GroupM – just like Philip Larkin

The language used in GroupM’s surprise announcement that MEC and Maxus are to merge brings to mind the master of a peculiarly British form of misery, writes Dominic Mills

Eeurgh. Faced with a choice between a serious story and a knockabout one, I’ve decided to start with the latter. Shamefully shallow…but, er, what the hell.

If you’ve been on Planet Half-Term you may have missed the big surprise announcement of last week: GroupM is to merge two of its younger offspring – MEC and Maxus – into one entity and bet the farm on turning its youngest and, in its eyes, most promising child, the as-yet-barely-out-of-shorts digital agency Essence, into a media powerhouse.

You can read the story here and the official release, which laughably describes this as a ‘portfolio reorganisation’ here.

Incidentally, imagine how an MEC or Maxus staffer whose life has been thrown up in the air by this change feels to be described as part of a portfolio. In the chilling language of the Pentagon, they are collateral language.

And buried at the bottom of the GroupM release is a boilerplate paragraph describing GroupM thus: ‘GroupM is the leading global media investment management company serving as the parent to WPP media agencies including Mindshare, MEC, Mediacom, Maxus, Essence and m/SIX, blah blah blah…’.

‘Serving as the parent…’. WTF. Seriously? Who talks like that? I don’t know if this is faux humility or corporate bollocks. In my head I see GroupM staff going to parent-teacher evenings. “Hi, I’m Kelly Clark. I serve as the parent to children including X and Y.” The teacher rolls their eyes and other parents snigger.

All this brings to mind Philip Larkin, poet and master of a peculiarly British form of misery, whose most famous line is ‘They fuck you up, your mum and dad’.

I’ll come back to the logic of the ‘portfolio reorganisation’ in a minute, but the mechanics and the announcement by an organisation that describes itself as a ‘parent’ look like a complete fuck-up.

GroupM can’t say what the new MEC-Maxus unit will be called. It can’t say what Essence will be called – apart from that its moniker won’t start with an ‘M’ (shame: I had ‘Meh-ssence’ in my head).

It can’t say where the London HQ of MEC-Maxus will be. Apart from MEC boss Tim Castree, who will be in charge and based in New York, it can’t/won’t name any senior staff.

It can’t say if there will be any redundancies among MEC and Maxus staff.

As the announcement was made it couldn’t say when the new agency will come into being – although we now know it will be January 2018.

And most importantly, it can’t say how the MEC and Maxus clients will be assigned. In the UK, MEC has Vodafone and Maxus has BT; you can’t see either feeling chuffed at the prospect of being shunted around to suit the parental ‘portfolio’.

I’m told that in cases of conflict, it is the MEC clients that will be assigned to ‘newco’ (as the new entity will be known) and the Maxus ones that will be moved. We’ll see.

Adding it all up, chief Dad Kelly Clark, aka global boss of GroupM, isn’t really able to say anything of substance.

So why make an announcement that catches everybody off guard? I’m told senior people had 48 hours notice. I’m guessing an unhappy client threatened to throw their toys out of the pram and go public.

Still at least Castree seems to know what he’s doing in this punchy interview in Campaign and there is a clear sense that in this ‘merger’ – sorry, takeover – MEC will come out on top.

As for the logic of the reorganisation, I can see the sense. One, with six buying agencies and Xaxis, the GroupM offering is bloated and confusing. By and large, and with variations at the margins, the buying agencies are pretty much undifferentiated. Relative to Mediacom and Mindshare, MEC and Maxus are the newer kids on the nursery. Their strength in the UK is not replicated globally.

Two, it makes sense for GroupM to add some digital media shizzle by beefing up Essence, best known as Google’s media buyer, in the manner of Omnicom’s Hearts and Sciences offering. Just to smooth its growth, GroupM plans to shovel some big clients its way – assuming they’re happy to go.

This story will run for a while, but let me leave you with this gnomic description from an unnamed GroupM individual as quoted in Campaign last week – which, incidentally, has done a first-rate job covering the news.

“This is sort of a holistic, strategic app to create flexibility for GroupM to find efficiencies to reinvest in areas that we can create growth.” Er, right.

With parents like that…

Revival of the JICs

Like convoys, JICs – Joint Industry Currencies – and the measurement industry move at the pace of the slowest participant – if not glacial, then without much apparent urgency.

As a result, in an era of rapid change, the JICs have looked off the pace and their relevance open to question. In short, they’ve gone out of fashion amongst buyers and advertisers who have swallowed the line that digital media has its own built-in accountability.

In fact this is looking at the problem through the wrong end of the telescope. Change brings uncertainty, and in uncertain times the media ecosystem – more than ever today – needs an objective measurement system it can trust. We know from the last year – and I don’t need to document it in detail here – that digital accountability is a chimera.

Hence JICs are more relevant than ever.

And now there are welcome signs that they are back in fashion, evidenced by last week’s convocation at the IPA entitled ‘A Matter of Fact’.

In a nutshell, it is a rallying call to the industry to support the principles enshrined in JICs: impartial, third-party measurement, covering all major media owners, and accepted and trusted by all parts of the advertising community – buyers, sellers and advertisers.

There is much to take out of the session, covered here by Mediatel, but the most significant is the fact that clients – in the form of ISBA – have thrown their weight behind the initiative. If they take JICs seriously, then so will agencies.

And if agencies and clients take JICs seriously so too – or at least that is one unspoken aim of the initiative – will Facebook and Google.

But will they play ball? There is a view that they will, eventually – perhaps when the pressure from big spenders starts to hurt.

At the moment – as with the YouTube/BARB snafu last month – it feels as though the two giants prefer to mouth platitudes to proper action, but there are senior industry figures who believe that, even if it looks like every step forward is matched by a step back, the time is coming.

I hope so, and I’ll look at some of these issues in more detail next week, but I think there is one massive cultural hurdle that has to be cleared. To play nicey-nicey with the JICs requires Google and Facebook to accept that they are media owners rather than tech platforms.

To do so will open them up to a whole can of worms – not least the prospect of regulation and scrutiny from politicians they would rather not deal with.

And that’s potentially a bigger hurdle than any loss of budget from big advertisers.