The crisis in advertising: things we can do today
Opinion
Nick Manning concludes his series reflecting on the ‘Advertising: Who Cares?’ summit by outlining the recommendations for action.
In the first two parts of this follow-up to the ‘Advertising: Who Cares?’ summit, I set out the transformation in the advertiser and agency business models identified by our workstreams as necessary to restore advertising’s fortunes.
The issues are structural and so are the solutions, but that doesn’t mean that we have to wait for radical change, especially when it’s not guaranteed.
The objective is always effectiveness. This doesn’t just mean business growth, but making an impression, creating and adding to people’s memories and contributing to the health of the media eco-system to perpetuate the symbiosis.
The summit on 16 October produced some positive recommendations that can be acted upon by people within the advertising industry. These are especially important given the huge volume of advertising the public sees and hears from outside the industry, which fights for the public’s attention without playing by the Queensberry Rules.
The videos from our summit are available for those who couldn’t make the day, but here is a potted version that does scant justice to the breadth and depth of the material presented.
The need for differentiation
A good starting point is the unquestionable need for us to use our experience and expertise to differentiate in a world where people are bombarded by ads all day, every day, most of them of little or no value.
Creativity is key to this, of course, and we heard a powerful call-to-arms from Caroline Marshall, Dillah Zakbah of Fold7 and Mick Mahoney on how creativity should transcend boundaries and departments and why some of the industry’s shibboleths should be abandoned.
This even includes the abolition of the concept of a creative department and creative awards for their own sake, especially if gamed.
We are in the world of generative AI, and the danger is that it is replacing great creative thinking rather than being another arrow in the creative quiver. With so many great techniques at their disposal, creative minds can work wonders for businesses if allowed to apply creativity across a broader spectrum of disciplines.
Such creative minds are still needed and worth their weight in gold at a time when some advertisers think they can do without them to save money.
Technology, data and analytics are central to advertising now. We heard from Alessandro de Zanche, Cameron Armstrong of VCCP Media, and Joseph Pamboris of Alligator Solutions, who talked about how advertisers should re-evaluate their use of tech from a base set of principles, with a ‘less is more’ approach to deliver more — like 100% of the ‘pizza’, not 44%.
It is perhaps reassuring that there is a growing realisation among advertisers that the bloated ad tech industry has sucked enormous value from advertiser budgets, with little actual effect other than enriching the software industry.
Accountability and measurement
The subject of accountability and measurement is a hot-button issue in a world of first-party data and closed-loop systems, where the assumption is that the various machines involved enable accurate execution and reporting, and that the base data is reliable.
This is quite a stretch sometimes, especially where half of all internet traffic is synthetic and AI agents are already doing their thing.
In fact, the observation that advertisers target humans, not machines, is no longer strictly accurate when agents and algorithms play an essential intermediary role, but this doesn’t negate the need to keep real people at the heart of any advertising strategy, and especially the need to reach them in ways that leave a real impression, not just a fleeting, machine-readable one. Knowing real people from false ones is a good start.
We heard from the IPA’s Denise Turner, Fiona Blades (Mesh), Jon Waite (Havas Media Network), Anthony Jones (Thinkbox) and Billy Ryan (the7stars) on overlapping aspects of measurement across the spectrum of research and analytics, including findings from their own investigations.
These included interesting insights into SMEs at a time that WPP has launched a do-all platform for them and Omar Oakes is mounting a one person crusade on their behalf.
There were many good points from the measurement and accountability session, one of which is to know what you’re measuring and why. This can get lost among the dashboards.
We could have filled a whole day on each of the nine workstreams individually, and one that could benefit from deeper discussion is the ‘Trading, Transparency and Trust’ question. The workstream was once again led by Jenny Biggam, founder of the7Stars.
The fact that the themes within this strand are so little debated publicly is a symptom of the lack of honesty in the industry and the omertà within it.
Jenny‘s team concluded that principal/proprietary media is the big issue, and it’s hard to disagree with this conclusion when the only way the market can go is to do more of it at precisely the time it should be doing less.
Jenny’s conversation with the head of media for Standard Life, Neil Harrison, reinforced the point that principal/proprietary media adds an unhelpful degree of obscurity in media planning, buying and reporting, which is the opposite of what advertisers need in a complex world.
The role of paid advertising
Another subject that warrants fuller discussion is the role that paid advertising plays in funding great media content that informs, entertains and educates the public, while providing a benign environment for advertisers.
Media owners who provide such an environment are losing revenue to platforms and channels that don’t, leading to a loss in advertising effectiveness.
