THE ADVERTISING INDUSTRY & THE SCHOOL OF LIFE — BY MIKE YERSHON
Mike Yershon’s experience in the Media and Advertising industry is both legendary and significant.
His journey spans many disciplines, experiences and industries — that’s why the ‘Learning By Example’ platform is so powerful and relevant in the 21st Century educational context.
KNOWLEDGE IS DANGEROUS WITHOUT EXPERIENCE
KNOWLEDGE THROUGH EXPERIENCE
Napoleon Hill once said —
“There is one quality that one must possess to win, help and that is definiteness of purpose, the knowledge of what one wants, and a burning desire to possess it.”
The trouble is it can take a lifetime to figure this out and very hard work along the way.
This document explains a way of helping students to get their first step on the rung and move their way up.
AN INDUSTRY EXAMPLE
The Media & Advertising Industry can teach us a lot.
In some ways it’s a blueprint for every industry on Earth.
Like life it’s constantly changing and like life it’s full of lessons.
We are either subject to the changes or we help make them.
THE CAREER LADDER
One of the biggest challenges of life is getting onto that first rung of the ladder.
The world of advertising and media is one industry that everyone comes into contact with every day.
It’s creative, it’s fast moving, it creates debate and it causes attention.
It can be brutal and it can enable people to achieve greatness.
It oils the wheels of industry and it’s the front line in the machinery of commerce and trade.
It informs how we think, how we vote, what we buy, where we travel, how we eat and how we feel about ourselves.
As a school for what life can throw at us it’s a great teacher.
This initiative takes every learning from 5 decades of growing up and learning through that industry and delivers a set of steps — the rungs of the ladder. It truly is ‘Learning — By Example’
WHY THE LADDER?
Much of the education that’s given to students up and down the country during in our years in School is academic.
And whilst that’s important it can leave many of us ill equipped with the practical skills that we will need to survive real life.
The question is often asked — “How can we apply what we get taught at school to our actual lives in work. How can we get on the career path that suits us and then achieve the passion and purpose we strive…?”
But the better questions are —
“How do we figure out our passion and purpose in the first place and then be better equipped to put that into practice…?”
“How do we, when we are starting out begin to understand the importance of knowing ourselves, create a strong foundation to exploit the best of ourselves and then achieve that purpose?
Have we any chance of defining our passion when we haven’t experienced what’s even possible…?
GETTING ON THE LADDER
The ‘ladder’ shows the simple steps to how it can be done.
A simple set of ideas and learning from one industry and one life. Turning that into a path to progress and in a way that simplifies why.
Each ‘rung’ builds on the other.
Each step is explained as a series of meaningful parts.
They come from the real world experiences of what works not what typically gets taught.
They are really practical steps learned the hard way — through the world of work.
And from an industry everyone feels and touches every day.
Universal Truths
RUNG ONE
The Street As Teacher
Older people often feel it is their right or responsibility to tell you what you should do with your life.
The challenge is that their experience comes from a world that often no longer exists.
People mean well but much of the advice is rooted in their insecurities or self-limiting beliefs.
You have to stay true to yourself and stay alive to what is really going on today.
Example:
Test:
The Result You Can Expect:
RUNG TWO
Standing Up Your Ladder And Creating Your Tribe
Figuring out the really meaningful relationships instead of simply building contacts is far more valuable.
Contacts are often superficial whereas meaningful relationships are deep connections where the person becomes an advocate for you and actively supports you propelling towards your success.
All of the money in the world can’t buy you happiness or worth.
To create your future and gain any freedom, build a community of friends you can thrive within you have to work hard and earn it.
Getting the result you want can be much more about who you know rather than what you know.
Example:
Test:
The Result You Can Expect:
RUNG THREE
Thinking Before Anything — Ignorance Can Kill Observing And Listening — Don’t Be The Idiot In The Village.
Set some intentions, put energy into those intentions, and then allow the results to unfold without trying to control the process.
It’s important to get out there and meet people.
Learn as much as you can about everything
Work hard, learn everything and watch what’s going on around you.
Example:
Test:
The Result You Can Expect:
RUNG FOUR
Trying And Testing — Smart Makes Smarter
You have to learn to trust that things will work out. Incredibly they almost always will and often better than you can imagine.
