attached to these series that they even naming their children after the main characters. This shows a significant power of this initiative and proves that partnership with PMC gives a great opportunity for brands.In this exclusive interview Bill shares some impressive statistics from PMC’s Ethiopian project that was aiming to change attitudes of population towards HIV testing and family planning and attracted 46% of Ethiopian population as regular listeners. The married women who were listening to the series dramatically increased reported use of family planning products from 14% to 40% by the end of the program.PMC also creates TV dramas and in the US “East Los high” remains in the top five on Hulu for all four seasons and is now on season five. East Los High targets Hispanic teenagers and educates them about teen pregnancy, obesity and many other issues. Online data shows that viewers of East Los High were increasing their visits to reproductive health and other health service websites. Many years ago soap production companies used to funding “soap operas” to increase their sales, now PMC works with brands and individual donors to create stories that are changing lives around the world. ID Comms partnered up with PMC in 2016 and to find out how you or your company can contribute to the great work that PMC does please ask ID Comms for an introduction.
On this week's #MediaSnack we are excited to see the digital media behemoths Google and Facebook, so dominant of global digital media investment, softening their stance on allowing external verification and measurement. Are the walls around their highly successful gardens finally coming down after a bit of recent pressure from P&G?http://blog.idcomms.com/pg-rewrites-the-rules-of-digital-marketingFacebook and Google have both confirmed that they will provide more data to the main third-party measurement partners Moat, DoubleVerify and Integral Ad Science and that these three will be audited by the Media Ratings Council (which is the independent, industry-funded medîa audience accreditation service, founded in the 60's).Facebook made their concessions in a meeting with the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) which came shortly after ANA Chair and P&G executive Marc Pritchard had delivered a powerful speech to the media industry calling for greater transparency of digital media measurement and the end of "walled gardens" that is media platforms not allowing external verification, essentially marking their own homework. Google separately announced their change of policy to allow more external verification, but claimed their announcement was not prompted by Facebook's first move nor "a reaction to industry pressure....". Go figure. Next up we discuss, also related to Marc Pritchard's speech, details of an exclusive ID Comms webinar we hosted last week with over 100 marketing and procurement leaders from around the world. We had attendees from as far wide as San Francisco, New York, Europe, Dubai and Singapore. You can access the full #MediaChange webinar recording here for the next few weeks.http://content.idcomms.com/mediachange-webinar-marc-pritchard-of-pgs-media-transparency-action-plan-what-nowIn the webinar, we provided some action-focused advice to advertisers on what they should be considering following Marc's speech and how it might impact their own businesses. We looked specifically at Marc's five-point "Media Action Plan" and hosted a guest panel to dig into the areas of measurement and viewability, contract compliance and TAG certification to combat ad-fraud. Thanks to all those that attended and provided some amazing questions for us and our special guest panel. Finally, on this episode, we look ahead to the ANA Media Conference (#ANAMedia) which is taking place in Orlando next week. https://twitter.com/search?src=typd&q=%23anamediaInterestingly the keynote is being delivered by none other than ANA Chair Marc Pritchard so the industry will be listening closely to see what follow ups there will be from the Action Plan speech. Tom will be at the conference and be reporting back on a future #MediaSnack.
On this week’s special #MediaSnack, Tom has a new co-host, Bob Liodice, the long-standing CEO of top US marketing trade body The Association of National Advertisers.
REGISTER FOR WEBINARWant to know WHAT the speech by Marc Pritchard P&G means for your business? Register NOW for an exclusive ID Comms MediaSnack Webinar on 15th Februaryhttps://app.webinarjam.net/register/25846/53a44efeb9----On this week's #MediaSnack we consider the announcement by P&G to launch a media agency pitch in some key European markets including U.K., Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Nordics and Ireland with estimated media budgets across the region around $500m. We expect the major agency groups to be invited, certainly WPP, Omnicom, Publicis and DentsuAegis and this will be one they will all want to win, for different reasons. The scale of the pitch is obviously significant but the reason it's likely to be one of the more interesting pitches of the year is that it comes at a time when P&G have gathered a lot of attention following a speech by Marc Pritchard their Chief Brand Officer. Marc delivered ”the most important marketing speech of the last 20 years” (according to Professor Mark Ritson) at the IAB leadership conference in New York. You can view the #MediaSnack perspective on the speech inEpisode 63https://youtu.be/JeTiPNvQSL8So the significant impact of this P&G pitch is that it will test agencies under this intense scrutiny. The wider implications are that the industry will inevitably regard the winner of the P&G account to have delivered to Marc Pritchard's high standards, and by implication that the losing agencies fell short of expectations. For relative ‘newbie’ Hearts & Science this will be a major test too. A win for them really validates that new media agency model and will set a new blueprint for media agencies and other groups to follow. A loss could be regarded as catastrophic to Hearts & Science's ambitious international expansion plans and will surely be pounced on by the other agency groups of an indication that Hearts & Science has an Achilles heel after all. A win for one of the other groups would help them position themselves as “more transparent” than the others, whether fairly or not. Such is the impact of having a P&G endorsement in your agency. It is possible that the other agency groups will use the P&G brief to forge their own disruptive media agency model, much in the way Omnicom had the opportunity to do in 2016 with P&Gs brief in US, which as we all know created Hearts & Science, the most successful media agency launch of all time. It is under the most intense pressures that diamonds are formed after all. For other advertisers planning media pitches in Europe in 2017, they will want to watch P&G closely. These scale of pitches like this, which will attract such focus from the agency groups, presents a risk as agencies apply all their resources to win P&G. This means not just good pricing, added value and other commercial elements, but also the agency’s top talent, most strategic creative thinkers and the best innovations. Everyone will be in the queue behind P&G for the next couple of months. ID COMMS WEBINARWednesday 15th February 10am EST / 3pm UK / 4pm CETJoin us for an exclusive webinar in which we look into the action plan of Marc Pritchard’s Media speech. We will look at some immediate, medium and long-term actions you might want to consider taking in response. We will be joined by an expert panel who can share perspectives on viewability, digital measurement, TAG certification and contract transparency. We will allow time for Q&A so sign up, register your place and please submit questions!REGISTER HERE:https://app.webinarjam.net/register/25846/53a44efeb9
In this week's episode of #MediaSnack David and Tom discuss the #MediaChange rallying cry issued by P&G's Marc Pritchard on the IAB Annual Leadership Marketing conference.Change is coming to the digital ad market. That much can be assured in 2017 because Procter & Gamble has decreed that it will no longer put up with the ecosystem as it works today.CMO Marc Pritchard recently told the US IAB Media Leadership conference that he and his company were calling time on current practices. Anyone who wanted P&G money would have to make radical changes by the end of the year.Central to his critique of how the industry works was the need to deliver transparency, reform supply chains, adopt common standards on viewability and open up to third party metrics.He accepted that advertisers had to take some of the responsibility for the current situation – even P&G had accepted these compromises in the race for digital firsts – and most had demanded cheap media and lowered fees.The message was powerful not just because it was delivered at the IAB – around a third of total ad spend goes on digital – but also because of the way it was delivered. The tone was calm, considered but also exasperated and defiant. The challenge was put into the context of the fundamentals of marketing and the challenges for P&G to drive a business outcome. Pritchard’s words carry great weight, not only is he the CMO of the world’s biggest-spending advertiser but he’s also just taken over as president of the US ANA. Many marketers across the US were looking for leadership following 2016’s media transparency bombshells.Some are confused by the sheer complexity of the challenge and don’t know where to start. P&G’s public roadmap helps them identify the first wins on the journey to a better relationship.While this a P&G initiative it's also a call to action for the industry. Other companies now have an obligation to act – and many already are quietly making changes to the way they operate.His willingness to accept some of the blame for the current situation was welcome but he called out agencies acting as principal and when challenged but admitting that they had to do so because the “fee doesn’t cover your expenses”. Agencies may have been acting in within the wording of the contract but that doesn't mean they should have behaved in this way.The question the industry needs to answer is how other marketers should respond, particularly those that don’t have the resources and budget leverage to make the likes of Facebook and Google behave differently.ID Comms has been promoting the notion of 2017 as a year of #mediachange and invites everyone to participate with their own thoughts and comments. Future editions of #mediasnack will address those contributions.Central to Pritchard’s manifesto was the wider notion that brands needed to change their agency or change their contract to ensure new behaviours become established – while some will pitch their account, others might go down the renegotiation route.Marketers also need to look in the mirror and consider not just their contract rights but also their behaviours as a client to the agency. CMOs need to ask themselves: “am I clear about my KPIs, the scope of work and am I paying the agency fairly for the value they create?” True #mediachange is about more than just negotiating new terms, marketers need to consider their media governance model, and whether they view media as an investment in growth or a cost to be managed downwards. It’s also worth noting that while Pritchard’s comments were broad, they were especially focused on the digital media business and the supply chain. The ANA’s own research said that bad practice was pervasive across TV, Print and Outdoor, not just digital.The right answers for P&G won’t be right for all advertisers but Pritchard has said the previously unsayable and every CMO should consider his words carefully.
In this episode of #MediaSnack Tom and David look at the vexed issue of accountability and how brands and agencies ensure they can truly track their media efforts, efficiency and effectiveness.Accountability is they argue the third pillar of the 2017 change agenda that could push media up the corporate ladder, improve its reputation and cement its power as a driver of business growth.Tom and David answer three questions about the challenges of accountability.Question 1 from a media director: We've been following pretty traditional audit-based tracking of our media spend. Does this still make sense? And if not, how do we make a transition to a different set of metrics for media?Tom and David argue that while the audit will always be important, it is not the only indicator of success. As a media director you need to make sure that your media investment is working as hard as possible, and the audit is only one element of that. A greater focus should be on making sure that planning and strategic thinking is held accountable, because traditional media auditing looks at the media buying performance of an agency when the real value comes with the smart thinking. This also holds the client to an account in terms of the briefing process and should ensure that you get the smartest thinking out of your agency. Other metrics include the compliance element of the contract - making sure that agencies are accountable for their work. Overall, they say, advertisers need to move away from price to a value discussion. If you will start looking at media as an investment for business growth you will be able to hold it to an account in terms of driving business outcome. Question 2 from an agency leader: Making a link between business success requires complex attribution modelling. If clients aren't willing to pay for this then it is difficult to demonstrate how much we are adding. Tom and David say that when you are working for a client where attribution model is possible (e.g. e-commerce business), that you can go down that road, because it is easy to track media performance. But if you are working with CPG or FMCG then business evaluating media performance is more difficult. Tom and David suggest that when clients are not willing to pay for attribution models it is the challenge is for the agency to change the conversation from price to value. Agencies can drive their clients the right way, make them more innovative and link media performance to the business outcomes. The best way to do it is to challenge the remuneration model - that gesture will help to open up a discussion with your client. Question 3 from a marketing professional: We are starting to lose trust in digital metrics. How do we change that?Advertisers have spent the last five years heavily investing in digital channels and now they are starting to lose faith in it. Tom and David argue that this going to be the greatest challenge of 2017 and it doesn’t just fall on vendors to sort it out even though they expect more vendors to discover discrepancy in their own metrics. The digital landscape needs to help marketers to simplify the complexity of digital measurement. There are so many things you can look at but at the same time it is hard to evaluate how these individual metrics affect business performance.Vendors need to convince marketers that digital is not just a measured activity but it is something that has an impact on business performance. Otherwise marketers will stop investing in it.
On this week’s #MediaSnack we continue the theme of Change from last week’s episode which you will recall that our word of the year is CHANGE and we considered this across three areas: Advertisers, Agencies and Accountability. On Episode 61 we dig into more questions, this time regarding how CHANGE will impact media agencies in 2017 - thanks again for all the great questions, we picked three which represent different perspectives: A network agency CEO, a Media Planner and a Media Publisher ---Question 1: (from a media agency CEO)“We are getting squeezed between demands for holding company returns and clients seeking lower and lower fees. The reality of transparency is that we go bankrupt, how do you see this new business model actually working?" ---Question 2: (from a Media Planner at an agency)"I'm a bit tired of the negativity and the bad headlines around media, I think we do good work for clients - how does this get resolved, where does it end?" ---Question 3: (from a major Media Publisher)"Who is going to change all this? For some publishers to survive the next few years, the media buying model needs to change to make sure that a fair amount income reaches us."
On this week’s #MediaSnack we continue the theme of Change from last week’s episode which you will recall that our word of the year is CHANGE and we considered this across three areas: Advertisers, Agencies and Accountability. We received loads of private comments, questions and emails (why do you guys not leave comments below so everyone can see them??) which suggested we really hit on something which is on the minds of others and perhaps piqued some interest in media change. On episode 60 we dig into some of those questions, specifically a few of those we got from advertisers. To get a balanced and rounded perspective we picked questions from 3 different advertisers; a CMO, a media procurement leader and a global media director.
