Corporate self-amputation, the air miles trap and mid-roll VOD

After yet another rebrand, the last 17 years have been erased from RKCR/Y&R’s history, writes Dominic Mills – plus: why Robert Senior quit, and beware of Facebook bearing gifts.

They say that animals caught in a trap often chew off the limb in order to escape. This act of self-mutilation seems an appropriate analogy with which to describe Y&R London’s rebranding last week.

For those of you who missed the story, struggling RKCR/Y&R has chewed off its RKCR leg and rebranded itself as Y&R London. Big deal, you might think; not many dead, it’s just a name.

Well, yes and no. I know the author of the change, global president David Patton, will say that the rebrand signals a fresh start and a return to the agency’s roots.

On the other hand, is this really the behaviour you’d expect of an entity that purports to advise advertisers on branding? This is its third name in 17 years. In 1999, Y&R bought hotshot agency Rainey Kelly Campbell Roalfe and became RKCR/Y&R. Now it is back to where it was. The latest iteration smacks of an organisation struggling to pin down its identity.

Second, it looks like an act of blame or revenge. There’s no doubt that RKCR/Y&R has had a tough time of late, deserted by M&S, Virgin Atlantic, Lloyds and Land Rover (to name but a few) in recent years. But only Mark Roalfe (a thoroughly decent bloke, for whom I feel rather sorry) of the original quartet remains – as chairman, which looks like a fig leaf for his pride and self-respect.

With one stroke, the last 17 years have been wiped out. You can hardly say that the RKCR bit should carry the responsibility for the agency’s current plight.

Third, Y&R as it then was didn’t seem to care too much for its roots when it acquired RKCR and, in an act of self-abnegation, stuck the RKCR name in front of its own. I know this is standard practice when a network agency acquires a hotshot outfit in order to add lustre to its offering (and lure the owners of the acquired agency) but the strange thing was that, at the time, Y&R London was by no means a busted flush.
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Yes, then as now, it had been through a hard time, but in fact a new management team had arrived and had successfully fixed the roof. Y&R was well on the way to recovery. Needless to say the authors of that change left by the back door shortly after.

Of course Y&R’s behaviour is by no means unique among network agencies. TBWA has similarly excised various names of agencies it acquired along its often-confused history, while MullenLowe (as it now is) was once Lowe Howard-Spink, then Lowe Lintas, then Lowe and Partners, then DLKW Lowe (if I have missed some incarnations, forgive me).

There’s one shining exception, AMV BBDO, born when BBDO bought Abbott Mead Vickers in 1991. The founders have long departed, but the name and the agency live gloriously on. No need for a rebranding there. It’s too early to tell whether the same will happen to adam&eveDDB, itself once BMP DDB. It better hope history doesn’t repeat itself.

Air miles and responsibility without power

It’s not hard to figure out why this happens. Entrepreneurs who sell their agencies to networks take two routes. One is to exit as soon as their earn-out is completed (I was surprised to visit one in his office where the wall was decorated with a huge piece of paper on which, as prisoners do, he was crossing off each day until he could take his money and leave. He did.).

The other is to see out the earn-out and then ascend the corporate ladder in a group role with a big title and which involves racking up the air miles and sucking up the corporate crap. Not surprisingly few last this course.

It’s not something entrepreneurs find easy to handle. They chafe against the bureaucracy, the endless spreadsheets, the self-defeating, time-wasting politics endemic to large organisations. A year or so ago I met just such an individual with the grand title of global president.

“Tell me what your job involves,” I asked.

“Well, I have a ton of air miles and I never see my family,” he replied. Then, drawing a deep breath, knowing he was about to speak the unspeakable, he added: “I’ve got lots of responsibility, but no power.”

Quite. The honesty was refreshing, but not surprisingly he was soon gone.

I wonder how much of this syndrome informed the decision by Robert Senior earlier this month to quit his role as global CEO of Saatchi & Saatchi and CEO of Publicis Communications in the UK. It’s obviously more complicated than that, but the timing of his departure suggests he took time off over Christmas, woke up on January 1 and thought “I just can’t hack this any more.”

Senior, those with a good memory will recall, took the second of the two routes I outlined above. After co-founding Fallon London, subsequently sold to Publicis (and now subsumed to the point of near-anonymity into Saatchi & Saatchi), he ascended the corporate ladder.

It’s worth noting that none of his fellow co-founders did the same thing.

He is by no means the first, and he will not be the last. But you’d think the ad industry would have learnt by now.

Mid-roll equals more ad blocking

Beware gifts, especially from the likes of Facebook. Earlier this month it handed the very same publishers it is eating alive what looks like a generous offer: new mid-roll ad slots in which the publisher gets 55% of the revenue take and Facebook 45%.

And none of this auto-play in the background or three seconds counts as a view malarkey either. The rules according to Facebook state that the ads can only run in videos at least 90 seconds long and after 20 seconds playtime.

This sounds good for publishers, or at least better than before.

But what about the viewer? It’s hard to think of something more irritating than an ad format more interruptive in what is essentially a short-form platform. A ten- or 15-second ad in a 90-second video? That’s proportionately very high.

My guess is that this will drive new increases in adblocking.

Of course Facebook will say that much of TV viewing involves a version of mid-roll advertising. Yes it does, but at least the viewer gets a hefty dose of programme before the first ads appear. And as the estimable Simon Andrews of Addictive points out in his weekly Mobile Fix, TV shows are structured in such a way as to absorb and anticipate ad breaks. It’s hard to see that typical Facebook content will be.