Staying open and positive to opportunities.
Serendipity favours those who say yes to meetings and hanging out.
Go for a coffee, go to events.
Go on trips even if there isn’t a clear reason for going.
Example:
Test:
The Result You Can Expect:
RUNG FIVE
Understanding Creativity — It’s An Art
Creativity isn’t restricted to some. We are all born creative.
We often get told there’s no value in drawing or playing a musical instrument or learning to dance. That’s rubbish.
Read and watch as much as you can — your ability to acquire knowledge and learn from others will help you exponentially, so make reading and viewing a top priority.
Example:
Test:
The Result You Can Expect:
RUNG SIX
The Confidence To Speak — The Big Win Debate
Standing up and speaking are completely underestimated.
Being confident and standing up can seem scary at first but you can very quickly get used to and also good at itTake care of yourself — you won’t work if you don’t work.
Learning to eat right, exercise are the key to health and success.
The modern day or entrepreneurial journey is hard on your body, mind, and spirit, so invest in all three, starting now. Example:
Test:
The Result You Can Expect:
RUNG SEVEN
The Art Of Calculating Options
Gather the information you need to make smarter choices.
Study the information as contexts change and be prepared to make changes and corrections to your course.
Example:
Test:
The Result You Can Expect:
RUNG EIGHT
Mentors
Get a mentor — a great mentor is a role model who will pour gasoline onto your fire.
Find someone whose life, career, and character exemplify the vision you have for your own life.
Lean on this person, learn from this person, and listen to his or her advice.
Example:
Test:
The Result You Can Expect:
Professional success is often measured by the number of meaningful relationships you have developed multiplied by how hard you work.
Personal success, by contrast, comes from our ability to maintain a healthy lifestyle while living the life that we want (and not the life that others want for you).
“The hardest period in life is one’s twenties. It’s a shame because you’re your most gorgeous, and you’re physically in peak condition. But it’s actually when you’re most insecure and full of self-doubt. When you don’t know what’s going to happen, it’s frightening.” — Helen Mirren
FIRING ON ALL CYLINDERS
MIKE YERSHON
The World Is Flat Out
YERSHON MEDIA
The world is a chaotic and complex place.
Everything we knew for sure over the last century is likely to trip us up as we rush headlong through the next.
The digital revolution upended the world again. Of that, there is no doubt.
Digital has ‘flattened’ access. It has made ‘quality’ available to everyone. It’s given us access to quality at low cost through an array of media channels and devices.
There’s no shortage of those who’ll fall over themselves to sell you the latest new technology. They’ll have well-rehearsed arguments to convince you they’ve discovered the holy grail.
What’s rare though, are proven, problem solvers.
People who can wrestle the answers to questions that others aren’t asking. Those with the required expertise stand out. As with all rare things these skills are valuable. Actually solving the problem.
Solving the problem requires knowing the problem.
Taking The Right Brief
Knowing the problem is not the same as having a strong preference for a particular solution. Agencies will default to ads, consultants will default to year-long research, analysis and change programs, tech companies will have a technology that can fix it.
Knowing the problem relies on knowing the problem. The root cause, not the effect. Solving the genuine problem requires calculation and real decisions.
This requires the facts to be as available as they can.
FACTS ARE NOT A MATTER OF OPINION
Getting to the facts ensures we go beyond opinion and wish lists. Opinion is the usual place we find clients when they first present their challenges.
I can’t remember a client or even a casual meeting where the following aren’t (to some degree) the topics of conversation.
Where do we think the world is going?
Why are we thinking that?
What’s our role in it?
How are we going to go after it?
What evidence do we have that makes us think we’re going to win?
I can’t remember a meeting where it wasn’t possible to drive the combined fleet of the Navy, Air Force and Army through each answer.
The questions are simple - the answers are telling.
IT’S TIME TO THINK
Our challenge is getting people to think.
Once they do we can open up a meaningful discussion. We will learn more about the product or service. We can identify how the market might be targeted. We may divine the ideal audience, we start to define the impact we want - we may start to develop the unique position we need to win.