On this week’s #MediaSnack, the first of 2017, Tom and David get excited about CHANGE, which they reveal is #MediaSnack Media Word of 2017 (in 2016 it was CONTROL) - as they foresee many advertisers implementing significant change this year in how they manage their media investments and work with media agencies. Tom and David detail 3 areas where they predict the biggest changes in 2017:The Advertiser - we expect a significant change in the internal narrative around media, from a cost to be managed downwards into an investment in growth. Advertisers will continue to take more control of media decisions, define a clear vision and ambition for media investment, set proper KPIs for media performance which focus investment against driving business outcomes. This change will be huge, with many advertisers who may have neglected their media budgets for years taking it seriously again and redefining media as a powerful lever for growth and a critical part of marketing success, so important to get right. The last piece of the jigsaw will be change in the relationship between marketing and procurement, we expect a change of internal narrative around media to drive far closer alignment between marketing and procurement stakeholders, which will have a very positive impact on media being seen as an investment in growth and the media agency being seen more as a strategic partner in success rather than a commodity supplier. The Agency - media agencies will undergo more change in 2017 than they’ve ever faced, driven largely by the change in brief and scope issue by marketers. The most significant change to media agencies will be driven by the big media pitches of 2017, as these tend to create the huge tectonic pressures needed to remould the media agency networks. The more strategic pitch briefs (rather than the clumsy, race-to-the-bottom eAuctions) will define a new blueprint for the media agency model, asking them to engineer their resources more specifically around marketers new requirements. We expect media agencies in 2017 to be more open to defining partner relationships with advertisers, aligning to the same KPIs, working to performance-based payment models and offering greater financial transparency. This in turn might have a huge impact on the shape of media agencies, perhaps shifting away from the being ‘buying giants’ leveraging scale to secure cheap pricing, to be more like objective, strategic consultants. But to do this legitimately media agencies are going to have to be very transparency about their business model, as its impossible to be wholly objective and neutral if your income is derived largely from the buying of certain media. Accountability - we anticipate big changes in how media investment is held accountable. This year, 2017 could be the year when metrics for media become more rationalised, with more standardisation and consistency. Accountability is the new thread that will link the changes in advertisers with the changes in media agencies, as both parties become more accountable to the CEO, CMO, CPO to account for how media investment is driving a business outcome. Over time we expect that this will result in the media market moving from one focused on cost, price, discount and auditing to one of value, growth and performance. Change starts from within, as Mahatma Gandhi said “You must BE the change you want to see in the world” which will be a good mantra for advertisers who became frustrated with media in 2016, not least over transparency concerns. The change starts with the advertiser
On this week’s #MediaSnack we consider what a challenging year its been for the global media industry and devote our Christmas episode to sharing with you the amazing story of Population Media Center (PMC), an NGO that we work with at ID Comms. We think PMC is a truly amazing organisation, leveraging the power of media to tackle some of the world’s most acute challenges, improving education and rights for woman and girls, empowering them with family planning which reduces the impact of population growth and thereby the impact and strain on the environment. PMC creates TV and radio shows, serialized dramas, that embed positive role models into prime time entertainment to drive behavioural and societal change. By thorough pre-post testing, PMC has been able to demonstrate to governments around the world how effective their programmes are when compared with traditional public-service communications. PMC are showing the world (and marketers) what true effectiveness means for media investment and how compelling content changes minds and changes lives. The goal of the partnership with ID Comms is to help PMC, which was founded in 1998, reach more people around the world.ID Comms will provide marketing advice, training and brand introductions for PMC, dedicating more than 40-days of employee time for the first year of the initiatives.The partnership will bring together ID Comms’ expertise, connections and understanding of the media landscape with PMC’s skill at creating compelling entertainment that inspires behavioural change.“We are very excited to be working with Population Media Center, which is making a real difference in the lives of women and girls in some of the most hard-to-reach communities across the globe,” said Tom Denford, Co-Founder of ID Comms. “The way PMC tackles these behavioural issues through media exposure is really easy for us to get excited about. The team at ID Comms act as trusted advisors to some of the world's leading brands, helping them compete in a fast-changing media landscape. We are therefore hugely excited to be supporting PMC’s incredible work, applying the same knowledge and skills to drive real change in the world through media. ”“We are delighted to be working with the team at ID Comms to help us analyse new markets and connect with more of the world’s major brands,” said Bill Ryerson, Founder and President of Population Media Center. “There is no more cost-effective use of charitable dollars than in preventing unplanned and unwanted births and reducing birth rates worldwide through information and empowerment,” said Ryerson. “The work of PMC is helping empower women and girls and prevent the needless suffering of millions of people. ID Comms is helping us expand this work. With their help, we’re going to reach more people, which is desperately needed.”Population Media Center is a nonprofit leader in entertainment-education dedicated to women’s rights and empowerment, population stabilization, and the environment. For the past two decades, PMC’s entertainment programming has promoted social and cultural change and has helped 500 million people in more than 50 countries.PMC’s efforts span the globe, continually targeting underserved audiences. The East Los High TV Series in the United States, broadcast via Hulu, resulted in almost 30,000 people using the Planned Parenthood widgets on eastloshigh.com in the first month of broadcast. Via this widget they were able to determine their risk for sexually transmitted diseases or pregnancy, and 76% of viewers who accessed resources on East Los High’s website also shared those resources with friends.PMChttps://www.populationmedia.org/Please donate to PMC directly here and support their amazing workhttps://www.populationmedia.org/donate-now/ID Comms x PMC press releasehttp://blog.idcomms.com/id-comms-announces-global-csr-partnership-with-population-media-center
On this week's #MediaSnack we kick off with some more troubling transparency news from the US, where the Wall St Journal reports that the Department of Justice has launched a criminal investigation into major US creative agencies, which it accuses of "bid-rigging" on creative production. A similar investigation years ago ended up with agency people in jail, so standby. Why is this on a media vlog? Well, the DoJ launched their investigation following receipt of information from K2 Intelligence, which the intelligence firm had discovered during their reporting earlier this year on behalf of the trade body Association of National Advertisers (ANA) into Media Transparency. The evidence on the potential rigging of production costs (bid rigging is in violation of US anti-trust laws and wholly illegal) was not included in the ANA's final report. But now the DoJ are following up and have announced this latest scrutiny over agency behaviours. They have, according to WSJ issued, K2 with a subpoena to collect relevant information - this information currently sits within all the evidence K2 gathered in their media transparency investigations - so there may some nervous media agency execs in US hoping the DoJ don't get visibility of K2's media rebate evidence and launch a subsequent investigation aimed at them. It's a realistic possibility. Major holding group IPG has admitted they have been contacted by DoJ, we wait to see how far this will reach. If you remember, the K2/ANA report suggested that un-transparent financial practice amongst media agencies was "pervasive" but the ANA felt it (rightly) appropriate not to name any individuals or agencies. The DoJ may not be so cautious. What we find also amazing in this story is that marketers have evidently been asking their creative agency to manage a rendering process for them in which the creative agency themselves will bid, and are now wondering why this created a conflict of interest which may well turn out to be against the law. This illustrates the pitfalls of blind trust, you really need to engage with a specialist independent who can help you validate agency scope and costs, don't ask agencies to mark their own homework. Next, we discuss findings from a report by research boffins Nielsen which has analysed 44,000 digital marketing campaigns across Europe and found that nearly 50% of all served impressions did not reach the intended Target audience. This is alarming news for marketers who have been confronted this year with numerous questions over the way digital marketing is measured. What was promised as an era of data-fuelled accountability is turning into a right mess, which some had foretold. This comes on the back of reports earlier this year that there are estimates of huge volumes of fraudulent clicks to digital display advertising, and continuing revelations by Facebook of errors in the methodologies of their own performance measurements. Looking ahead to next year, we consider how marketers will want their digital marketing partners to help them solve these issues and inaccuracies. Finally, in the continuing saga of the big consulting firms eating the agencies’ breakfast, lunch and dinner is news that Accenture Interactive (their marketing services division) has paid $50m to acquire leading UK independent creative shop Karmarama which is their most high-profile agency purchase so far. It sets a new milestone in the spread of consulting scope into traditional areas of agency work. Accenture has stated an ambition to offer an "end-to-end" marketing service which questions how they might consider moving into traditional areas of media buying, which could be a conflict of interest based on Accenture’s global media auditing business. It seems unlikely that the industry would tolerate Accenture buying media themselves whilst also auditing the prices paid by other media agencies, this is something that they are going to have to resolve.
This week's #MediaSnack is all about data strategies, viewability, ad fraud and key client watch-outs when it comes to programmatic. David is joined by one of the most experienced people in ad:tech - Wayne Blodwell. For the last couple of years he led programmatic initiatives at Dentsu Aegis and GroupM in the UK but has now founded a consultancy offering programmatic advice to brands, agencies and media vendors.David and Wayne start with some context. Programmatic is now one of the fastest-growing disciplines in advertising. Brands are expected to spend almost $40bn on programmatic this year, with more half of all display transactions now conducted this way. Next, they look at how programmatic strategy differs from traditional marketing strategy, and Wayne identifies the key elements that make the former successful: data, segmentation, creative, activation and measurement. Wayne and David also discuss the vexed question of whether brands should take programmatic in-house. Earlier this year, ID Comms’ Global Media Talent report highlighted the fact that advertisers are expected to develop their programmatic skills internally in the next two or three years. There are already signs of such investment, the most recent example coming from the UK, with Diageo's hire of Gawain Owen as Head of Programmatic. While agencies currently have the greater tools and talent, and are well informed to make decisions for their client, big brands that are spending more and more on programmatic do need to get closer to the data and the tech that's enabling it. They also need to get a handle on issues such as ad fraud, viewability and ad-blocking to ensure they are not needlessly exposed to risk.Finally, Wayne summarises his three key recommendations for advertisers. Firstly, they need to think about their data, first-party as well as the data that they have access to. Second, they need to think about technology and whether these decisions are being made appropriately for each brand. Thirdly, they need to think big and take advantage of programmatic beyond the simple placement of display. Getting programmatic right will allow marketers to make smarter decisions and get more value from their media investment.Links from the episode:http://www.thedrum.com/news/2016/11/28/programmatic-advertising-grow-31-2017http://www.adweek.com/news/technology/programmatic-ad-buying-now-available-social-influencers-174811http://digiday.com/publishers/programmatic-advertising-alt-right-problem/http://www.campaignlive.co.uk/article/programmatic-spend-will-grow-almost-third-2017-forecast-says/1416932http://www.chiefmarketer.com/build-stronger-relationships-with-programmatic-advertising/http://www.campaignlive.co.uk/article/programmatic-will-meet-purpose-2017/1417696http://www.campaignlive.co.uk/article/diageo-hires-nestles-gawain-owen-first-head-programmatic/1416900http://www.campaignlive.co.uk/article/putting-new-lens-programmatic-telescope/1416865http://www.wsj.com/articles/breitbart-controversy-spotlights-ad-technology-confusion-1480737178http://www.thedrum.com/news/2016/12/02/we-need-transparency-around-the-decisions-agencies-make-and-its-good-discuss-openlyhttp://www.isba.org.uk/blog/2016/12/02/unilever-asks-advertisers-to-engage-on-digital-industry-issues
On this week’s #MediaSnack Tom and David devote the episode to considering Facebook’s stunning growth and the impact of a bumpy last few months which has included criticisms of fake news dominating their timelines, issues over measurement inaccuracies and the closing of their troubled ad-serving business. Where to start with Facebook? The media phenomenon has seen highly enviable growth over the last decade which has been well publicised. From the outside we’ve all marvelled at a business which has managed rocket-speed growth whilst managing to keep staff, investors, marketers and agencies consistently engaged and supportive. It is a case study in how to expand a business and maintain vision, consistency and reputation. However, in the last 6 months their celebrated success story has come in for a bumpy ride. The most notable dent, especially for marketers and agencies, comes from revelations Facebook issued in September 2016 that one of their performance metrics was inaccurate. After an internal audit by independent measurement company MOAT, Facebook admitted the way they had calculated video views - one of a staggering 220 different metrics they track - had been calculated incorrectly. After further internal investigations they found additional inaccuracies in other metrics - leading many to question whether Facebook had been benefitting commercially from overstating the impact of their advertising products. Facebook claimed the errors hadn’t influenced the prices paid by advertisers, but you could argue that the decision to use Facebook at all is based on their self-validated effectiveness measures. Facebook, to their credit seem to have managed this well - quickly issuing clarifications and changes. Facebook announced that they were opening up to external verification, creating a Measurement Board which invites independent measurement companies and some advertisers to ensure Facebook is properly serving brand needs and held more accountable. Following the concerns over metrics, they came in for criticisms over the algorithm managing news stories in Facebook-user timelines. Research seems to suggest that so-called “fake news” stories had outperformed genuine news (whatever that means), especially notable during the US Presidential elections. This calls into question the role that Facebook should play: does it become editor and curator of news or simply a platform which allows freedom of speech? Finally, Tom and David report on Facebook’s closure of their trouble ad-server, which was part of their Atlas business. The ad-serving had found it hard to compete with Double-Click’s dominance and so they have taken the decision to close and focus Atlas on measurement, which was always its strength. Facebook’s huge asset of having logged-in users across multiple devices and apps allows for very smart targeting, in theory. Atlas’ future can focus more on this ‘people first’ measurement. Perhaps far from this being the beginning of the end of Facebook, is it merely the end of the beginning - a media company which is learning (alongside important clients like P&G who have scaled back their precision targeting on Facebook) as it grows and moving from being a ‘safe harbour’ for media dollars, to a more accountable performance platform. Its move to come clean and now upgrade its metrics, and allowing external verification are the actions of a mature media business, listing to its customers and building for the future.
