The room fell silent. ‘Would you like to introduce yourself?’ ‘Yes, my name is Brian and I didn’t go to Cannes this year.’ Sympathetic murmurings. ‘In fact to be quite honest with you …’ Sounds of encouragement. ‘… I’ve never been, and I’ve never regretted not going either.’ Mumblings of ‘well done … that must have taken a lot to admit … sit yourself down … here’s a glass of rose’.

Back in March I wrote: “From time to time … I’m going to do my best to share some lessons learned (over my career). I’ll try to stick to one per post, and to illustrate with examples”. When all’s said and done, I have been at this a long time (over 50 years) and would have to be a complete fool not to have picked up a few tips along the way.

Not so many years ago, around 2005/2010 (yesterday in my terms; just after the ice age to some) the media agency world was pretty straightforward. If we set aside the specialists – those who do a great B2B job, or who run an agency handling local advertisers – pretty well the only game in town for large advertisers was that delivered by the large holding companies.

A few weeks ago an old colleague (and loyal Cog Blog reader) Florence Waterman posed an interesting question. Paraphrasing, she wondered why so many advertisers use influencers, without it seems much evidence, or data to justify their decision? After all, most spending is subject to a certain rigour.