Some Key Questions
Let’s assume they have a plan, many will say they do. It may even be a new one. So it’s worth testing.
Have you changed your investment choices according to your new hypothesis?
Are you prepared to?
By what measure and basis did you formulate your investment thesis?
Was any testing done to prove that?
Did you listen to people outside your own comfort zone - those not vested in your own calculations?
Once again the answer to these questions tells us a lot.
AVOID SOLVING THE WRONG PROBLEM REALLY WELL
Business is a complete system. Clients cannot leave the important discussions (market, media, management, manufacturing etc.) to their silos to make. Do that and the specialisms dictate. And then you get the wrong answer.
The correct answer is unknowable in advance anyway. There has to be some evidence. The least risk approach to better answers is testing.
Let’s assume we can get the right product, the best targeting strategy, the correct story through the right channels - but the world moves.
Being ready for inevitable changes means planning an organisation that’s alive to changes. Competition is always there. The biggest competition often comes from our own complacency.
Leaders have to stop working divisionally when thinking strategically.
The success of the business can be measured by how distant market strategy development is from the product development strategy. They are two halves of the same. Any distance at all will spell game over.
Why do we allow the marketing strategy to ignore the product development strategy?
Simple and obvious though it sounds target metrics are everything. They are the one thing that allows the truth to emerge. Missing target metrics are the biggest signal we can have that thinking needs to occur.
Raising the next set of questions:
Have we got the right metrics?
What measures have we missed?
Have we got systems in place to measure?
Why are we beating our forecasts?
Why are we missing our targets?
What needs to change?
We have to stop describing everything under the tag ‘digital’. Everything in our world is being automated, improved or accessible more quickly and effectively than ever. The questions have to focus on the correct things.
What media will engage our customers?
What story will resonate most with our customers?
What mix/blend of activities and experiences will turn prospects into long-term advocates?
Digital solutions are already here - mobile devices, screens everywhere. The challenge, like all techniques and tools, is how confident and expert we are at exploiting them.
For example:
How quickly can we migrate or transform our solutions to mobile media?
How adept are we at creating powerful user experiences in the mobile environment?
Can we take our business from the current browser-based world to Apps and platforms?
Are we learning and leveraging voice, AI/ML/DL, VR and other embedded capabilities.
Can we exploit the value and impact gained through lessons in e-sports/gaming, podcasting, e-commerce and messaging platforms?
Are we thinking sophisticatedly enough about strategies for storytelling, content and internal communication?
Are we competent when it comes to data protection, permissions and privacy as our consumers get closer to our operation through modern more global platforms?
Calculating these decisions is at the core. There’s zero chance that what worked over the past 10-20 years will work over the next one or even two years. Investment in marketing has to follow consumer attention and focus which can happen more quickly than it did in the past.
“It’s the digital age. Everything is media. That’s why business strategy is indivisible from media strategy.”
— MIKE YERSHON
How It All Happened
Mike Yershon had seen an American 1940s film on the BBC featuring a guy who needed to come up with an advertising campaign for the Farnhight Featherlite, a new car to be launched.
This guy had his blank paper on a draughtsman’s board but the ideas would not come. Then, in the early hours of the morning before the crucial day when he had to deliver, it all came pouring out.
At the age of 16, in the summer of 1959, having left school with no job and no prospects, this story completely appealed to me. So when kind people asked what I wanted to do, I told them “advertising”.
A FULLER HISTORY OF MIKE YERSHON
There’s a lot of talk about the Future Of Work.
Robots, Digitalisation and new business models.
Platforms and technology changed the game.
Business leaders/decision makers (who wish to survive) have to steer the right course. Their job is to take advantage. There’s two questions - will they and how will they execute? In the media business that means being as effective in ‘digital’ as in traditional.
Being prepared is only strategy for business in this century. That’s true for two reasons.
It’s impossible to know what’s happening from one week to the next.
Preparation enables the business to take advantage of whatever happens.
Being prepared for business life after 2020 has to start now. A lot of businesses designed for today will fail by then.
The Shape* Of The Successful Business
After decades of proving it we know it’s extremely easy to solve the wrong problem really well.
Experience taught us that a great Ad campaign can leave a badly prepared operation in dire straits.