On this week’s #MediaSnack we celebrate an epic list of the 50 Most Innovative CMOs In The World written by Lara O’Reilly at Business Insider. Business Insider segmented the world’s marketing leaders into 4 interesting categories; The Connectors, The Rebels, The Integrators and The Storytellers. It is interesting to note the mix of old and new, notably that the CMO’s at Google and Netflix account for the top two positions. The word ‘media’ appears 25 times across the 50 CMO profiles, whilst the word ‘advertising’ only appears 17 times. Perhaps an indication of the shifting focus of the CMO to take a more pro-active interest in media? What’s certain is that this list tells us the individuals within the world’s most ambitious and exciting brands who will set the narrative for the future of the industry. Also in the news this week, a Dominic Mills blog lifts the lid on an apparently highly secretive plan by Dentsu-Aegis Network to launch a digital media buying (or is it audience selling?) platform akin to GroupM’s Xasis, that is a non-disclosed media buying model which would allow advertisers no right to audit media prices. These types of buying methods, which exist in most all of the other agency groups already, are regarded as delivering particularly healthy profit margins by allowing the agency to mark up media inventory in opaque ways. They operate as ‘Principal-based buying’, that is the agency buying and then selling on the media opportunity to the advertiser (see here for more explanation on PBB). The (perfectly valid) argument in support of this approach is that in not disclosing the price paid, that the agency can negotiate lower media prices for the advertiser compared to using a fully transparent model. Some advertisers love this approach, getting more for less always sounds like a good idea. Whilst many other brands can’t tolerate the lack of transparency. Whichever side of this barbed fence you sit, it still begs the question as to why Dentsu-Aegis thought that a ‘cloak-and-dagger’ approach to launching this to US advertisers would serve them well in the long term. These things have a habit of leaking out and it was only a matter of time before questions were raised about the need for secrecy at a time of low trust in media agency digital media operations. We will wait to see if Agyle Advantage - for that is what this secret plan is called - becomes a serious proposition, giving advertisers more choice in the principal based / arbitrage approach to media buying. But it does seem to sit against the underlying trend to offer more transparency, visibility and control to the advertiser. The agency in this case obviously sees a demand (or a tantalising margin) which has driven this new product release. It is time to ask ourselves, who will actually define the media agency of the future? We have the simple answer, its the Marketers. As we’ve discussed many times before, the blueprint for a media agency will be defined by the marketer, typically based on a narrative and vision set by the CMO. Which is one of the reasons why the Business Insider Top CMOs list is so important. It is their marketing ambition and vision which will determine the role for media, how brands will invest in connecting with customers and therefore what will be required from the media agency landscape. We can already see this taking shape in some pitch briefs for 2017, brands are having a very clear point of view of exactly what media agency resources they need to support and reflect their own internal media management operational structures. Many are following best practice in preparation for media agency pitches by really defining the blueprint for a new agency model and ensuring a well-organised, accountable and transparent process. It is the only way to be a priority pitch in a busy 20176 market and to get the best out of competing agencies.
On this week’s #MediaSnack we report on a little feisty exchange of words between the CEO of GroupM UK, Nick Theakstone and Mark Finney the head of media at ISBA, the UK’s leading marketer trade association. It all stems back to March 2016 when ISBA’s head of consultancy practice Debbie Morrison launched they excellent media agency contract template with some comments to the FT which angered agencies. In her FT interview, Debbie had suggested that media agencies don’t have the best interests of their clients at heart anymore. The fight back from agencies at the time was quite aggressive but months have passed, the media transparency debate has gathered momentum in different areas, not least thanks to the ANA’s Media Transparency initiative and we probably felt it was water under the bridge. Not so. Last week Nick Theakstone thought that the recent success of one of ‘his' agencies MediaCom (the UK’s largest media buyer) at a media awards event entirely defended the agency community from the transparency concerns raised by ISBA. We discuss how this simply doesn’t make sense, the two things are entirely separate - and we doubt whether Nick would have been making the same point the morning after a successful awards sweep by Zenith. Whatever his intentions, Nick has managed to get headlines for himself and the agency for entirely the wrong reasons, of course everyone is talking about the sniping against ISBA rather than appreciating MediaCom's excellent work. Mark Finney, ISBA’s head of media responded in Campaign, reminding everyone that we need to revert to a more constructive dialogue - at the same time calling Nick’s words “baffling and disappointing” - they won't be exchanging Christmas cards this year one supposes. Next up, we share details of the excellent ID Comms CMO panel which we hosted at LinkedIn’s lovely London HQ. The event was an invitation-only networking and panel discussion, attended by 40 marketers from brands including Unilever, Mars, Lego, Universal Pictures, Disney, British Gas and Royal Mail. The panel discussion featured Martin Moll, Head of Marketing at Nissan Europe, Lindsay Pattison, Global CEO of media agency Maxus and Steve Hyde CEO of 360xec. Finally, we report on news that Adobe has acquired TubeMogul for $540m - a strong indication of the much-expected consolidation in the ad tech space is actually happening.
On this week's #MediaSnack we start with a consideration of the impact of Donald Trump's election this week as President-elect of the USA. Our friend Brian Wieser, senior analyst from Pivotal Research Group was the first off the block with his thoughts on how the global advertising industry could be affected. Brian posted his analyst perspectives at 3am NY time as the election result was just becoming clear - which means he'd devoted his evening to shaping thoughts, well done Brian. His main observations were based on the economic, political and regulatory uncertainty, but also covered the impact of potential immigration restrictions especially for multi-national media companies such as media agency networks and ad platforms such as Google and Facebook. He also acknowledged the important role that Twitter plays in these type of global events, although they perhaps weren’t able to commercialise it fully yet.We note the learnings that will surely come from Donald Trump’s unexpected triumph, notably with far less of a campaign war chest compared to the well-funded Hilary Clinton. A Bloomberg Politics report estimates Hilary’s funding exceeded $1bn whilst Trump managed a mere $512m - yet Trump dominated media coverage by a vast margin. Whether by accident or design Trump managed to leverage not just social media power (as Obama had done to huge success in 2012) but dominated mainstream media with his provocative narrative. Estimates are that Donald Trump generated over $2bn value of earned media in his race for POTUS.Continuing the Trump theme, we refer to a piece written by Dominic Mills for Mediatel which made a parallel between Donald Trump’s “blusterous” style (in an attempt to avoid addressing difficult subjects) and comments made by GroupM Global Chairman Irwin Gotlieb at a recent conference in New York. At the Video Everywhere Summit on 28th October Irwin Gotlieb was asked about the media transparency reporting published this year by the Association of National Advertisers (ANA). The ANA Media Transparency report highlighted a rift between advertiser and media agency and pushed trust between the two to new lows. But rather than try to bring parties together, which is what Irwin had called for back in 2015 and which Tom reported on from the ANA’s Advertising Financial Management Conference in Florida, he instead took the opportunity of his platform to further undermine the credibility of the ANA’s initiative. “I’m going to be really harsh,” Gotlieb said candidly. “The entire effort was a biz-dev effort. … The ANA allowed themselves to be part of a third-party’s business development.”Irwin is typically very careful with his words and would not have said such inflammatory things on a public stage in naivety. This was an intentional act designed to further undermine the credibility of a report designed for and funded by America’s largest advertisers, to benefit them. Dominic Mill’s comparison to Trump is not just timely, it's accurate. Brian Jacobs also wrote excellently about this on his recent Cog Blog, link below. Finally, we bring news that Toyota, the car manufacturer who you will remember was recently at the centre of a dramatic over-billing scandal by their Japanese agency Dentsu, have (in unrelated matters) shifted their entire $300m media and creative business away from Publicis Groups agencies and into WPP without a pitch. The comments from Toyota suggest a client with a clarity of vision to create a blueprint for agency resources, as we’ve spoken many times about on #MediaSnack previously.
On #MediaSnack this week Tom and David mark the 50th episode by taking a look at recent reporting by Campaign after a survey into staff morale at agencies, both Creative and Media. It highlights a worrying downward trend of morale amongst staff at different levels. About a third of the respondents work in media agencies, in the USA which is the area the study covers.The most worrying element of the data is that amongst the more senior media agency staffers (who are the cohort most likely to state they have low morale) state that the main driver of their low morale is "lack of leadership"Is this indicative of media agencies lacking vision and ambition? Or is this simply burn out? We consider whether just being worked hard leads to low morale and conclude that working hard without purpose is what leads to negative thinking. Have media agencies lost their vision and purpose? If they had more vision from their leadership would things change? This comes coincidentally alongside news that global media agency network MEC announces that their long-serving global CEO Charles Courtier is stepping down in 2017, his replacement is Tim Castree, most recently running video ad sales platform Videology. Will be interesting to see how the narrative in that agency evolves in new leadership hands. A few week's ago Tom wrote an OpEd for Campaign called "Its Time For A Change of Guard at Media Agencies" which posed the question whether existing media agency leadership have the skills and appetite for the next five years battle which is much different as the nature of media agencies and their business model evolves. Some will become more transparent, some less, some will specialize some will diversify further. Laura Desmond, long time CEO of Starcom has recently resigned and we've seen a change of leadership at GroupM, with Kelly Clark taking the reins again. We wish Charles the best for his next adventure.
On this week’s #MediaSnack Tom and David look at some new research suggesting that half of US advertisers are not engaging with their media agency over the findings of the ANA’s Media Transparency report, even though it is nearly 5 months since it was published. This seems to reflect the different stages of reaction that ID Comms has experienced from a wide spectrum of advertisers; some took immediate action back, some are still considering the best course of action and some are seemingly unaware or unconcerned by the ANA's report.The typical response (largely correctly in our view) is that advertisers should have scrutinized their own circumstances by looking at their existing media agency contracts and we helped them quickly establish the level of protection or exposure they face in the areas of “non-transparent practices” detailed by the ANA report. Once we have helped the advertiser establish a point of view of their current situation, then they need to make plans to correct or improve the contract. It is very easy to update contract terms, far harder to actually implement a contract which wholly protects your interests, especially in a complex market like the global media landscape. This is taking time for some advertisers, some are electing to review their contracts as part of a larger tendering process, consider that their scope of work for an agency, their preferred payment model, their media mix, their resource needs may have all changed in the 3 or 4 years since they last pitched. Not to mention the rapid change of the media landscape each year.As a result, we are anticipating a busy 2017 pitch market as many advertisers, kicked into action following the ANA Transparency Report have spent some months reviewing contracts, conducting audits where they can and now shaping plans for their future media agency needs. It still seems possible that some advertisers might elect to pursue legal routes against their media agencies, there are still faint rumblings of an SEC investigation which won't go away just yet and that’s going to keep the US media industry on its toes for the foreseeable months.We anticipate very few advertisers would take this ‘nuclear’ option, fearing that it would actually create larger problems than it might resolve and cause a massive distraction from business as usual (which incumbent agency is going to maintain passion for a client who is publicly suing them for claw-back of millions of dollars?). It presents a huge risk for advertisers considering legal routes. Alternatively, we expect the majority of advertisers will want to re-design and re-engineer their relationship with the media agency. This has to be driven by a clear vision and a common ambition. It is the only sensible route to re-build the missing trust in the industry and set a path for a more productive and transparent and accountable media industry for the future.We are helping brands define this future and we are designing ways for marketers to get back around the table with their agency leadership to design for trust. It won't happen without engineering, it won't happen by accident - the most ambitious brands know they have to make this happen.
