20 December 2018
A version of this post appeared on Mediatel’s Newsline on December 18th
It’s usual in these future looking pieces to exaggerate both the problems and the opportunities. But it really is no exaggeration to say that 2019 will be a critical year for media agencies – and, in particular for the network agencies.
14 December 2018
A shorter version of this post appeared on Mediatel’s Newsline on 11th December
One of the hoariest clichés you’ll ever hear about the ad business is that the assets go up and down every day in the lift. Even today when the lift is equipped with the latest AI algorithms it’s still the people that make it go.
03 December 2018
I’m not sure when this happened, but whenever it was it seems to be an ever more popular pastime to call out what some identify as fake data.
20 November 2018
Nobody in the UK ad business has ever heard of Gary Vaynerchuk. I know this as I’ve employed a research technique beloved by Gary himself: I asked a few people I know. Admittedly these people were gathered at the asi conference on audience measurement but, hey.
12 November 2018
This post is in-part based on remarks made by me at the 2018 asi Conference
Last week was the annual asi International TV and Video Conference, held this year in Athens. The asi has become an institution: it’s been held 28 years’ consecutively, with this year’s delegates (and speakers) coming from countries as diverse as Russia, New Zealand, Japan, Australia, the USA, many mainland European markets, the Nordics and the UK.
29 October 2018
Who would be an agency these days? Pitch after pitch after pitch, controversy after controversy, new vendors every time you turn around, competition from (comparatively) new entrants. It’s no life for someone after a quiet life, that’s for sure.
19 October 2018
Disclosure: BJ&A has done work for both Suzuki and the7stars
It’s been a good few weeks for the old git community, even the Cynical Old Gits in honour of whom the Cog Blog is named. We’ve had the 30th anniversary of Zenith, the first of the media agencies to be spun off from the old full-service ad agency model; ‘Campaign’s 50th birthday; and only this week the 30th anniversary of the demise of the first real agency I worked in, Davidson Pearce.
02 October 2018
I’ve been in the ad business almost 50 years, starting as a messenger in an ad agency in the days when the UK had one commercial TV channel, and no commercial radio stations. Despite myself I’ve absorbed lessons, and so from time to time I’m going to devote the Cog Blog to attempting to summarise a few things I’ve learned.
20 September 2018
Disclosure: BJ&A has done consultancy work for the7stars
The latest survey by the media consultancy ID Comms on the degree to which advertisers trust their media agencies showed the lowest numbers yet with only 10% of advertisers rating trust in their media agency as ‘high’ or ‘very high’. 40% say that the level of trust is ‘low’, as against 29% a year ago.
13 September 2018
The latest Nike ad, featuring Colin Kaepernick (the American quarterback who started the controversial ‘take a knee’ protest) is stirring up quite a storm. No doubt as Nike intended.
07 September 2018
I don’t know Mark Read which I would estimate puts me in the same position as 99% of those offering him advice on how to do his job as the newly appointed CEO at WPP.
30 August 2018
25 years ago almost to the day I sat in the boardroom at the Leo Burnett building on West Wacker, Chicago trying to persuade Cathay Pacific to extend the agency’s relationship with them beyond traditional advertising.
22 August 2018
There’s an anecdote about the great Irish footballer George Best. He was lounging in a hotel bedroom with the then current Miss World waiting for room service. The waiter arrived with the ordered champagne. Entering the room and seeing two naked figures, at least one of whom he recognised he is said to have shaken his head: ‘Oh George, where did it all go wrong?’
10 August 2018
It is a common mistake to ignore history. We all do it, only realising it in later years when what is paraded as the latest thinking starts to look eerily familiar.
26 July 2018
Facebook hasn’t exactly got a stellar reputation when it comes to numbers. Even the most rudimentary statistics (like how many people are on the platform) seem prone to what might perhaps politely be termed ‘a degree of variation’.
11 July 2018
Trinity Mirror’s insight team, working with House51, the strategic consultancy has produced an interesting piece of work called ‘Why we shouldn’t trust our gut instinct’. This looks at the behaviours and opinions of what the authors describe as ‘the people who populate adland’ as against those out there in the wider world.
04 July 2018
Last week’s Cog Blog post referred to Newsworks’ upcoming Effectiveness Summit, which has now upped and come. And very good it was too.
28 June 2018
For some while now there has been talk that the UK’s major publishers need to collaborate in some way to compete with the likes of Facebook and Google. The case is obvious – ad revenue has been migrating to platforms who have managed the impressive con trick of persuading content creators to provide them with material at a fraction of its worth.