The smartest and most relevant technology on Earth can gather dust through disuse.
Expensive consulting firms and strategy documents often don’t move the needle.
Certain capabilities are needed to survive. Ingenuity, curiosity, creativity and hands on experience in how media works.
“The answers to today’s questions are not the answers for tomorrow’s. We don’t know tomorrow’s questions. We can only be the best prepared.”
— MIKE YERSHON
At the last count there was at least 120 channels. That’s 120+ ways to interact with the consumer. That's not a challenge that’s the opportunity.
The Work Of Mike Yershon By Dave Trott
The following articles are taken from Campaign Magazine
Dave Trott - March 17, 2016
Grounds were miserable, old-fashioned, dilapidated, mainly all standing.
Fewer and fewer people were going to matches.
And games had to be played at 3 o’clock on Saturday afternoons.
That was unquestionable, for every club in the country.
But they desperately needed a way to get some money into the dwindling game.
Mike Yershon was the most influential media guy in town.
Mike was a game changer.
So The Football League asked him to a meeting to find a way they could raise more money from the TV companies.
Mike’s recommendation was simple and powerful.
But also complete heresy.
Mike said put live football on TV.
He said if they allowed some games to be played on Friday nights and some on Sunday afternoons they could sell the rights.
They could get ITV and BBC to bid against each other to drive the price up.
The Football League would make a fortune.
So how did they react to Mike’s idea?
The President threw Mike out of the meeting.
Moving matches away from 3pm Saturday was unthinkable, impossible.
And broadcasting live matches was suicide.
Why would anyone go to a cold, wet, miserable stadium when they could sit at home and watch the match on telly?
The stadiums would be empty.
He said Mike was crazy and his advice would kill football.
They couldn’t get him out of the building fast enough.
But then a strange thing happened.
When Mike got back to his office, the phone was ringing.
They asked him to come back to the meeting.
It seemed they had decided to over-rule the President.
Football was slowly dying and it had to raise money or else.
Mike’s advice might be the only way.
So Mike went back to the meeting and explained his plan.
The bidding process went ahead: BBC won Friday night matches and ITV won Sunday afternoon matches.
So, in the event, who was proved right: Mike or the President?
Did live matches on TV mean empty stadiums and the end for football?
Hardly.
In fact the live matches acted as advertisements for football.
People began returning to the stadiums.
And the money from the TV deals went into the game.
In 1983 the rights to live football sold for £5 million.
By 1988 they were up to £44 million.
In 1992 Sky paid £304 million.
And in 2015 Sky and BT paid £5 BILLION for the rights to live football.
That’s £10 million for each game.
In 1997 Manchester United opened their own TV channel, now most clubs have their own TV channel.
Football grounds are now so packed that season tickets are usually the only way to get in.
And there’s a waiting list years long for those season tickets.
Football is far and away the biggest, richest game in the country.
Largely because Mike Yershon did what he was told he wasn’t allowed to do.
He changed things that he was told couldn’t be changed.
You see it’s an uncomfortable truth for all of us, particularly clients.
You can’t change things without changing them.
Dave Trott is the author of Creative Mischief, Predatory Thinking and One Plus One Equals Three
Dave Trott - June 09, 2016
One evening many years ago, I was in the BMP creative department.
A very stressed head of media came round.
He said: "Dave, I can’t find anyone else to ask, do we want to buy a million pounds of 48-sheet posters?"
I said I dunno, it depends, what client are they for?
He said: "I don’t know yet, but I just got a phone call: Mike Yershon is buying up all the 48-sheet posters. If we don’t buy now we’ll miss out. I need an answer quick."
He didn’t need to say who Mike Yershon was.
Everyone knew he was the best media director in town at the best agency in town, CDP.
Mike did things other people hadn’t thought of yet, and the rest of us just had to try to catch up later.
Now Mike was buying every 48-sheet poster he could get his hands on.
And our head of media thought we should buy them too, just because Mike was doing it.
For people who don’t remember, before Mike Yershon there weren’t any 48-sheet posters.
Except for a few special sites, all posters were 16-sheets: smaller, upright posters.
