Once upon a time, in a land far away there lived a widow and her young son. The widow had always been kind to her son, as long as he did what he was told, but woe betide if he stepped out of line! ‘You can always be replaced’ she said to him; ‘There are plenty of boys out there who would love to come and look after me in return for a warm house and regular meals.’

Well, that was, shall we say an interesting year. Quite aside from such cataclysmic episodes as a pandemic, Brexit negotiations, elections, and what has sadly become the usual quota of intolerance and violence we had a few little moments of our own in the quiet backwater that is advertising and media.

What will we take away?

Remember when the trades were full of thought leaders enlightening the rest of us? In the media world these were usually smart people from agencies, or media owners.

Advertisers rarely featured – indeed back then there was almost a paranoia around anything that could be described as sharing secrets outside the organisation.

It’s a mystery why it is that sensible, smart people so often see things in absolutes: black or white, right or wrong, win or lose, media or creative. Surely the concept that teamwork is generally a good idea is not that hard to grasp?

For the last seven and a half years the Cog Blog has provided a weekly platform for me to rant on about this or that pet hate, to vent on what I see as industry wrongs and injustices, to amplify others’ good ideas, and to comment on the latest tit and tattle. To be honest, most of this really doesn’t make a great deal of difference in the overall scheme of things – but the subject of this week’s post does.

Disclaimer – I helped the asi team with last week’s annual conference

Last week’s asi conference, the annual get together of the video and audio audience measurement community broke new ground, and not just because it was a virtual as opposed to a physical gathering. It featured a session devoted to the concept of attention; it was the best ‘attended’ event asi has run; it attracted an audience from a number of disciplines beyond pure audience measurement; and it generated a wider, and a more lively debate than usual (and most asi’s in my experience are good at debate).

One of my favourite quotes from the great Jeremy Bullmore goes as follows: “People build brands the way birds build nests. Through the straws and scraps they chance upon.” It’s a wonderful summation of how it’s people who build brands – and why all channels, all the straws and scraps have to work together, to fit together to build the whole.

Disclosure: I help asi with their annual conference and will be chairing a session at the 2020 virtual event

At the start of this year (on January 9^th) The Cog Blog came out with the traditional list of predictions for the year 2020 to come. Amongst these was the following: ‘Media runs on measurement. If the measurement is wrong, or not there, or not validated objectively then we’re all in trouble. Anyone who thinks otherwise is in for a nasty shock when they wake up to find that the ground beneath their feet has turned into a rather nasty, messy bog’.

The Cog Blog a couple of weeks ago contained some lessons I’ve learned over the years, illustrated with real-life examples. I asked the great Cog Blog reading population – an ever growing not to mention discerning group – to contribute to the follow-up.

That great cartoon-strip philosopher Charlie Brown once said: “I have been repeating the same mistakes in life for so long now I may as well call them traditions.” Had Charlie Brown ever grown up he may very well have enjoyed a successful career in advertising.

In the last few days, egta, the European Association of TV and Radio Sales Houses published a comprehensive report into advances in hybrid television audience measurement. I don’t pretend to have read it – it runs to 104 pages and is really a source document outlining the options available – but fortunately I know a man who has who assures me it is both comprehensive and useful.

‘WFA says it has cracked cross-media measurement’ screamed the headline in ‘Campaign’ last week. The body of the article of course was a lot less hysterical. ‘Campaign’ headlines sometimes err on the side of over-enthusiasm, but this example really doesn’t do anyone any favours.

You may have noticed me banging on about the benefits of experience lately – here – along with a defence of the older adman.

You may very well ask: what do you know? Who are you to lecture the young and vibrant with your talk of the last century, of full-service agencies, of long lunches and longer afternoons?

Things always seem to kick off at WPP when I’m away. In April 2018 (when the Cog Blog was on a break..) Sir Martin Sorrell left his creation. This time it’s some poorly thought-through remarks from Mark Read, Sorrell’s successor that have fired up a number of advertising luminaries over the age of 30.

