What Business Are You In?

13 March 2025

Given recent events in the US, a debate on ‘what is the ad business for’ is overdue. Is it about creating messages and experiences (including ads), designed specifically to help drive clients’ businesses and placed in environments that will help achieve that aim? Or is it about producing ads quickly, and cheaply, to be placed automatically, using spurious metrics, regardless of client needs?

Do we see an industry within which ads, in all channels revert to a norm, and creativity, including in media choice makes no difference?

Or are we going to stand up for individuality and creativity?

The former is shortsighted, based on an ironic obsession with short-term margins over long-term prosperity. Yet it does seem to be the policy of many of the largest holdcos – the very people who should be our flagbearers.

The trouble is this is a short road to nowhere, as a glance down memory lane shows.

Jeremy Bullmore was right. ‘People build brands as birds build nests, from scraps and straws we chance upon’.

Scraps and straws come in all shapes and sizes. A purpose-built nest with them is likely to last longer than one without them.

But who needs a nest that lasts? Let’s just build a production line churning out identikit, cheaper nests and move on.

As they put their portfolios together a few decades ago, the holdcos saw ‘media buying’ as an arcane specialism ignored and not understood by most clients, full of numbers, and attractive to those believing everything could, and should be quantified.

Far easier to deal with hard metrics, however spurious, than trying to put numbers on feelings, emotions, creativity.

Today the talk is of these holdcos reinventing themselves for the AI age, as media and / or data businesses. Including reselling technology and media to clients, who, once upon a time, hired them to act objectively and in their best interests. Clients who now find themselves unable to question via audit or compliance everything they’re being sold.

The industry faces an existential threat if it goes down the path decreed by the biggest. The holdcos range of sellable expertise is shrinking and has a fast-approaching sell-by date.

Smaller, nimbler players are outdoing them creatively, comms planning specialists are thriving by selling objectivity across all channels, independent media agencies are winning by offering objectivity in planning delivered through transparent buying.

It must be depressing to sit in a holdco agency, doing amazing work on how media channels work only to hear your CEO commit your agencies to spending on social media channels you have just spent months demonstrating aren’t optimal. Whatever happened to client needs?

Furthermore, the competitive set is expanding. Clients are doing more in-house; the largest vendors are offering creative, production and analytic services and are increasingly disintermediating even the largest agencies.

It’s hard to see what the giant vendors get from collaborating with the holdcos beyond the medium term.

For now it seems that many see their best hope as industrialised ad production and media buying for the incurious and the unwary (there’s a lot of them). Buys increasingly untouched by human hand, executed by machine. Buys offered up by the agency acting as principal. Some would argue that’s unethical; ethical or not it’s not a long-term strategy for success.

In 1891 a group of advertisers met to discuss the burgeoning business of advertising. They set out certain principles: ‘The advertising agents were unfriendly, if not definitely hostile … many of them, including some of the biggest held the sole agency for the sale of advertising space in one or more well-known publications and since … they depended on the commissions they earned on the space they bought or sold they, naturally, sided with those who paid them. The advertiser, like any other buyer … had the right to know how many copies were sold of the newspapers and magazines in which they advertised. Facts and figures were what they wanted, not the fables and fantasies to which they were accustomed.’ (Source: ISBA)

The result of this meeting was the advertisers getting together to form ISBA; and advertising agencies as they were then evolving their creative and thinking capabilities.

Today, the ad business is fragmenting. We have creative agencies who are stretching what ‘advertising’ means.

We have the adtech and platforms who are in the data business.

And we have many of the largest holdcos, increasingly funded by vendors whilst paying lip-service to their clients; clients who, don’t let’s forget pay for everything.

They’re the ninety-oners, recreating a model that failed 134 years ago. And then again in France 32 years ago. In both cases the agencies focused on themselves, and the short-term, not their clients’ real business issues, or on building long-term partnerships.

The ad business exists to serve clients; to offer the best, objective advice; to make brands famous; to balance the long-term with the short-term; to advance thinking by understanding what works; to engage with and delight consumers with interesting, relevant work; to fund quality media channels; to provide employment with enjoyment to brilliant people.

Advertising remains a powerful weapon in building brands and businesses; it seems advertisers increasingly don’t need the current large agencies to do it for them.

Whatever business the ninety-oners are in, it’s not the ad business.