That all changed when Mike Yershon went to CDP.
They were launching the Ford Capri II and wanted to make it a really special event.
So instead of running a 30-second TV commercial (as most agencies would), they chose to run a two-and-a-half-minute commercial.
No-one had ever done anything like that before.
And instead of single-page ads (like most agencies would), they chose to run double-page spreads.
Mike saw the DPS and immediately said: "That shape suits the car better, let’s do the posters the same shape."
Mike knew the poster owners had begun experimenting with putting three 16-sheet posters together to form a single 48-sheet poster.
So he ordered 4,000 of the new 48-sheet posters.
Which meant they had to find many thousands of 16-sheet posters to put together.
It was a logistical nightmare.
But when it was done, it was a massive success.
In fact, Mike got two of his clients, Gallaher and Whitbread, to agree to CDP starting a company specialising in 48-sheet posters.
But Gallaher also had JWT as an agency, so they asked CDP and JWT to start the new poster company together.
They called the company Portland.
They had a staff of 16 going around the country checking out poster sites.
None in bad condition, none badly lit, none down back alleys, none with trees in front, none facing the wrong way.
Only the best poster sites were good enough for Portland.
Which helped make CDP’s work more attractive than anyone else’s.
Which helped make CDP more attractive to new business.
Which helped make CDP the best agency in the world.
Which is why years later, when Sir Martin Sorrell bought JWT, he also bought CDP’s share of Portland.
He renamed it Kinetic, and today it’s the biggest outdoor media company in the world.
All because Mike Yershon understood media better than anyone else.
Media isn’t about the number of impressions you make.
Media is about the power of the impression you make.
Dave Trott is the author of Creative Mischief, Predatory Thinking and One Plus One Equals Three.
Dave Trott - November 09, 2017
When I started in advertising, commercials were either 30 or 15 seconds long. Everyone liked writing 30s, but nobody liked doing 15s. You couldn't fit much in - 15s were a pain.
Then, in 1976, the rules changed.
Suddenly 15s changed to 20s, which was a much better length for us.
I never knew why it changed until recently.
To start with, you have to understand how the old system worked.
The UK was divided up into different commercial TV regions.
Programmes ran nationally, so these regions all had to have the same-length ad breaks.
Even though they often had different ads.
For instance, if the ad break was five minutes long, each station would have to fill the break with exactly five minutes of ads.
Obviously, their job was easier if the ads were all 30s because they fitted together more easily.
Putting a break together was like fitting all the pieces together in Tetris.
Awkward lengths like 15 seconds were a pain, so companies preferred to sell longer lengths.
Mike Yershon was head of media at Collett Dickenson Pearce.
Mike was a really creative person.
Among its clients, CDP had a single Reckitt & Colman brand, Supersoft.
It was worth about £200,000 (around £2.5m today).
But all Reckitt & Colman’s other brands were at a lot of other, bigger agencies.
And together they added up to £4.8m (more than £60m today).
Mike wanted to get the media buying for the entire lot.
And he found two numbers that proved the key to him doing just that.
The cost of a 15-second commercial was 70% the cost of a 30.
But in London, at Thames TV, the cost of a 60-second spot was 150% the cost of a 30.
That meant if Mike bought a 60-second spot and ran three 20-second ads in it, he’d get three 20-second spots for less than the cost of three 15-second ads.
Which meant he could give Reckitt & Colman 25% more media, at no extra cost.
Which would be like saving more than £1m (around £13m today).
And they’d be running 20-second ads instead of 15-second ones.
Of course, 20 seconds wasn’t the industry standard, but Thames TV didn’t care.
Because its job was easier if you bought longer-length ads.
What you put in it was up to you.
So Mike could run a 40 and a 20, or three 20s in that spot – whatever he wanted.
Mike was the only person in advertising to see this.
And Thames TV agreed to let him do it for Reckitt & Colman, so Mike and CDP won all its media-buying business.
Meanwhile, the rest of advertising was still stuck doing 15-second ads.
None of us knew why CDP could run 20-second spots while the rest of us had to run 15s.
The truth was, no-one else had the imagination Mike had.
Eventually, he presented the case to all the TV companies and everything changed.