Just occasionally in amongst the cries for attention and the blatant sales pitches on my LinkedIn feed a gem appears. Admittedly most of these gems tend to be written by one of Dave Trott, Bob Hoffman or Richard Shotton but every so often someone else simply hits the spot.

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A few weeks ago, The Cog Blog commented on the boycotting of Facebook by a variety of big name brands. How’s that been going?

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I have never met Tom Goodwin. I’ve never even heard him speak, but as is the way with these self-made social media superstars I feel as if I know everything there is to know about him.

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You don’t need a smart-arse blogger to tell you that these are uniquely difficult times, nor that some things won’t ever be the same again. All of us have examples to hand – from our attitudes towards home working, to how we feel about walking into shops or eating in restaurants right through to the likelihood of ever again paying for anything with cash.

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It’s been a busy few weeks at Facebook, what with the ad boycott, hastily arranged meetings with agencies, bullish statements from Mark Zuckerberg (‘who needs advertisers, and in any case they’ll be back soon enough’), and remarks from the company and its supporters that there’s really nothing to see as here at Facebook we were in any event cleaning out the Augean stables. No one believed them.

In the midst of all this a ‘Campaign’ piece by Daniel Gilbert ‘In Defence of Facebook’ appeared.

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It’s a bit of a business this blogging lark. You write a piece on Facebook and the various companies who have decided in one shape or form to pull funds from the platform, only for Mark Zuckerberg to change the rules thus rendering out-of-date most of what I’d written. If you see him, have a word with him for me would you? Thanks.

Anyway, on with the show.

The competition to be number one in the spreader-of-hate-and-discrimination stakes is intense. Twitter seemed to have it pretty well sewn up going into the final stages but a late run by Facebook, combined with a sudden outbreak of responsibility over content at Twitter has seen the lead change.

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The last few Cog Blog posts have wandered around what the agency of the future might look like post-pandemic, and the degree to which this coming recession will likely reshape the industry, as opposed to simply making it smaller. But what about the tools it will need to work?

The hub and spoke model, with the media agency at the centre acting as strategic lead on all forms of communication is easy to type, and very hard to do.

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Last week’s Cog Blog post, on what the agency of the post-pandemic future might look like generated some interesting feedback. This week’s post tries to provide some suggestions (answers would be presumptive) to the points raised, based purely on my own experience. I’ve grouped these around four of the most popular topic areas. Read more

You don’t need to be a genius to notice that things have been a little different in the world of work over the last few months, nor a futurologist to predict that at least some of these changes to the way we all live our lives will stick.

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I’ve been meaning to write about in-housing for weeks – but then the ISBA / PwC report and its implications happened and well … you know how it goes. Mind you, the ISBA work has implications for how clients handle their media activities, what if anything they do themselves and what they outsource to their agencies, so here we are at last even if by a rather circuitous route.

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Disclosure – BJ&A has done work for Kantar Media, mentioned in this post

Last week’s Cog Blog outlined the findings from the ISBA / PwC report into the transparency of the programmatic supply chain, indicating that a large chunk of the average advertiser’s online budget doesn’t arrive at the intended destinations.

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Last week’s Cog Blog commented on the recently released report from ISBA and PwC on where online ad money goes. The reaction has been, shall we say, extensive.

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Last week’s Cog Blog was all about how it seems that far and away the majority of agencies seem to have a blind spot when it comes to following their own advice about marketing during a recession. Most are regrettably silent when it comes to promoting their own values and client offerings.

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As I’ve commented before here, there are plenty of opinions, articles and webinars on how marketers should go about weathering the coming economic recession. Many of these come from agencies, trade bodies, media owners, academics and marketing consultants; most peddle the line that the smartest plan is to keep spending at a time when the competition slows or stops, thus raising share-of-voice.