On this week's #MediaSnack David Indo is joined by Miriam Jordan Keane, Head of Marketing at British Gas, to discuss the company's marketing transformation, recent media pitch and the role of the in-house media leader. David and Miriam discuss the incredible transformation that British Gas is going through as a brand and Miriam shares her perspective on evolving media landscape. She argues that it’s very important it is for brands to be able to adapt to these changes and suggests that having the customer at the heart of the organisation has played a massive part in British Gas’s success . As one of the UK's leading advertiser, British Gas's constant ambition is to be a customer-centric and future proofed brand. It’s not an easy transformation but Miriam says it is very exciting because it provides more opportunities for greater success in the near future.Next, they discuss the recent British Gas media pitch, which was managed by ID Comms. The account was awarded to MediaCom last month and all participating agencies were hugely inspired and motivated by the marketing team’s clarity of vision, desire for media excellence and commitment to find a true media partner. Miriam points out that having clear ambition for media allowed British Gas to get the best agencies to compete and has also enabled the marketing team to see the impressive scale of media talent in the media market. She argues that having defined their media agency requirements so clearly not only gave the brand an opportunity to see a "pitch theatre", but it also allowed agencies to showcase great work that was aligned with the company's ambition for media.
On this week’s #MediaSnack David is joined by ID Comms Clients Services Director Carly Bedford to look at the way media is changing. The big news of the week is that Danish AI media agency Blackwood 7 is coming to London and partnering with the7starts, another independent media agency with a good reputation. Blackwood 7 was launched in Denmark in 2013, and now successfully operates in Germany and the US and manages approximately €400m of client billings. The agency claims 25%-50% improvement in media effectiveness and absolute transparency to their clients. David and Carly argue that new businesses disrupting the media landscape are a great thing for advertisers, offering more choice in terms of how they invest and how they track and deliver media plans.Next, they reflect on this year’s pitches and the prospects for 2017, focusing on the three key questions that clients are asking. These were:- How to future-proof my business and my relationships with my media agency? - What are the key areas my contract that I need to tighten up?- How do we as an organisation (client side) continue to keep media high on the corporate agenda?
On this week’s #MediaSnack Tom and David are reflecting on some of ID Comms experiences in recent media pitches. Compared to the last year’s pitch market, 2016 was relatively quest. However, the quality of media of agency performances in major reviews this year increased significantly, and Tom and David explain how this has led to an impressive level of commitment from participating agencies. As a result of this, the advertisers found it very hard to make a final decision in most cases, which is the sign of a great pitch process because agencies are hungry, competitive and committed to win. There is a clear correlation between those advertisers who make good pitch preparation including a clear vision for the role of their media agencies and the level of commitment from participating agencies. Agency CEO’s will tell you that they compete hardest for the best-prepared pitch briefs because they lay out a vision the agency can hang on to and work towards. These are far more fulfilling than a complex spreadsheet simply asking for cheaper media prices. Nobody enjoys a race to the bottom because ultimately nobody actually wants to win it. Recent research in US suggests that 64% of US media spend is going to be reviewed next year. We question the maths on that: This means that over $120bn of media spend is going to be in review. When compared to the $30bn that formed the MediaPalooza from 2015 you can see this is an extreme scenario and one which would terrify agency CEO’s. Tom and David also look into The Guardian’s recent experiment with its own inventory, that led to some fascinating results. The press reported that The Guardian set up an experiment to purchase its own inventory in order to follow the supply chain. This allowed them to see how much money as a publisher they get from the investment they made as an advertiser. The results of this experiment were fascinating, as according to their new Chief Revenue Officer, The Guardian was receiving only 30% from the initial investment in a worse case scenario. #MediaSnack encourages more media vendors and media publishers to conduct similar experiments as this gives as greater insights into media supply chain for all advertisers. Finally, the guys review some great comments made by Ben Jankowski, global media director of MasterCard at Advertising Week. Ben strongly advocates that brands should invest in senior media talent.Links from the episode:AdAge researchhttp://adage.com/article/agencies/thi...Guardian story:http://mediatel.co.uk/newsline/2016/1...Ben Jankowski at Advertising Week NY:http://digiday.com/brands/mastercards...
On this week’s #MediaSnack, Tom and David take an opportunity to look back across 2016 as a landmark year and indulge in looking ahead to 2017 in what they believe is likely to see a pivotal change in the future of the media industry. They review their experiences this year, notably the ongoing impact of the ANA’s media transparency investigation, which is still causing after-shocks around the world (see last week’s #MediaSnack for details of the latest media transparency scandal, this time from Japan). The full results of the ANA shining a light on “non-transparent practices” are still to be seen, but ID Comms can feel the wind of change about to sweep the industry, driven largely by a mindset change amongst some major advertisers. Brands that may have been neglecting their media investment and not providing sufficient oversight and governance have been woken sharply by the ANA findings and global press coverage, and now they are starting to think differently. This is apparent in the number of brands taking time to properly consider their future requirements for media, at a strategic level. If you consider that many advertisers contract with agencies might be 3 or 4 years old, and they are starting to look 3 or 4 years in to the future, the media landscape has changed, and will change dramatically. So has consumer behaviour. So has the relationship between advertiser and their media agencies. So has the shape and design of marketing organisations themselves. Its all change and its gathering pace. Just look at recent news that P&G have hired Gerry D’Angelo as global head of media, the closest thing to a Chief Media Officer that you’re likely to find. Brands are investing in media management again and are taking it seriously. Perhaps as brands start to look ahead and consider their future needs for media with a more strategic approach, so too are they rethinking their requirements from a media agency. Change in the media agency landscape has been happening this year, just look at Publicis Media's restructure, IPG’s media resurgence, Omnicom’s recent new business triumphs with innovative agency models. Tom and David expect this disruption and innovation to pick up even more pace into 2017 as more and more marketers make demands of a new kind of media agency service. One fit for a post-#RebateGate world. One thing that may be a good illustration of this change in strategy is the recent news that GroupM have changed their global CEO, Kelly Clarke taken the reigns from Dominic Proctor. Is this indicative of a changing of the guard at the top positions of media agency groups? Perhaps we’ll see more of this in the next 12 months. Future leaders of media agencies are going to have a different set of challenges in the next five years to those faced across the last five years, not least in defending their businesses from the onslaught from management consultancies, AdTech companies and now from marketers looking to fundamentally re-design the agency resources.Advertisers are going to be more forthright in their demands of agency resource and the terms of business, which will be somewhat painful for agencies to adjust to but ultimately will help them grow their businesses in new and exciting ways. The first part of this will be advertisers pushing to closer align their agencies to company business outcomes and incentivise them financially on some shared goals. This will (in time) flush concerns over transparency and conflict of interest out of the systems and leave us with a media agency landscape more in tune with advertisers requirements.Change is coming. We’ve got to all move away from obsessing about cheaper pricing, bigger discounts and more (and more!) auditing as being what media is all about. Instead, the fear of the complexity of media must be replaced by the excitement in the opportunity of media. Let’s hope so.
On this week’s #MediaSnack we bring you rather sad news that the media transparency concerns are not going away anytime soon. Stories have been emerging this week from Japan where Dentsu, the dominant advertising services group has admitted that its digital media buying operation has overcharged some clients, they suggest there could be over 600 cases of over-charging across the last 5 years. It is believed that the victim on this occasion was long-standing Dentsu client Toyota, one of Japan’s biggest corporations and famous for the 60+ year longevity its Dentsu relationship in an era of increasingly short-lived client and agency tenures. The story has made big news around the world and unsurprisingly spilt into the finance pages beyond the marketing trade press. The Financial Times, Bloomberg and others have been reporting the details and the impact of the news has brought Dentsu stock down 5% at the time of writing.What does it mean for the industry? This is a very big deal. It calls into question a few things, not least Dentsu’s dominance of the Japan market and the potential for conflicts of interest that could exist in a company which not only buys media on behalf of its clients but also has an interest on the other side of the table, owning some of the media it is buying for its clients. This ‘complexity’ of Dentsu’s influence has been well-known for many years, but has been accepted as a cultural norm because Japanese business relationships have been built on gentleman’s agreement and deep trust. These revelations, which have now caused Dentsu CEO to issue a public apology and admit the wrongdoing, will surely have a lasting impact on the reputation of Dentsu and perhaps even change the way advertisers engage with agencies in Japan, now demanding greater transparency and accountability from their media buying contracts. http://www.moreaboutadvertising.com/2... Earlier this week, Tom spoke to Asian trade press AdNews and highlighted that these kinds of leaks coming out of advertising agencies may increase as more light is shone on the non-transparent practices of media agencies around the world. http://www.adnews.com.au/news/dentsu-...On #MediaSnack we consider the implications and what, as a global marketer, you should make of this latest scandal over agency financial management? Is it a concern, how should you react and what should you be demanding from your media agencies to avoid this stuff? Sadly, there’s not room on the show to detail all the transparency stories as fast as they are appearing, should you be interested to read further try some of these links: Why are the 4A’s failing to engage in the rebates discussion in the US? http://www.campaignlive.co.uk/article...In South Africa, media companies have been judged to have been price fixing media inventory http://themediaonline.co.za/2016/09/m...The head of media at Deutsch Telekom has publicly encouraged brands to heed the advice of the ANA’s Media Transparency report http://digiday.com/agencies/deutsche-...ISBA have issued new guidelines to improve transparency in programmatic media buyinghttp://www.campaignlive.co.uk/article...JP Morgan Chase suspends media buying in the US whilst it conducts audits into its media agencieshttp://www.campaignlive.co.uk/article...Links: Dentsu apology - Campaignhttp://www.campaignlive.co.uk/article...AdNews:http://www.adnews.com.au/news/dentsu-...http://www.adnews.com.au/news/dentsu-...AdAge: http://adage.com/article/agency-news/...FT http://on.ft.com/2cMpVskBloomberg http://www.bloomberg.com/news/article...
On this week's #MediaSnack we review news that P&G have hired a new global media director, pinching the impressive Gerry D’Angelo from Mondelez to lead their global $7.2bn media operations. Media is a massive business driver for P&G, it accounts for over 10% of their total global sales, so they need it to work hard. As media gets more complicated and agency relationships get fragmented and more delicate, it requires strong visionary leadership and Gerry is the right guy for P&G. Interesting timing as P&G recently moved their US business into Omnicom “startup” Hearts & Science. Maybe coincidental timing Hearts & Science have announced the launch of a UK agency at the same time that P&G are “reviewing their UK media agency requirements”. Lets see....ID Comms announce the launch of a Global Survey looking into Media Training, something which the ANA highlighted this year as a big gap on the client side, they advised brands need to commit to a "media education". You can contribute to the survey here Finally, more focus on Hearts & Science as we discuss the ‘zero-margin’ deal apparently offered by Omnicom to land the US McDonald’s creative and media duties. We consider some of the implications of these kinds of deals, where they agency assumes a big commercial risk on the client's business performance. It has been reported that the agreement requires Omnicom to be accountable for their profit margin derived solely by McDonald’s business KPIs. A nice idea on paper, it is a sure-fire way to make sure your agency resources are laser-aligned with your business objectives, but it requires deep faith and trust on both the client and agency sides, who both have to be equally motivated by the same goals and have to be comfortable they can equally influence the business outcomes. It is somewhat of a gamble, but a good innovation if successful. Overseeing from the agency is Wendy Clark an ex Coca Cola executive who will be very familiar with value based payment models
On this week's #MediaSnack we are back to school, after an unusually busy summer for the media industry, we review some of the biggest stories of the last 3 months. This will help catch you up if you've been on the beach. The scale of progress in the global media industry is immense and it's interesting to review what's happened in just the last quarter. First, we review news that Diageo, the global drinks giant has concluded its hasty media agency review and it's pretty much as you were. Dentsu Aegis retained their most important global client. You might recall on a previous #MediaSnack we were surprised that Diageo had called a review because we regarded them a highly loyal to their long relationship with DA agency Carat. Retaining clients of this scale is as good as a win, this year the media agency pitch market has been significantly slower than the madness of 2015's MediaPalooza so these global pitches are highly contested both in terms of the commercial offer and the agency talent working on them. It's an advantage for advertisers like Diageo and IKEA (also running this year, managed by ID Comms) to pitch their accounts in quieter periods because you get more attention for agencies who are not having to spread their resources and commercial power across multiple big advertisers. Next, we discuss a fascinating insight from some research in the US which highlights the huge churn still occurring in the CMO role. 50% of major retail advertisers in the US have changed their CMO in the leat year! And over 60% of those found replacements outside their company. This churn seems to indicate a broad dissatisfaction with CMO's likely because the role of a CMO is changed but companies are not able to describe what they need. Our review of the busy summer shows just how broad the CMO's perspective and expertise needs to be nowadays. It's overwhelming, and then you add on top of this the far greater accountability that marketing is subject to in this competitive digital world. CMO's are expected to turn magic in very short periods. We suspect that this is in because of their organisation's dysfunction which makes it very difficult for CMO's to succeed: The company expects them to transform the business but at the same time is not actually empowering CMO's with the influence internally to activate the changes needed. We consider how this impact the Chief Media Officer role, any media executive needs greater tenure because of the specialist technical knowledge which is required. Companies who transition media directors out of their roles risk losing huge value. Finally, we review some startling evidence found by Gideon Spanier of Campaign in the accounts of the Guardian Media Group. The publisher has made provision in its accounting to pay incentives to media agencies in return for commitments of advertisers budgets. Sometimes this can be in the form of cash rebates. It's another example, following the Daily Mail admitting it puts aside £27m ($40m) each year as rebates to agencies, this amounts to 7% of its total ad revenue. Both examples give welcome transparency into how media agencies can generate income and benefit from committing advertiser spend. This is concerning at a time when Guardian is posting record financial losses and the organisation risks imploding under debt which would be a loss to quality journalism and a loss to the advertising industry. Marketers should welcome the transparency, and we look forward to many more publishers starting to make public their financial arrangements for paying incentives and rebates to media agencies.