Twenty-second spots became an industry standard.
At the time, I didn’t know all that – I just remember being glad to get rid of 15-second ads.
We could finally write a decent spot in 20 seconds, and advertising got better.
Creativity isn’t just about the creative department.
Real creativity can come from anywhere.
And that’s how a media guy improved advertising by thinking creatively. •
Dave Trott is the author of Creative Mischief, Predatory Thinking and One Plus One Equals Three.
Dave Trott -November 30, 2017
In 1973, Mike Yershon was offered the job of media director at CDP.
Mike had a reputation as the best media guy in town, so he wanted a lot of money.
He was amazed when CDP agreed to pay it.
On his first day at his new job, he asked to see the agency reel.
After he’d seen it, he knew why CDP agreed to pay the money.
He loved the reel – it was the funniest, wittiest, classiest reel of work he ever saw.
But he’d never seen any of those ads before.
It was obvious why CDP needed him.
They were doing great work, but the work wasn’t getting seen.
Although, as Mike investigated the media, he found the work was getting seen.
It was just getting seen by the wrong people.
The typical, unquestioning, buy-it-by-the-numbers industry convention was to buy eyeballs.
CDP had been spending money getting the biggest number of people to see the ads.
But there’s a difference in the quality of eyeballs.
The fastest way to get the numbers up was to spend the money where most people watched: soap operas and daytime TV.
But it didn’t occur to anyone to ask what sort of eyeballs watched those programmes.
Which meant CDP’s ads were being seen by older people, retired people, unemployed people: couch potatoes, in fact.
Mike knew straight away it was a waste of money.
You didn’t want couch potatoes, you wanted the opposite.
You wanted the people who were too busy to regularly watch daytime TV or soap operas.
What you actually wanted was light viewers.
Light viewers were working during the day so they didn’t watch soap operas – in fact, they often didn’t get home until late.
They were fussy what they watched – they didn’t watch a lot of TV, just the best stuff.
By buying light viewers, Mike got fewer eyeballs.
But the eyeballs he did get were much more influential, they were opinion-formers.
Suddenly these opinion-formers began seeing CDP’s work and it became famous.
Lots of the people running large client companies were light viewers too, so they’d never seen CDP’s ads before.
Suddenly they saw them and decided they wanted advertising like that for their brands.
Mike’s "light viewer" strategy had a massive influence on CDP’s new-business results.
It turned out that lots of people in the media – journalists, broadcasters, editors – were light viewers, too.
When they began to see CDP’s work, they loved it and helped make it go viral.
Which also had another effect.
Ordinary viewers began to see CDP’s brands advertising in all the best programmes.
This changed the context, which changed the image of the brands.
Mike had discovered the difference between signalling and targeting.
Although he didn’t call it that.
Currently, in digital, targeting is considered everything.
Targeting relies on identifying the consumer and hitting them as often as possible.
But this ignores the context the ads run in.
And consequently it smacks of cheapness, and of desperation.
It certainly doesn’t send out the best signal about the brand, the way having it seen in the best context would.
And worse, with the advent of programmatic it’s not even humans buying the eyeballs, it’s algorithms.
You’d think we would have learned the lesson from Mike all those years ago.
The difference between signalling versus targeting.
Dave Trott is the author of Creative Mischief, Predatory Thinking and One Plus One Equals Three.
The Fearless Breakfast
The Fearless Breakfast - Shoreditch House 19th November 2019
Mike Yershon 60/20
The Fearless Breakfast is our response to the traditional conference and meeting format. Traditionally familiar, often one dimensional but increasingly optional to attend. This event was sold out within 2 hours of tickets going on-line.
In Brief
Nicole set the tone - immediately the place was relaxed and ready for anything.
Gemma Greaves, the CEO of the Marketing Society discussed the importance of ‘Fearlesness’ with Nicole.
Dave Trott injected his unique humour and truth as he explained what a game-changer Mike Yershon is.
Mike Yershon was the inimitable Mike Yershon. Literally unstoppable.
The audience would have stayed all day.
Background
Mike Yershon was the youngest ever fellow of the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising. He was recently voted in the top 50 game changers in the ad industry over the past 100 years - when the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising celebrated their centenary.