21 June 2018
No, I’m not in Cannes, thanks for asking. One of the advantages of being your own boss is that you can choose to avoid such colossal bullshit-fests. Of course, there are diamonds in amongst the rubbish but I’m at that stage where I prefer to read about them. I would rather watch the World Cup on telly too.
14 June 2018
A few weeks ago we featured an interview given by Mark Read, now joint COO at the post-Sorrell WPP in which he stressed the importance of the group focussing more on clients and less on internal matters.
08 June 2018
‘Advertising is a people business’ and ‘The assets go up and down in the lift each day’ are two of the most popular clichés around. Even (or especially) in this programmatic world and the launch of Accenture Interactive’s media operation – something that incidentally seems to be happening without a huge media name at the top of it. Read more
01 June 2018
Much heat was generated last week around Accenture Interactive’s announcement that they were entering the programmatic media buying business. Social media was full of posts from the media auditor community (Accenture is of course a media auditor, and consultant, occasionally running pitches), as well as much harrumphing from the media agencies.
25 May 2018
A longer version of this post appeared on MediaTel Newsline on May 10th
Much of what we refer to within the media world as measuring the effectiveness of advertising is in fact nothing of the sort. Rather we measure things that are comparatively easy to measure, like audience exposure, and convince ourselves that because something has been exposed it must have been noticed, and because it has been noticed it must have had an effect.
17 May 2018
Back from holiday and it seems the wheels are still turning. It was only a month ago, on April 14th that Sir Martin Sorrell exited his creation, WPP. Millions of words were duly filed. Speculation (much of it from outside the industry and ill-informed) around the future of WPP has been rife. Now Sir Martin has followed up his gnomic message to staff (‘Back to the future’) by confirming that he does indeed intend to start again.
19 April 2018
By now the world and his wife know that Sir Martin Sorrell has left WPP, the business he founded 33 years ago. I’m old enough to remember the ad world before WPP. Sorrell transformed his industry – and there aren’t many in any field who can legitimately claim to have done that.
13 April 2018
We are living in a world of short attention spans, where detail is almost derided and tweets trump well-argued hypotheses.
26 March 2018
The Facebook/Cambridge Analytica scandal has thrown up a surprising number of people with an apparent expertise in data analytics and a detailed knowledge on how one goes about scraping personal information from a very large social media site.
19 March 2018
There’s very little doubt that the story of the week (year, decade even) concerns Facebook, the use made of data from their platform by Cambridge Analytica and the consequences of the resulting micro-targeting as used in an election, maybe even one near you.
16 March 2018
Over the last few weeks we’ve heard the views of two of the largest advertisers on the planet on the current state of the media and advertising businesses.
08 March 2018
What the heck has happened to the industry’s trade bodies? And can we all have a sip of whatever it is they’ve been drinking?
02 March 2018
To read the headlines you would think we live in a curiously binary world. Facebook’s wonderful; Facebook’s on its last legs. TV is dead; TV is still the most effective medium ever invented; printed media forms cannot survive; print circulations increase as readers seek the truth behind the stories.
23 February 2018
Facebook is having a bit of a moment – and not in a good way. Users are apparently falling away, rumours swirl around Russian FB ads/influence over the US (and maybe other) election(s), Edelmen has concluded that ‘social media news’ is not to be trusted, the AdContrarian is calling for Mark Zuckerberg to go, and Unilever’s CMO Keith Weed is, as we said last week suggesting that his business will no longer “Invest in platforms that do not protect children or which create division in society and promote anger or hate.”
15 February 2018
A couple of weeks ago the Cog Blog commented on the growing importance of planning to the network agencies as they strive to replace the grey revenues lost to the era of transparency.
09 February 2018
If you’re a dedicated LinkedIn user, you’ll know that posts detailing ‘lessons from my extensive experience’ are hardly in short supply. It’s remarkable how many life-coaches there are out there. Given the mass of free advice it’s extraordinary that anyone, anywhere ever fails at anything.
01 February 2018
It is often said that pitches are the lifeblood of the agency business. Right now there must be quite a few agencies who could do without all the excitement.
25 January 2018
Being a simple chap, I like to divide the bulk of the media agency world up into planners and buyers. I know everyone has far smarter, and possibly more accurately descriptive job titles these days, but fundamentally you’re either a ‘hot’ buyer (driven by the deal) or a ‘cool’ planner (driven by the data).
15 January 2018
Last week’s Cog Blog came up with three ‘C’ words as hopes for 2018: collaboration, creativity and context. Today’s post touches on two of them.
04 January 2018
So here we are, at the start of a new year. Will the media roundabout slow so that we can all draw breath; or will it speed up, throwing those without a firm grasp off?