On this week’s #MediaSnack we discuss the different types of media auditing, in an attempt to clear up some confusion. What people typically call a media audit (using what’s become known as a media auditor) actually isn’t auditing in the strict sense. Asking a firm to grade your agency’s media buying performance by analysing pricing and quality isn’t actually auditing. This kind of work is best called “Price benchmarking”. Is that clearer? Maybe not. So, we invite a proper auditor onto the show to help clear up the confusion. Adrian Jenkins is a Chartered Accountant (like a CPA for those of you in the US), he’s the founder of an independent company called Financial Progression which conducts contract compliance audits of agencies on behalf of advertisers (including media agencies, creative agencies and many others). FP are long time collaborators of ID Comms. With a lot of concern around over Media Transparency, not least following the ANA’s Media Transparency Guidelines, we have found many more advertisers looking to conduct these types of compliance audits of their agencies, to check that the agencies are fulfilling its obligations as a service supplier to the advertiser. In ID Comms “PostK2" Manifesto we recommend that advertisers need to regularly audit their media agencies [add underlined text as which includes both the ‘price benchmarking’ type and the contract compliance type. Our view is that it is important to consider contract compliance auditing in a holistic way, as part of a mix of accountability techniques to make sure your external agencies are working productively to deliver your marketing and business objectives and operating with transparency. It also typically finds where there are errors, especially important in today’s complex world of automated media buying systems. I ask Adrian to help clarify the different types of audits, explain what contract compliance is and how it benefits the advertiser. It is interesting to note Adrian’s perspective that, far from creating hostility and mistrust between advertiser and agency, a compliance audit can actually benefit the relationship because it removes any uncertainty, provides transparency and aligns both parties for the future. Adrian also gives his top tips to those advertisers who haven’t audited in this way before, and he explains how to start and what to look for.
On this week's #MediaSnack we meet with Pete Mitchell who is amongst the world’s most experienced and well-traveled media professionals. For the last couple of years, Pete has been part of Mondelez' highly respected global media team under the stewardship of Chief Media Officer Bonin Bough (now departed to a new career as a TV presenter) and the legendary CMO Dana Anderson. Pete has been based in Europe, Asia and the US over the years but is now back in London. We got together to discuss three main themes:What does Pete think about the much discussed Chief Media Officer role, what does it look like, what skills are needed to succeed?How likely are brands going to be bringing media capabilities into their organisation, what talent and resources is going to be required within brands? And how does this potentially change brands' relationships with media agencies?What is required for brands to move to a content rather than paid media strategy and is it realistic to aim to monetize brand content, making marketing a profit centre rather than a cost? At Mondelez, Bonin also had oversight of eCommerce, is this a trend likely to be repeated elsewhere?The Chief Media Officer role was one recommended by the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) in their Media Transparency Guidelines this year as a way brands should look to see media as an investment in growth rather than a cost to be managed downward. The ANA highlighted serious gaps in capability within brands to properly oversee media investments. The summary from our conversation with Pete is that the Media Officer role is a broad and complex one. But, is it too much for one person?
We start this weeks episode with news that Tom was included in a new documentary film, commissioned by Campaign magazine, about trust and transparency in the advertising industry. Tom appears alongside industry leaders including Martin Sorrell CEO of WPP, Cindy Gallop, Claire Beale editor in chief of Campaign, Keith Weed, the CMO of Unilever, and many others. The documentary explores the theme of trust, why it's needed and where it's missing. It's well worth a watch. Getting into this week's #MediaSnack episode we discuss news from America that investigations firm K2 Intelligence as well as media auditor Ebiquity we have launched media contract services specialist companies following their collaboration on the ANA media transparency report published in June. For K2 specifically this is a very new service, and makes sense for them to leverage their knowledge and insights gained from the ANA #rebategate work. For Ebiquity, they are partnering with lawyers Reed Smith to offer a contract management service. We ask what the scope these companies will fulfil for marketing organisations and consider whether any conflict of interest might exist by grouping this spread of scope into single companies.Next, we discuss news that telecoms giant AT&T has awarded it's $3 billion US media account to agency start-up Hearts & Science which you may remember was the agency set up by Omnicom in 2015 to pitch to Procter and Gamble which it won.For Hearts & Science to win AT&T is media account is a huge endorsement of that agency model and means WPP lose between 50 and $100 million revenue to a business with currently only one client. This also means that Hearts & Science ranks as one of the leading agencies in the US having only been in existence for less than a year. Very impressive.
On this week's #MediaSnack David Indo is joined by Gayle Noah, Media Director for L'Oreal UK & Ireland. As media guardian of one of the largest media budgets in the UK, Gayle's position is essentially that of Chief Media Officer.Gayle is a huge believer in the importance of internal media leadership and suggests that any advertiser investing in excess of £10m in media should have dedicated media specialist resource in-house. Gayle describes how she has gradually developed her own internal media team at L'Oreal, across the last 6 years, focussing on developing analytical and digital performance capabilities within her team. She believes that these skills are becoming more and more important as L’Oreal continue to evolve its agile media strategy. Unquestionably benefiting from the privileged position of being a 'priority' client within GroupM's Maxus, Gayle provides insight into how to attract and secure the best media talent from the agency's resource pool, explaining that good client behaviours in particular around developing strong and engaging briefs are the secret to her success. Finally, when asked about the big media issue that keeps her awake, Gayle disregards the issue of transparency saying that she has confidence in the robustness of her agency contract and that she feels secure that L'Oreal interests are properly protected. Instead, Gayle explains that her greatest challenge is in identifying the key innovations and the areas where L'Oreal should place the big bets that that will continue to move media forward.
On this week’s #MediaSnack we consider if identifying, organising and motivating the best Media Talent is the major focus for marketers now. We’ve highlighted many times the needs for brands to take back more control of their media investments and the way to do that is to build the proper resources (people, processes and tools) internally.We reference the recent ANA Media Transparency Guidelines which make very clear recommendations, in line with ID Comms best practice advice, for marketers to implement. They note (correctly) that advertisers typically lack the infrastructure, resources and staff to effectively manage today's media challenges. We discussed on last week's #MediaSnack the role of a Chief Media Officer, which is to oversee these resources to ensure that there is proper governance over media investments. We strongly advocate not just hiring great people but to ensure there is an internal media community with a commitment to continuous incremental improvement. Considering what the best media clients do, David shares his insights from his time as Media Director of Nike and Coca-Cola. The best media clients know they have the right resources, organised n the right way but they always improve. They will see media more strategically as an investment in company growth not simply an executional spend, with clear KPIs internally understood and the media agency aligned to the same or very similar KPIs. The best media clients also typically oversee an internal media community with responsibility to continually improve media capabilities internally through training and best practice sharing. Next Tom considers the implications for how brands can make sure they are working with the best media agency Talent. It boils down to a few key principles; firstly to be able to describe the services you want from a media agency, so that the right talent can be identified which is relevant to your needs and will make an impact to your KPIs, next the agency talent should broadly reflect your internal structure for media - is this just local, market by market or do you have global or regional hubs and centres of excellence in media - the agency must mirror your organisation; finally and most importantly you have to actually pay for Talent, especially if you want that talent to stay working on your business for the long-term. Paying for agency resource in a transparent and fair manner ensures that you’ll get access to the best media talent in your media agency.Finally, we share details of an exclusive marketer-only event we are hosting in London on 8th September to discuss key themes around Media Talent. We already have many major brands signed up to attend, space is strictly limited so if you are a marketing or procurement leader and interested to attend and meet other like-minds to discuss Media Talent please get in touch quickly below and we will send you details of how to register. Looking forward to seeing you there.
On this week’s #MediaSnack we report on a landmark Supreme Court ruling in Germany which has created a new precedent on how media agencies should manage rebates and other incentives related to media buying. This could have implications and impact into the global media buying market and affect advertisers beyond the borders of Germany. This latest ruling concluded a disagreement which has lasted over 6 years between Haribo and German media agency MediaPlus. The case has been through 3 judgements, firstly found in favour of Haribo in 2010 then reversed on appeal a couple of years later. This latest, final ruling has stated that Haribo does indeed have the right to audit and receive rebates and incentives paid to the agency. The turning point of the case rested on whether Haribo’s contract with MediaPlus classified the agency as “agent” and if so then they should be working fully in the interests of the client and pass back all incentives earned. The court ruled that MediaPlus (and in future any agency) working as 'agent' will be obliged to give full transparency over rebates earned. Also on this episode we review the recent update made by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to Rule 40 which relaxes the rules places on athletes with regard to mentioning personal sponsor brands. Previously Rule 40 enforced a blackout of any mention to brands who were not official sponsors of the Olympics. We consider the implications, on both the sponsors (who are potentially losing exclusivity) and the brands who have been on the outside and relied upon guerrilla tactics to get seen and heard.
On this week’s #MediaSnack we devote the whole episode to reviewing the ANA’s Media Transparency Guidelines which were finally published this week after some delay. This draws to a conclusion the Association of National Advertisers’ year-long project to identify the scale of rebate and other non-transparent practices amongst US based media agencies and offer guidance to those advertisers (pretty much everyone) who may have been exposed to this practice or was entirely unaware of the risk.We look at the main points of ANA’s advice to marketers, including a strong suggestion that most marketers don’t currently have sufficient capabilities to oversee media management internally. They recommend appointing a Chief Media Officer, someone internally who can champion the role of media within the company, have more accountability for media as an investment for growth and someone who can define the relationship with the agency beyond just buying cheap media. We expect that the guidelines will now trigger many brands into action to upgrade their media skills and capabilities, to take back some control of media management from their agency if they have overly delegated this away. This, as regular viewers will know, is what ID Comms have been recommending for many years; marketers need to have control (ANA calls is “primacy”) over their own media investments. Those brands which do not will be at a serious disadvantage to those who decide to do the hard work to take back some control. For any brand looking to understand how to upgrade their own media behaviours, start by reviewing ID Comms 7Ts principles, the 7 media behaviours of successful marketers. This simplifies the major tasks and responsibilities of the Chief Media Officer, allowing them to benchmark their organisation and create a roadmap for improvements over time. One pleasant surprise as part of the ANA’s release was the inclusion of a media agency services contract. A template to guide marketers in creating the best media agency contract. This is a great asset, built on the good work that ISBA (the UK's marketer trade body) executed earlier in 2016. ISBA created a best practice media agency contract, ID Comms was heavily involved in the drafting of the contract and supporting guidelines so we can attest to its quality and robustness. The ANA have used ISBA’s template as a basis for their own version for US members. In our review, we believe that the ANA contract template is of best practice standard, but will be hard for advertisers to implement unless they have sufficient negotiation leverage over agencies to get them to accept these terms. That’s the next challenge for marketers, how to put all this stuff into practice. We certainly welcome the publication of the ANA's Media Transparency guidelines. We discuss that if advertisers adopt these guidelines then they will certainly be in a better position than they were 12 months ago. In that sense, the ANA have achieved their goal and done what they said they were going to do, the guidelines are sensible, reasonable, considered and fair. We highly commend the ANA for the rigorous process they have undertaken. We hope that, at the conclusion of the ANA media transparency investigations, this will draw a line under this difficult and toxic chapter for the industry and that advertisers and their agencies can build more productive relationships together for the future.If you have any responsibility of your company’s media investments, work with a media agency or work at a media agency, you need to be very well versed on this project. Happy reading, let us know what you think in the comments or email us at ID Comms.