A wide-ranging discussion led by Pam Vick examined different aspects of this conundrum, including the rise of the brand safety industry and unjustified content blocking.
This energetic working group included Jamie Credland (World Media Group), James Fleetham (The Guardian), Abi Cunningham (North Star Media), Brian Jacobs, Sarah Jones (Sky Media) and also the sadly absent Simon Wilden (Goodstuff). A video contribution by Kevin Lygo, MD Media and Entertainment for ITV, made the case for investing in high-quality content such as ‘Mr Bates vs the Post Office’.
The panel concluded that we shouldn’t expect advertisers to support high-quality media in its own right, but it is one of the responsibilities of media strategists and planners to recommend the most productive places to advertise, and these are generally in environments where engagement peaks in ways that help deliver the advertising message.
Contrary to popular belief, this doesn’t mean sensational content is algorithmically amplified, where car-crash content drowns out advertising, but rather places where the audience is receptive and advertising works harder, as many studies show.
The panel agreed with some recent reports in The Media Leader that some channels are being over-invested in, and the result is an imbalance of media investments that needs to be addressed by hold-outs and more rigorous testing.
Advancing media planning
On the subject of great planning, Sally Weavers of Craft London and Pippa Glucklich of Electric Glue flew the indie media agency flag for the discipline of Communications Strategy, supported by James Shoreland of VCCP Media and other top-level strategists.
In a complex world of paid and organic content and channels, getting the right mix is vital, and the idea of forming a Media Planning Group to advance the practice is undoubtedly a step in the right direction.
Many hands make light work, if only to provide mutual reinforcement.
Meanwhile, relationships matter more than ever when successful marketing relies on teamwork across many disciplines.
There can be a lot of tension in advertising between the many parties involved, including within advertisers themselves, where the number of people involved has multiplied beyond the marketing and procurement functions, with the owners of the 7Ps all now playing a part.
And this is before the question of poor relationships within the advertising industry, with agencies, media owners and ancillary parties often at daggers drawn, given the high stakes at play. Even some agencies struggle with tensions between planners who act impartially and trading directors who don’t.
One thing that is indisputable is that better relationships are needed if the advertising industry is to confront the forces against it, and procurement guru Tina Fegent and Relationship Audits co-founder Simon Rhind-Tutt described how we need to reset our ways of working by finding common cause in their ‘Industry Relationships’ workstream.
They proposed a new code of practice to remind everyone of their common cause.
Young people and advertising
The importance of human ‘capital’ was picked up by Crispin Reed (Skyscraper Consulting) in the ‘Recruitment and Wellbeing’ workstream, with more insightful research into younger people’s attitudes towards advertising itself and the advertising industry.
Crispin’s interview with two recent entrants into advertising (Divine Katolo of Amazon and Aaron Wallace of AKA) powerfully underscored the way that low pay and excessive work patterns are an issue, but young people with enough talent and perseverance can and will join the industry.
Divine and Aaron are alumni of the impressive The Marketing Academy Foundation, which supports career starts for talented young adults from low-income backgrounds.
The general task is to reward young people properly as they start their careers —a real issue for today’s new stars —if we are to avoid further ‘juniorisation’.
Breaking down the walls of silence and fear
Talking of stars, we ended with the Star Chamber of David Wheldon, Phil Smith and Sarah Mansfield reviewing the day and its recommendations from the advertiser perspective.
The challenges facing us in getting advertiser traction by this session were well-articulated, but the conversation encouraged the pressing need to keep the listening and talking going with the advertiser bodies.
Whether people agree with them or not, and there was a healthy debate, we need to continue to break down the walls of silence and fear. We know what the pressures are, but it will not serve the longer-term interests of advertising to sweep its challenges under the carpet.
Let’s hope the themes we have started in ‘Advertising: Who Cares?’ are picked up by the wider industry. The last 18 months have shown that there are a lot of people who care enough about advertising to devote a huge amount of time to trying to help others, and it’s now down to those others to join in-or not.
The hoary old canard that ‘all of us are smarter than one of us’ is only partly true. We have to have the right people in the room who are prepared to have the tough conversations, and not everyone can or will take part.
This is a crisis and while it can’t be resolved without advertiser and agency transformation, the advertising industry can help lay the foundations by looking at itself in the mirror and deciding to get its act together, ideally today.
Nick Manning is the co-founder of Manning Gottlieb Media (now MG OMD) and was chief strategy officer at Ebiquity for over a decade. He now owns a mentoring business, Encyclomedia, offering strategic advice to companies in the media and advertising industry, and is non-executive chair of Media Marketing Compliance. He writes for The Media Leader each month.