Mike changed how media was done and even what media was. Mike still changes
In Mike’s Own Words
“I Had A Journey Of Good Fortune - I found myself in a situation where I loved my job and I wanted to be the best I could be at it. I’m fortunate enough to have boundless energy and it does not seem to have diminished with age, yet!”
“I was always frustrated by the prevailing attitude to media and the business of it all. Media was constrained by being the cinderella department in the three full-service agencies I worked for. Media was presented, as an afterthought in the last 5 minutes of the creative presentation to clients. On one occasion my presentation was dropped by the agency CEO because there was not enough time. This frustrated me no end.”
“Enough was enough and I decided to take the risk and set up on my own - selling the idea to advertisers of media as a separate contract to creative. The client wanted increased sales and entrepreneurial thinking. This was right up my street and still is today. I wanted to sit on the client-side of the table promoting plain language and transparency.”
“The media plan had to calculate precisely how, through what method and means, in the most effective way possible, and for what amount of money the client could get the promise of the product/service to its customer. This is still true today.”
The Alchemist
“What was a presentational afterthought for half a century is now one of the most important calculations a business will ever make. In my opinion, it always was. The easy solution was to put it on TV. Nowadays that is not an easy solution. Thankfully I found a few clients, now very wealthy people - who agreed with me. But I had to form my own agency to really make my point!”
“Being prepared to take the risk of leaving a highly paid job with no clients no money no offices and no staff was a big risk. But I was determined not to be in a position when I would look back and say to myself I wish had taken the chance when it was there.”
“My specialist subject area back then has expanded to embrace what it means to be a business right now.” - Mike Yershon
“I’m amazed, and it seems to work every time, that I find it hard not to answer a problem. Once the problem virus enters my body and my brain then that it. I’m locked and loaded like a laser-guided missile fixed on the target. I can’t switch it off. On my constitutional walks, as I speak to others somewhere in this whirlwind lies the answer and it becomes my mission to unlock the solution to whatever the issue is.”
“I can’t write down a formula because it’s different each time. What stays the same is my persistence and bloody-mindedness at needing to fix it. I never give up trying to find the solution to the problem. Obviously, I will draw on my experiences. It has been said of late that people are looking for people who do not have the experience because the issues today have no previous relevance. I see the point but feel the combination of experience and keeping up to date with all that is happening today combines the best of both.”
The Creative Business Of Media
“Today we have well over a hundred channels in media and more new technologies and dimensions than we could ever imagine. Cultures have changed beyond recognition, consumer behaviours have transformed in so many ways. Expectations are different but business results are still expected, the calculations still need to be made, but the real cut-through of the innovative media and creative idea still needs to be found.”
“Someone smart said - the more things change the more they remain the same - but the aim of every business is to reach the target audience - at the right time - through the right channel - with the right message - as often as the budget will allow. NO different today than it was in 1959.”
“There are infinite ways to identify and know the target audience. A myriad of ways to dynamically alter the message as your audience passes by different screens, there’s the real-time assessment of how well that value proposition is doing through which media platform and with what treatment. There is one big difference though. Between 1955 and let us say the end of the 20th century, there was one media planning strategy decision that made sense above all else. Put it in commercial TV.”
“I don’t mean to suggest that no money should be spent on TV now, but my issue is what proportion of the total marketing budget should be spent on TV. The balance should include what I call a ‘test and run’ policy. It should include what I call ‘activation’. This, for example, could be anywhere that pulls in a big crowd. We need to find the best ways in creative and media to make it work towards ROI. This is also a policy of test and run. Too often I am told we did this or that but it did not work.”
“I won’t rest until I have made it work.”
Back To The Future. The Beginning
“There’s always a close relationship between creative work and creative media planning in my mind. To me, they are two sides of the same coin. Separating them never made sense. The reason I moved to separate them was a signal of the frustration I felt. Media needed to prove itself as a function of equal importance to creative and now it ranks in that way. The media agency contract ranks pari passu with the creative agency contract. Creativity and Media are inseparable parts of the job that needs doing.”
“If I was a client, and it was my own money, I would insource media planning. I have a view about insourcing media buying - but let’s get media planning in-sourced first. For me it is the raw material of being in business.”