On this week's ID Comms #MediaSnack things are getting serious in the US as Democrat senators, Mark Warner and Chuck Schemer, have co-written a letter to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) asking for clarification on what the FTC is doing to tackle the menace of ad fraud, which is expected to exceed 10% of the US digital market this year. They suggest that means some $7 billion annually is being siphoned off to fund organised crime. No wonder there is now serious political and FBI interest in the advertising industry, the concern is that ad-fraud will be the second largest income stream for organised crime, behind drug trafficking.Tom Denford and David Indo discuss what might be the implications of political interest into ad fraud, and whether this will force a change in the industry. Will this provide the pressure needed to clean up this mess and giant loss of value from client budgets. We also consider what happens when these interested and proactive Senators get round to reading the ANA (Association of National Advertisers) report into US media rebate practice, also known as #RebateGate. Some of the very questions the Senators ask in their open letter include:Is the FTC observing a trend that favors one particular type of advertising fraud over another? If so, what factors are leading to the prevalence of that particular type of fraud?What is the projected economic impact of this degree of data and revenue leakage amongst media owners and publishers?What steps is the FTC taking to protect consumer data and mitigate fraud within the digital advertising industry? What regulatory agency currently provides oversight of mobile advertising platforms?What steps can be taken to reform opaque advertising exchanges?What can be done more closely align the incentives of ad tech companies with publishers, advertisers and consumers?To the extent that criminal organizations are involved in perpetuating digital advertising fraud, how is the FTC coordinating with both law enforcement (the Department of Homeland Security or FBI) and the private sector to formulate an appropriate response?Next in this epic episode, we quickly review news that Walmart has handed a bunch of marketing service duties to Publicis group, consolidating a lot of their roster into one group. However this is only bitter-sweet as Publicis US (MediaVest agency) lost $1bn of Walmart's media account earlier this year. Nobody seems to know who is managing it now... It's not easy to hide (or lose) a billion dollar media account so someone must know where it went. Please let us know. Finally, we tackle a thorn in the side of media agencies around the world. E-auctions (software which requires media agencies to input competitive media pricing guarantees) have become a more common feature of new business pitches in recent years and this week a media agency leader, Mediacom global CEO Stephen Allan blew his top over the impact these auctions can have. Mediacom recently lost long-standing client Volkswagen Group ($2bn+ global media billings) which was handed to rival PHD. Stephen Allan's complaint was that VW ran a "blind" auction for media pricing which required agencies to bid ever-lower without knowing what target they were trying to hit. Now, if you're the incumbent agency like Mediacom you already know the existing pricing levels and so your bids should be more accurate, however, according to Allan, VW's methodology encouraged agencies to undercut each other in a race to the bottom on media price. His suspicion was that the business was awarded to the winning agency based on unrealistic pricing being input to the client’s blind e-Auction system.
On this week’s #MediaSnack we provide a little update on the 2016 media agency pitch market. As you will recall it was a busy 2015 with fun-sounding MediaPaloozas and scary-sounding MediaTsunamis at every turn. This year has been a little quieter so far, perhaps because brands have been holding back a little to see how big events like the ANA #RebateGate reports resolved and if #Brexit would materially change the UK and global economy. Now those events are passed, but the implications still becoming clear, we expect more brands to be preparing to launch media agency pitches in Q4’16 or Q1’17. We have seen this week IKEA announce the conclusion of their global framework pitch with Diageo and BT are still in progress. We encourage ID Comms clients to consider pitches carefully and try to avoid pitching solely with a financial objective to cut costs, this is typically a short-sighted tactic which affects business performance in the longer term. A race to the bottom on costs and pushing agencies just to save money creates many of the transparency issues we have been discussing for years. We find these days marketers are more keen to discuss their own behaviours and how they can evolve their media management processes, which deliver better value for their media investments. Next, we report on some highly-charged accusations by Sir Martin Sorrell, CEO of agency group WPP. His target today is ‘media auditor’ Ebiquity and their contract compliance division called Firm Decisions. Sir Martin’s accusation is that there is a conflict of interests for the same company (Firm Decisions) performing forensic financial audits of agency book and then reporting back to clients who could (in theory) instruct Ebiquity to pitch that agency. It is a logical conflict of interest potentially but in practice it is probably low risk. SMS taking time out to raise this is probably another indicator of the tense relationship between agency and auditor; the two companies were featured on last week’s Episode because they’re currently battling in the High Court in London. As a client of WPP, Ebiquity or Firm Decisions you’d be right to be growing a little impatient with the pettiness of these fights and wondering why these smart companies can’t collaborate their resources to tackle marketers’ many challenges and stop briefing against one another.Whilst Sorrell's conflict of interest accusation may be overblow, we do think that a potential conflict of interest lurks within the ‘auditor and advisor’ industry though, which Sorrell doesn’t highlight, and that is where auditors are receiving income from agencies and vendors. We think it is critical for marketers to be assured that they know exactly where their auditor, consultant or advisor has ANY commercial relationship with media agencies or media vendors because any preference this creates could affect their objectivity and advice, especially with regard to guiding complex, high-profile media agency reviews. As you know, at ID Comms we are very proud of our 100% neutrality and objectivity - we have zero commercial relationships with agencies or vendors anywhere in the world. This keeps us 100% focused on what’s right for our clients' businesses, not ours. Can you say that about your current auditor or advisor?Finally, we report on the launch of "Digital/McKinsey" - the management consultant has packaged up its digital assets under a new (cleverly titled) brand. Another step into the agency domain, surely now any remaining aspiration that the agency groups may have had as being the go-to for digital transformation is stunted by the total dominance of the consulting groups to own deep digital scope for the world’s leading CEO's?
On this week’s rather meaty #MediaSnack we review 3 big stories each likely to have a significant impact on the global media industry.First off we can't escape the Brexit UK referendum decision and its potential impact on the UK marketing scene and how it might affect marketers behaviours in the coming months. We try not to get caught up in the general negativity and whilst managing Brexit certainly has its challenges from a political perspective, if its going ahead then agile and ambitious companies will already be figuring out their best next moves to make the most of the opportunities. Those opportunities in media are likely to be significant, the rejection of the political status quo by UK citizens could set some precedent for marketers’ rejection of the status quo when it comes to the current media landscape and ways of working. There was already some appetite for change and re-invention in the media industry, which we have discussed before, but perhaps this may accelerate somewhat with the referendum decision. David and Tom consider how different kinds of marketers might react and hope their reaction will be largely proactive, optimistic and brave. This is the time to adopt a challenger mindset, think in leaner and more agile ways and consider how positive disruption might benefit your marketing organisation. Things are going to be tough, we all need to plan to survive and then flourish, to make change and innovation better than the status quo. Next we report on a fascinating story coming out of the US, the Chase retail bank has launched a deep audit of their media agency Zenith in the US and have hired corporate investigations firm K2 Intelligence and media auditor Ebiquity Firm Decisions to execute this. You will recall that these are the same two firms who have also provided the analysis for the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) recent investigation into media rebate practice in the US. The fact that the CMO of Chase sits on the board of the ANA could suggest that this might be just the tip of the iceberg and we may see other ANA members follow suit with big audits of their media agency practices. Finally, Firm Decisions is in the news again, this time they are being taken to the High Court by the world’s biggest media buyer GroupM. The claim lodged by the agency group accuses Firm Decisions of potentially misusing privileged data sent to them by mistake. Firm Decisions is yet to respond to the claim. We have reviewed the court papers and GroupM’s requests seem logical and reasonable, to request Firm Decisions prove they have deleted materials and account for how they came into possession of them. The alarming element is that this has ended up in court in public view, its very rare for agency and auditor to end up in court and is not reassuring for advertisers at a time of uncertainty to have the integrity of a leading auditor called into question. All at the same time Ebiquity Firm Decision are imminently about to publish their part of the ANA report into media rebate practices in the US….All of today’s stories are just the beginning, all will run much further so we will keep an eye on their progress in the coming weeks.
We bring this week’s #MediaSnack from Cannes in the South of France where David and Tom are attending the annual Festival of Creativity, which gathers some of the world’s leading marketers and executives from the world’s leading agencies and vendors. It was historically an advertising festival but in the last decade has been overrun somewhat by big spending media and technology companies. We broadcast from the beachside Cabana of the International Advertising Association (IAA), the sun is shining and the dark clouds that had been gathering over the media industry recently have definitely been left at home. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pREKAnwlqoThis allows for more positive, collaborative and unguarded conversations on the sensitive issues facing the industry. We highlight the important role Cannes plays to bring together the industry to celebrate good work (for only around 10% of the time) and engage in meaningful and different conversation with many different people you don’t typically get to talk with in the same way. We had the opportunity to talk with many senior client, agency and vendor leaders about the challenges and opportunities for the global media industry. #RebateGate was being talked about a lot, but the tone of the conversations has changed in most cases (thanks to Cannes), becoming less emotional and more open, sensible and rational. We announce the publication of the ID Comms 2016 Global Media Talent Report and talk to agency leader Toby Jenner, Global Chief Operating Officer of Mediacom about his agency’s approach to identifying, motivating and retaining the best industry talent. We discuss some of the findings and consider the current state of advertisers’ media capabilities and how that might need to evolve over time. http://idcomms.com/global-media-talent-report/ Finally we discuss the launch of the largest UK media review of the year. Communications groups BT and EE merged in early 2016 and currently split their media planning and buying across two GroupM companies (Maxus and MEC respectively). The combined account is worth £160m in billings and will be a big prize for the winner. We understand giants WPP, Publicis and Omnicom have been invited to fight it out.
On this week's #MediaSnack we ask whether the ANA's report into US media rebate practice, which has become known as #RebateGate has had any effect on Wall Street (and other financial market) valuations of the large marketing services groups like WPP, Omnicom, Publicis, IPG etc. Analyst perspective seems mixed, Morgan Stanley report the removal of the "overhang", whilst Brian Wieser is more cautious. The typical analyst questions to ID Comms have been: is this getting LEGAL? (maybe, unlikely, but not immediately) and will this trigger MediaPolooza 2.0 / Media Tsunami 2.0? (probably, again not immediately, likely to be in 2017 if so)We report on some of the many client calls and meetings we have had in the last 10 days which have tended to involve a calm and considered perspective and focus on immediate and long-term actions. We announced the release of the "Post-K2 Manifesto for Media Change" a simple 6-step practical guide to short and long-term actions which marketers need to consider, links to this are below. Next we discuss our plans for Cannes - Tom and David will be attending the world's largest annual communications festival which brings together leaders from the marketer, agency and vendor communities. We will be bringing #MediaSnack to Cannes with some great interviews lined up, check back next week. Finally, Tom is speaking at #TheIndieSummit - a gathering of some of the world's best independently owned creative, media and PR agencies.
In this weeks #MediaSnack Tom Denford is joined by Matt Green, Senior Manager Media and Digital Marketing (a.k.a. "the voice of global media") at the global marketer trade body the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA). They discuss the role and membership of WFA, which includes global brand companies like P&G, Unilever, L'Oreal, Nestle and many others with a global marketing spend of over US$700bn. The WFA represents around 60 national marketing trade associations across the world and is the voice of marketers worldwide, representing 90% of global marketing communications spend – through a unique, global network. The WFA champions responsible and effective marketing communications worldwide.In the first part of the episode Tom and Matt discuss WFA’s most recent initiative - 'WFA's Compendium of Ad Fraud Knowledge for Media Investors'. The document identifies clear actions to enable brands to reduce their exposure to ad fraud in four key areas: Standards, People & Technology, Education & Communication, and Governance. In the second part of the episode Tom and Matt discuss WFA's perspective on the ANA's report into US media rebate practice, called “An Independent Study of Media Transparency in the US Advertising Industry” and written by K2 Intelligence. For information about the report watch #MediaSnack Episode 28. In Matt’s word’s the ANA report contains a lot of constructive comments and is a helpful step forward for their marketer members. He says "we endorse the document completely". Matt Green of WFA believes that the ANA media Rebate Report (#RebateGate) will be a "catalyst for behaviour change" on the client side because some client behaviours may have "provoked the transparency problem". Finally, they discuss WFA's most recent member’s survey on media transformation which highlights that Talent is becoming one of the biggest concerns amongst WFA members and how important it is to ensure that they have the right resources and capabilities to face the future. This month ID Comms completed the ID Comms 2016 Global Media Talent Survey, that will be published in the next couple of weeks and will feature on future episodes of #MediaSnack.
