Principal versus Principle

28 November 2024

Back in the day when newspapers were newspapers a good media quiz question was: Who has the most upscale male readers? ‘The Financial Times’ or ‘The Sun’?

The answer was ‘The Sun’.

And yet ‘The FT’ continued to attract the same advertisers as always, at a hefty CPM premium over ‘The Sun’.

Any media man worth his or her salt would have no problem explaining this. Context, editorial suitability, time spent with the publication and thus quite possibly the ad too are all sensible reasons.

Somehow the planners of the day managed to work this out and sell the concept of quality to their clients without the plethora of data and research available today.

It’s instructive to translate this example into the present, move the market from the UK to the USA, and change the participants from media planners to online adtech professionals, platform sales people or investors in media properties.

Bigger audience? Cheaper CPM? ‘The Sun’ would win every time.

This simple example is at the heart of my issue with so much poor media thinking today, when plans are subservient to the buys, where quality is a concept that seems to exist only on conference stages and in trade articles, and where those making the buys are the servants of data and technologies they rarely understand.

A world within which seeking the truth about how audiences behave comes a poor second to commercial considerations. Why else is the US the only major media market that trades on the audiences to TV shows, not commercial breaks?

Could it be because there’s an assumption that audiences go down in breaks? And if that is the case, shouldn’t the measurement and the currency reflect that?

It’s also why I dislike the notion of Principal Based Media, the practice promoted by every major holding company in analyst calls and in pitches (and yet, rather remarkably not exactly featured on their websites, in trade press interviews or from conference platforms).

PBM (another good old three-letter acronym) has been around for decades. It may be more sophisticated (read, convoluted) now but even in comparatively modern times (let’s not count the buying of newsprint-rationed press space in pubs before retrofitting clients to the space acquired), it was the model behind the enormous success of the original French Carat business. Back then the established agencies (now the holding companies) sneered at what they called The French Disease.

It took the French agency establishment (companies like Publicis, ironically) to scupper the Carat model via an amendment to a law designed to do something completely different and introduced by the then Government. Loi Sapin decimated Carat profits.

Today’s variation on the same theme boosts rather than decimates the profits of the largest agencies, at a time when non-media disciplines within the holdco organisations have lost their way and their margins.

I can see the attraction of PBM to advertisers for whom gross numbers deliver the best results, but these are very largely not the advertisers with the brands coveted by / served by the largest agencies.

These advertisers spend time trying to understand what works for them, and why. And for them, planning, quality and context count.

Buying cheap media and selling it on at an undisclosed margin takes the industry back decades. It leads to mistrust, and to a relationship based not on objective quality advice but on what’s best for the agency.

After all, if you have a garage-full of cheap tat to sell you’re going to do all you can to sell it, including (as Carat did) conducting cod research into why the tat is exactly what the client needs.

All of this dents trust. It forgets that agencies are there to serve all their clients by offering them (all of them) the best advice to meet their particular circumstances.

The ‘best advice’ also covers the most appropriate technology for the client’s needs. Who’s to say that ‘A’ does a better job than ‘B’ when there’s a chance that ‘A’ is being proposed because of some agency or holdco-wide deal.

It also plays perfectly into the disintermediation game played so well, for so long by the platforms. Why listen to biased advice from your agency when you can get equally biased, but at least transparently biased advice from me? And not pay for it.

What are agencies for if not to offer expert, objective advice to all their clients?

No wonder more and more advertisers are doing it for themselves. Most of them would back themselves to tell the difference between ‘The Financial Times’ and ‘The Sun’.