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If nothing else, the time we’re saving on commuting, and unproductive meetings allows us to explore what smart people have to say that could be relevant to the current situation. Time to show-off by dusting down those pretentious quotes!

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It may seem premature, given that like many I am locked inside with only multiple Zoom calls for company, but one day life will start to return to something approaching normality. What will agencies, and agency life look like then?

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It is no surprise that our industry’s commentators, researchers and (naturally) bloggers are all focusing on what happens to marketing and advertising during a recession. These include the excellent Mark Ritson, whose column in ‘Marketing Week’ references data right back to the 1920s.

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Time to rewrite the old rule: never believe your own publicity should surely become never believe your own Twitter / Facebook / Instagram / LinkedIn feed. We are in danger of running around in ever decreasing circles, screaming at the same people, recycling the same news, the same rumours, the same lies.

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Faced with an unprecedented worldwide health emergency, how lucky we are to have access to literally millions of ‘experts’ just a click away. It was only a matter of time before the ‘100 Lessons Marketing Can Learn from the Coronavirus’ articles started to appear, and sure enough it’s now hard to avoid this or that marketing commentator pontificating on one or other aspect of this awful situation.

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If you have been (paying attention that is..), you’ll be aware of a group called The Attention Council which met last week in London. Some of the more interesting things about this group is the variety and quality of its founders, the variation in the work they’re doing, and where they’re based. Not so long ago, measuring attention was a rather niche, not to say lonely activity. Not so today.

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I’ve always been something of an optimist. Even though last week’s Cog Blog post was full of doom and gloom (although you have to admit there were some great ads) I like to think that lessons have been learned and that the ad business is, finally, coming to terms with the world as it is today.

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Advertising has never been a particularly admired profession. Indeed, some would say it isn’t a profession at all. We’re not doctors or teachers, we’re not even lawyers or accountants. We don’t make or do anything of any great practical use to humanity. We help people sell stuff.

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We are supposed to be good at words. We are after all in the communications business, although if you’ve had the misfortune to read a typical agency pitch document or sit through yet another conference paper on neuroscience and the media you may wonder.

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What a weird business we’re in. On the one hand we talk a lot about the need for consistency in relationships, about the need to truly understand the client’s business, about the importance of our work being acknowledged and respected in the advertiser’s Boardroom. And on the other we celebrate pitches as if we were involved in a sporting event (we even delight in publishing new business league tables).

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Last week’s Cog Blog laid out the case for this being a watershed year for audience measurement. We are facing an increasingly complicated media world within which we use multiple devices to consume content selected from a vast array of choice. We consume at times and in places that suit us, not the content providers. And we’ve been trying to make sense of all this with a set of tools that were imagined in a different age.

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The Cog Blog is nothing if not prescient. Here’s an extract from a post on 9^th January. That’s, oh almost a month ago (or sometime in the last decade in the minds of those from the cult of the shiny thing). I wrote: “‘Measurement’ is believe me the topic of the moment.”

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I delayed last week’s post until after the glorious / miserable (delete according to choice) day when the UK left the European Union. For those overseas, this happened at 11pm on Friday 31^st January.

The wait was so that I could, without being accused of political point-scoring write about the incredible ad campaign run by the Government to ‘Get Ready for Brexit’.

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Last week an unusual thing happened. The Telegraph Media Group (TMG), publishers of The Daily and Sunday Telegraph announced that they were pulling out of the ABC (for overseas readers, that’s the UK’s Audit Bureau of Circulations, the industry-wide measurement of newspaper and magazine sales covering around 1,200 titles).

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Last week I was (I think entirely justifiably) snooty about predictions. The Cog Blog doesn’t make predictions – if only because of an entirely rational fear of being called out a year later for getting them hopelessly wrong.

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It’s traditional to start the first post of the year with predictions for the year ahead. It’s inevitable that a few of these will come true (on the basis that even a stopped clock is right twice a day), and equally inevitable that most will never happen.

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