Today’s special episode of #MediaSnack is devoted to the review of the ANA’s long-awaited report into media rebate practice in the US. Following a 9 month forensic study by corporate investigations firm K2 Intelligence, the report is an alarming wake up call to a global industry riddled with speculation about bad practice on behalf of some media agencies. The report calls media rebate activity “pervasive” and that they have evidence that agencies "across the spectrum” have been involved.We take a look at the report findings, consider the implications on the wider industry and discuss what should a media director be thinking right now after reviewing the reportBefore the report was widely released, we were invited to join a briefing call hosted by the ANA and K2 Intelligence for interested parties and journalists, on the call ANA President and CEO Bob Lionise stated clearly that “the media business is not transparent”. K2 then spent 20 minutes detailing the executive summary of findings and opened up to Q&A. We understand that the accompanying guidelines being drawn up by US media auditors Ebiquity will follow in a couple of weeks.There have been very robust responses from the large media agency groups questioning the integrity of the ANA’s approach and K2’s report. This has included an accusation from Publicis Groupe that the report has “diminished and maligned" the industry. Clearly battle-lines are being drawn and this is probably just the start of a bigger fall out between marketer and agency. Look out this week for The ID Comms “Post-K2 Media Manifesto” offering some initial practical guidance for marketers feeling exposed and unsure of how to react to the report findings.
On this week's #MediaSnack - we review The Wall Street Journal reporting that the hotly anticipated report by the ANA into US media rebate practice will be published "imminently". On this week's #MediaSnack - we review The Wall Street Journal reporting that the hotly anticipated report by the ANA into US media rebate practice will be published "imminently". We discuss the likely fall out and some implications of the report. We share what we think US Media Directors should be thinking and preparing for including carefully managing the message internally and seeking a mandate from their boards on a considered and strategic view on how to apply better governance to media investments in the future. Next we review Tom's perspectives of the Media360 conference which touched on many of the same themes, notably Media Transparency, media agency business models and the so-called "Talent Tsunami". One of the highlights of the conference was a panel which debated the pros and cons of splitting media planning duties from media buying scope. One of the panellists from Mars, Marc Zander highlighted how their splitting of planing and buying globally had given them the benefit of greater transparency and worked for them. Finally we remind you that the ID Comms Media Talent survey closes today so please take 5 minutes to complete it if you haven't done so already.
On this week's episode. We review some fascinating data published by AdAge, Agency Report 2016 which for the first time really brings the threat of “consultant” businesses to the traditional agency business into stark focus. Based on annual revenues, the somewhat tyranny of the “Big Six” which for many years has been WPP, Omnicom, Publicis, IPG, DentsuAegis and Havas has been broken. Accenture Interactive is now the sixth largest global agency by revenue having achieved $2.9bn in revenue for 2015, edging Havas Group out of the top six. We consider this trend, look further down the ranking and realise that the majority of the top ten digital agencies by revenue are now owned by consulting firms like Deloitte and PwC rather than WPP and Publicis. What impact is this making on the industry and is this the beginning of the end of the agency holding model and their historic dominance of the agency market?Next we look at SAP XM, a new media trading technology launched this week. Its another fascinating disruptor to the traditional media agency model, giving marketers self-serve tools at scale to connect them with media inventory in a transparent market place.Finally we address an article written by Dominic Grounsell (the Global Marketing Director of Travelex) called “Why the marketing industry is failing to attract the best and brightest talent”. He suggests that the talent question should be keeping marketers awake at night.We also announce the launch of our latest 7Ts Investigation into the 7 drivers of competitive advantage in media: Talent. Today please check out the ID Comms 2016 Media Talent Survey which is open until 3rd June 2016. If you complete the survey you will get priority access to the results when published in a few weeks time.
On this week's #MediaSnack we look at breaking news that drinks giant Diageo has launched the first 'mega-pitch' of the year putting their $2bn media account up for tender and sending a shock to incumbent agency Dentsu Aegis Network who have held the account (within network Carat) for many years. Could this indicate a change of fortune for DAN who have had a strong business performance the last few years? Looks like Diageo will be the first major global brand to really stress test agencies organisational model and financial model this year. David discusses what he would be thinking as a Diageo exec and the likelihood that this pitch is prompted not just by financial imperatives but also a desire to design a new blueprint for media agency scope and service. Next we talk about “The Most hated Man In Media” the one and only (and infamous) Mr Jon Mandel, the ex-CEO of MediaCom in US who was arguably the catalyst for the current ANA media rebate investigations and task force after his revealing presentation at the ANA’s Masters of Media conference in 2015. His recent interview with Nic Christensen at Mumbrella makes for entertaining reading (unless you’re a media agency CEO I expect) and Jon raises some new perspectives worth reviewing. It ends with a sad indictment of media agency management that they risk "killing the industry" with their short-term thinking, we are inclined to agree. Finally we mention more talk of trust and transparency from two industry stalwarts, Keith Weed the CMO of Unilever and Michael Roth, CEO of IPG who in the last week or so have both made public statements on the importance of trust and Transparency to their respective businesses. We also link to the recent ID Comms 2016 Media Transparency survey and Media Transparency webinar, check them out.
On this week's #MediaSnack we go live on Google Hangouts whilst Tom and David are in different countries. Tom is reporting live from the ANA's massive Advertising Financial Management conference in Florida.The big highlights of the conference are the ongoing concerns over media transparency, the CEO of ANA Bob Liodice sets out his big media concerns and updates the 700 assembled marketing procurement clients on the progress of the K2 Intelligence investigation into media rebate practice in US. He also interviews Michael Roth, the global CEO of IPG one of the world's leading marketing services companies who (in contrast to the same conference last year which featured GroupM's Irwin Gottlieb) took questions from the audience and seemed very open to discuss matters especially around transparency. His bold claims of IPG's openness on this area are refreshing but he fears all agencies will be "tarred with the same brush" if the K2 report is damning on agency practice.Next we look at some clouds gathering over another smaller agency group called MDC in US who have been in the headlines for the wrong reasons again. Last year their CEO was forced out amid an expenses scandal that saw him having to repay $21m back to the company he founded. This week they are in the news again because their struggling stock has been shorted by a notorious investor, betting against their future growth. We consider the implications of this and wonder what parallels may be drawn.Finally we announce the first in a series of Webinars on Media Transparency as a follow up to our very successful Media Transparency survey and report published last month. In next week's webinar we will talk you through the results and give more analysis and commentary about the data you need to know. If you have any interest, whether as a client, agency or anyone else in the topics of trust and transparency around media then please schedule an hour next Wednesday to join the free webinar. It will be worth it.
On this week's #MediaSnack we are joined by Mark Finney - newly appointed Director of Media and Advertising at ISBA. Mark talks about the important role ISBA play in championing the key immediate and future facing issues concerning the advertising community in the UK. Mark shares his perspective on the main initiatives that he has inherited from his predecessor, the legendary Bob Wootton and also highlight the topics that he's looking forward to addressing in the future.Next, we couldn't resist discussing the recent launch of the new ISBA Media Framework Agreement. This media contract template attempts to provide greater protection to ISBA members in their contractual dealings with their media agency partners, it will looks to redress the balance in favour of the brands. Here at ID Comms we are excited to have been part of the working group who contributed to this new agreement and look forward to improvements in media transparency as a consequence of it being implemented.Finally, we discuss the upcoming ANA Financial Management conference in Florida next week, and whether the ANA will have any new juicy bits of information to share with the industry regarding the rebate investigation that has recently concluded.
On this week's #MediaSnack we get rather excited by Alexandra Bruell’s most recent article from AdAge in New York. In it she brings attention to principal-based media buying approaches, its well worth reading if you currently (or ever intend to) invest any money in media in the US. The piece highlights (the perfectly legitimate and legal) practices by media agency groups buying media inventory at their own risk, in advance of client requirements and then selling it on to clients for an undisclosed profit. The client has to typically sign away rights of transparency in order to gain potentially cheaper media inventory. We consider the implications of this practice, how it blurs the lines further of what an agency is (as per Irwin Gottlieb’s comments at ANA’s Advertising Financial Management Conference in 2015) and how it might lead to significant changes within agencies as they decide how transparent they are going to be for clients. We look ahead to this year’s Advertising Financial Management Conference which takes place in two weeks time. Next we discuss that last week CNBC launched in-house agency called Catalyst under the leadership of Max Raven the SVP of CNBC Internatioal. We had a chance to attended the launch event where CNBC also announced a new TV series called "Marketing. Media. Money." which will feature industry leaders discussing current trends and issues of the marketing business. Launches 5 May. Finally, this week we are pleased to hear about a new media agency global network comprising independent agencies into one force. Local Planet is a network of local media agencies. We consider the benefits, opportunity and challenges of such a business and why it's a welcome addition to a heavily consolidated agency landscape.
On this week's #MediaSnack we discuss news that the newly formed Publicis Media has marked a significant new business win in the UK, picking up Asda supermarkets UK media and creative business which have been handed together to Publicis UK. There was no pitch, the entire £90m ($130m) account was awarded without a review, meaning Carat UK have lost a significant and long standing client which will be a blow. Its good news for Steve King, Iain Jacob and the new Publicis Media team as they work to launch their new agency proposition, with a big UK advertiser now validating this will give them a huge boost. Next up Tom details his time spent at the recent FT Digital Media Conference in London, paying special attention to a fireside-chat interview with WPP boss Sir Martin Sorrell, he talks about the scale of the group’s media buying, what he thinks are their differentiators from other agency groups and finally makes a bold statement about the likelihood of further consolidation of agency groups. Last up we bring attention to a great piece in Campaign written by Jenny Biggham founder of independent media agency The 7 Stars, she follows up on the transparency and trust issue, referencing the recent ID Comms research and gives marketers her top tips on how to improve transparency levels with media agencies and hopefully rebuilding trust over time.
On this week's #MediaSnack we are celebrating our (lucky) 7th birthday as ID Comms, yes we launched on April Fools Day in 2009. Just like Apple Inc did in 1976.... On the show today we first consider the K2 Intelligence assessment that is ongoing in the US as part of the ANA's look into potential media rebate practice in US. Tom shares his experience of being (pleasantly) interrogated by the K2 team in New York as ID Comms supported their process of data collection and analysis. Also we reference Tom's article on the subject in this week's Campaign magazine. See link below. Next, continuing the theme of trust and transparency we review the headline results of the recent ID Comms 2016 Media Transparency survey, the report from which will be published next week. If you'd like a copy please get in touch, @idcomms Following this survey report ID Comms is hosting an exclusive invitation only panel discussion on 15th April in London to build on these insights. Tom and David reveal who will be sitting on the stellar panel, including Bob Wootton from ISBA and Iain Jacob the CEO for the new Publicis Media operation across EMEA. Finally we review the recent product updates announced this week for #Snapchat and consider how they might be getting it right to rapidly build out their user based and attract valuable media dollars away from Facebook. You can find and follow Tom on snapchat at denfordtom. Next week we will be doing a special birthday Q&A - David and Tom will answer questions about the industry, the ID Comms business and what they see trends in media for the future. Please leave questions in comments below or tweet @idcomms - many thanks for the great questions so far.
On this week’s #MediaSnack we have a special guest, Gary Vaynerchuk, founder of VaynerMedia who drops in for a chat with ID Comms co-founder Tom Denford whilst he’s here ahead of the agency’s London launch and he’s also promoting his new book #AskGaryVee. Gary wears many hats, as an entrepreneur, writer, speaker, agency principal and digital and social marketing thought leader. He is the presenter of the weekly #AskGaryVee show on YouTube and star of his new daily video show #DailyVee which follows and documents his life as a full-throttle entrepreneur, tech-investor, speaker and social media influencer. Following on from last week’s episode when we discussed a meeting Tom had in New York with the VaynerMedia team, Tom asks Gary about the idea behind his fast growing media agency business, whether they see themselves as disruptors and why they are launching in London as their first international office outside US. Typically Gary doesn’t pull any punches, when asked about the ANA’s media rebate investigation in the US, Gary is forthright both about the existence of incentives paid to US media buyers and also VaynerMedia’s clear policy on accepting or offering incentives. Finally, its well known Gary is a huge NY Jets fan, often stating that the ultimate goal behind his rapid empire building is the wish to one day buy the Jets franchise. In #MediaSnack Episode 8 The SuperBowl special, David and Tom made some rather poor predictions on American Football. We take the opportunity to put Gary on the spot and make some predictions for English football. This weekend sees a schedule of European international friendlies, watch Episode 17 to see Gary Vaynerchuk’s score predictions for the big games; Germany v England and Armenia v Belarus...
On this week’s #MediaSnack there is a nice theme of 'disruption' which weaves through the episode. We start with Tom sharing his observations and learnings from attending a marketer event last week in New York. Tom was invited to sit on a panel organised by The Internationalist and the Association of National Advertisers under the theme “Setting the Global Marketing Agenda”. The day started with a fireside chat with Brad Jakeman, President of PepsiCo beverages who pulls no punches when talking about marketers need to disrupt their own businesses and his frustration at agencies for not evolving and innovating as fast as marketers need them to. The panels followed, on the theme “The Reinvention of Client Agency Relationships” and alongside Tom featured the very impressive Andy Markowitz from GE Performance Marketing Labs, Rob Rakowitz from Mars and Dan Vihn from Marriott. Next we discuss the phenomenon of the US presidential race currently well underway. Typically the candidates with the most media budgets will be most successful, almost all previous victorious candidates going on to be president have spent the most money on campaign advertising. However this year, Donald Trump has turned the model on its head and disrupted the normal rules. He’s done this by understanding the power of earned media, to date estimated at nearly $2bn in value, having spent only $10m which is just a fraction of what some of the other (less successful) candidates have spent. #Trump has dominated media coverage, perhaps being intentionally provocative in order to do so, and sucked the air out of his competitors' bid for exposure. Forcing them to spend even more aggressively to counter his dominance of the airwaves. So far the strategy seems to be working well for him. Finally we bring news of a new agency shortly launching in London. #VaynerMedia are opening their London office, their first outside the US, in July. Tom met with the Vayner team in New York last week to discuss their plans and learn more about their innovative agency model. Look out for a special #MediaSnack next week featuring VaynerMedia founder Gary Vaynerchuck, host of the #AskGaryVee YouTube show, which has clearly been closely modelled on ID Comms #MediaSnack ;)
On this week’s #MediaSnack, David is accompanied by ID Comms Head of Performance Alex Morse whilst Tom is away in NY speaking at a client conference (he will report back on next week’s #Media Snack).We are talking about the final big reveal of CEO Steve King’s vision for Publicis Groupe’s media entities. Since first announced the group have been very quiet on the details as we’ve discussed previously talked a lot about the restructure (see Episode 9 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_VpdXHd2jwfor a back story to all this). Steve has provided good clarity with a strong narrative around it, the structure is nothing revolutionary and may be accused of being cautious or “me too” but it is a massive step forward and we look forward to seeing how this operates in practice.Second, Alex is picking up on Nielsen’s recent acquisition of media planning tool – Pointlogic and how that represents a short in the landscape. Alex warns that this might attract the interest of media agencies seeing Nielsen as a competitive threat.Finally, we look at WPP’s very strong 2015 financial results and consider why CEO Sir Martin Sorrell seems to be very cautious on future growth, driven by economic pressures and uncertainty of the 2016 media pitch market, which we have said we expect could be as busy as 2015.
On this week's #MediaSnack we first discuss a fascinating "confession" made on Digiday.com by an unnamed CEO of an agency about the state of the digital display market. His or her claim is that display is a waste of money and advertisers generally have been spending in display for years without seeing any meaningful results. It's an explosive admission / confession in itself and worth a read, just for entertainment purposes even if you don't believe the statement. This is part of a long "confessions" series by Digiday. Next up we review a new campaign by Pre-roll superstars Geico.com - you may recall their "Unskippable" activity from last year which won awards everywhere, notably at Cannes. To raise the bar further they've come out with a new format called Fast-Forward which shows more intelligent use of YouTube's TrueView functionality. Links below to watch the films, great insight really well executed. It shows a brand and agency (The Martin Agency) really on their game and understanding how content, context and connection work together. We quickly mention that the ID Comms 2016 Transparency Survey closes today, please check out the links below to participate if you haven't already. Results to be published end of March. Finally we take a look at some impressive results coming out of Havas Group and consider behind the numbers what is driving the recent strong performance of this marketing services group.
ID Comms 2016 Media Transparency Survey: http://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/media_transparency_2016_IDCommsOn this week's #MediaSnack we hear from David about his recent trip to Paris where he presented to the WFA (World Federation of Advertisers) Sourcing Forum. The WFA represents the interests of the worlds leading brands and the Sourcing Forum is a very impressive group of the worlds most influential marketing procurement leaders. David explains the work ID Comms has done with WFA to research different marketing operational structures. The Paris meeting follows a similar session in NY back in December 2015. A white paper of the results will be published by WFA shortly. Up second, we discuss the launch of the ID Comms 2016 Media Transparency Survey which looks into how the myriad transparency issues might be affecting trust between advertisers and their media agencies. It will also give insight into which areas of transparency might be most influential in building trust. We are interested in transparency as an aspirational business principle rather than something toxic. Leading up to the ANA's findings of the investigation into media rebate practice in the US, The ID Comms survey will hopefully provide some constructive additional context. Please participate in the survey, links provided below. Closes on 4 March. Finally we discuss news reports that some major mobile network operators are considering providing their users with network wide Ad Blocking technology, allowing customers to have better control over how ads are served to mobile devices. It's an interesting move. Certainly users are fatigued with poor quality, intrusive ads on mobile. It's a good challenge back to the advertising community. It coincides with Mobile World Congress (MWC) happening this week in Barcelona. One notable keynote by Sir Martin Sorrell highlighted the gap between mobile's share of global ad spend (6%) versus consumer media time spent on mobile (25%). Agencies want to reduce that gap, the mobile networks might have something to say about that!
On this week’s #MediaSnack we reflect on some more bad news for Publicis Groupe’s media operations in the US after Walmart one of the world’s largest advertisers shifts $900m media billings out of MediaVest without a pitch. Its unclear who will be Walmart’s new media agency. But this represents another big blow for Publicis Groupe as it is in the middle of an expected restructure of its media operations. Pressure is on now to stop the losses and start winning business. Next up we consider the meaning of Media Transparency and argue that the conversation needs to get back to a higher level, with advertisers and agencies committing to rebuild trust. We also announce the launch of the ID Comms 2016 Media Transparency Survey which will seek insights into how marketers view transparency and how important that is to built trust and more meaningful and productive working relationships. Finally, we respond to a viewer's question about how to get into the media industry and we think about where we would want to work if we were to start over….
On this week’s #MediaSnack we look ahead into what’s likely to be another busy pitch year and echo the sentiment made by Charles Courtier (global CEO of media agency MEC) that this volume and scale of media pitching could be “the new normal” for media agencies. We offer some helpful tips and advice to CMO’s, in another crowded pitch market, what can brands do to stand out and make sure that agencies are making their pitch a priority and focusing the best talent, resources and value to their brands. We take a review of Omnicom Group’s Q4 results and look at the behaviours and movements behind the numbers, programmatic media buying revenues are driving 25% of their total group growth and we expect Omnicom to shortly announce details of their 3rd media agency network, which if you remember, was prompted by the recent big P&G media win in the US in 2015. Finally, we hit 100 subscribers (yay!) and as promised we invited our lucky 100th subscriber to ask us a topical question. The winner was Simon Peel, Global Media Director at adidas who asked us a great question about the hot topic of media transparency.Links from the episode:"Fatal February"http://www.campaignlive.co.uk/article...http://www.thedrum.com/news/2016/02/1...Omnicom Q4 results:http://adage.com/article/agency-news/...http://www.brandrepublic.com/article/...http://www.mediapost.com/publications...http://mandmglobal.com/omnicoms-third..._______________________________________About ID Comms:• ID Comms is a strategic media consulting company, founded in 2009 • We act as a trusted media partner to the world's leading advertisers, helping them to navigate the complexities of the changing media landscape.• Media is a very powerful lever for growth for brands, but the landscape is complicated, cluttered and confusing. Making sense of this and knowing what to focus on is a challenge for marketers.• It comes down to having the right knowledge to make decisions with confidence and the right controls to implement them, and that's what we do.• We provide clarity in this complex landscape by empowering our clients with the knowledge they need to take the right decisions and we provide the data and tools to give them more control over their media performance. Visit our website: http://www.idcomms.com
On this week’s #MediaSnack we hit double figures and look at the brewing angst between the US agency trade association the 4A’s and their US advertiser trade association counterpart, the ANA. They were both due to collaborate on a joint task force to address accusations of media rebate practice but they have fallen out a little and the 4A’s raised the temperature last week by issuing their own guidelines without aligning with ANA. Cue the ANA (rightly) criticising the 4A’s for going “rogue” and issuing incomplete guidelines. We look at the facts and analyse the 4A’s output. Next we try to make sense of the very complex Sony media review results which began to trickle through, it looks like a massive win for Mediacom. Or is it? We uncover more confusion. Finally we think about what might be driving Facebook’s stellar numbers from their Q4 reporting. We ask "is it sustainable and will it last"?
On this week’s #MediaSnack we can’t stop talking about the Publicis Groupe restructure (see Episode 4 [link] for a back story to all this). We spent some time last week with a delegation of institutional investors in the media sector at a special ID Comms Q&A lunch at Nomura Bank in London. Their questions were fascinating but lots of attention and focus was paid to Publicis Groupe, their restructure and their ability to reverse recent fortunes and find organic growth and grow margins. In today’s episode we delve further into these questions. We pick up on news that ITV, the UK’s largest terrestrial broadcaster has started an investigation into one of the UK’s largest media buying agencies (Dentsu-Aegis Network) for failing to meet their trading commitments (ITV suggest that the agency didn’t spend enough of its clients money with them). We discuss the merits and challenges with these kinds of big agency trading deals and wonder what the real benefit might be to brands when they seem to fail like these with increasingly regularity. Finally, Tom has a little moan about the poor standards of agency marketing collateral and what might be done to improve this.
This week on #MediaSnack we'll be devoting the whole episode to consider one of the most significant and famous media events of the year. It's a #SuperBowl special!With the big game just a few weeks away we will consider :- why the Super Bowl is still considered such a powerful advertising opportunity for brands in the digital age?- how does the Super Bowl work from a media perspective?- what does it cost to buy a spot in the Super Bowl?- who are the major Super Bowl advertisers this year?- we consider why do brands prize Super Bowl spots so highly?- how have brands used digital and social channels like YouTube and Facebook to extend the impacts and views of their Super Bowl commercials? We will meet Stephan Schwarz, Business Analyst at ID Comms who gives us some of the social media numbers and trends behind the Super Bowl advertising.Finally, we look at the good and bad of Super Bowl advertising and consider why this is such a one off event and not something which raises the bar of brand communications consistently across the year.
MediaSnack Ep. 7: Direct Vendor Deals, Nick Manning, The Exchange Lab - from ID Comms by ID Comms
In this episode you’ll be delighted to know that we discuss absolutely nothing at all about #CES2016, BUT we do talk about matters closer to home such as Recma’s nicely presented report on the results of 2015 #MediaPalooza and how that has affected the agency groups’ performances. We also highly recommend reading a long post on Medium by our friend Mikko Kotila of botlab.io who gives 8 awesome predictions around Ad Fraud in 2016, a must read for any marketer spending money on digital advertising and wondering where their money goes. Finally, we respond to a viewer question about Daily Mail Group’s financial reporting which shows that they “set aside” £26m ($40m) to pay rebates to UK media agencies, this is about 7% of their ad revenue and for the first time gives an official benchmark to UK press rebates.
In this episode we consider the impact of P&G 's decision to shift their $2.6bn US media out of Publicis Groupe. We also dig below the headlines in a recent deal signed by GroupM which commits their clients to spend £500m with a TV network in exchange, the network will buy TV programming from GroupM. Is this blurring the lines of what a media agency should be doing with clients money?Finally, we consider what should be the word on the lips of marketers going into 2016 and we meet ID Comms Head of Performance, Alex Morse.Find ID Comms here:Website: http://idcomms.comTwitter: http://twitter.com/idcommsLinkedIn: http://linkedin.com/company/id-commsG+: https://plus.google.com/b/101836473001605573756/101836473001605573756/posts
In this episode we discuss the major restructure of Publicis Groupe and how this might impact their media agency brands, we discuss findings from the many new 2016 ad spend predictions and finally close on a fascinating piece of research of C-suite and senior markets (FT readership) which was conducted by agency Maxus with the FT insight team.___________Find ID Comms here:Website: http://idcomms.comTwitter: http://twitter.com/idcommsLinkedIn: http://linkedin.com/company/id-commsG+: https://plus.google.com/b/101836473001605573756/101836473001605573756/postsAbout ID Comms:• ID Comms is a strategic media consulting company, founded in 2009• We act as a trusted media partner to the world's leading advertisers, helping them to navigate the complexities of the changing media landscape.• Media is a very powerful lever for growth for brands, but the landscape is complicated, cluttered and confusing. Making sense of this and knowing what to focus on is a challenge for marketers.• It comes down to having the right knowledge to make decisions with confidence and the right controls to implement them, and that's what we do.• We provide clarity in this complex landscape by empowering our clients with the knowledge they need to take the right decisions and we provide the data and tools to give them more control over their media performance.v