“Digital is on everyone’s mind. Yes it’s disruptive but it blows nothing up except the immediacy, extent and pace of it all. The speed with which everything can be considered and done is exponential. And pretty soon even today will seem slow. We are entering the no-code, fully automated, quantum computer, carbon nanochip mixed with every thing else world - science fiction fast becoming fact. But what I’ve been doing to calculate success stays unwaveringly the same.”
“Bring it on.”
My 20 year plan is about putting back - into my roots - school, youth club - back into the advertising industry and being an entrepreneur. I can’t stop thinking in terms of putting back.”
Breaking news - There’s No Agency Of The Future
NAMING THE ENEMY -
No Comparison
There’s much talk around what constitutes the agency of the future. It’s not the conversation that we wish to be in.
We do not want a comparison with an agency of the future any more than we would like to be compared with an agency of today.
The word agency has too long been associated with the creative industry. Marketing, media, advertising and branding.
We believe in the roles but not the industry that’s grown to profit from them.
A WORLD IN DISARRAY
Advertising, the creative industry’s glamorous elder sister, has done so much to bring the game into disrepute.
On the whole:
The Ad industry is highly visible, severely criticised and deservedly so.
It is under the spotlight for being variously, crass, expensive and sluggish.
It’s done little to prove that it’s valuable and responding to criticism.
Its practices have been opaque, superficial, arrogant, plagued with confusing language and complacent when it comes to properly solving the challenges it’s given. The creative industry is in disarray not because advertising isn’t valuable to business but because the industry and its methods have become irrelevant.
Agencies have focused for too long on justifying their methodologies in order to win awards and far too little on understanding the client's business and what it means to drive value.
*We accept that this is highly unfair to some great talent out there. But they are the ones; the few that would probably agree with us.
WHAT’S NEEDED?
Value, for clients, comes from the brand, marketing and media strategies that drive performance and deliver a return on investment - to the business.
These returns are measured in reputational improvement, market attention and trust. (The outcome is success, sustainability and profit)
The role rather than the words ‘marketing’, ‘media’, ‘advertising’ and ‘brand’ are what’s important - to the business.
Business is nothing; it doesn’t exist without marketing and marketing is nothing without the media and the intelligence to develop the winning strategy.
WHY NOW?
We are reaching peak frustration.
Clients need breakthrough ideas that bridge the gap between almost certain destruction and a new era.
The work agencies did historically is being replaced by necessity.
Clients realised that it’s possible to be smarter and invest in what they know works. If they can find the capability to engineer it.
Clients can create their own creativity, they can improve on their agencies contribution by owning their own data - and by increasing effectiveness through adding automation and digital systems.
They can get access to creativity by greater use of experienced advisors who know how to extract value from their business marketing and business media skills.
Now it’s not about an agency of the future but by giving clients direct access to objective business nous and creative experience.
WHAT OUR BRAND NEEDS TO CONVEY
Our brand has to convey access to creative concepts and skills into the minds of the CEO. These are the stricken leaders of companies where there’s no longer a choice but to contract for value of this nature.
Access to the skills capable of creating breakthrough concepts, ideas and innovations. Innovations that will transform the stricken business.
A model of operations that can ‘make’ products and solutions that currently do not exist.
Access to the capability most required to drive value for the future business and least likely to exist inside the business in the future. The kind of strategic horsepower and creativity of mind suggests talent and skills most often found in the entrepreneur, not the employee.
WHO CARES?
Our audience is likely to be leaders of the large enterprises seeking to change. The change is triggered by the realisation that the enterprise will fail or is under intense scrutiny by its shareholders, the market or the competition.
The business is atrophying or has an identifiable opportunity within its grasp. This is a decision well worth $1 million investment for us to calculate the past and the future position that the business needs to take.
WHY US?
We are a collective.
We give direct access to real and objective creativity - in every aspect of marketing and media - available inside the business for the benefit of the business.
The successful clients recognise that this role has to be fulfilled by people who understand business strategy and how to create the right attention and relationship with their audiences.
Our business is wholly focused on return on investment and supporting the leadership in whatever way that is needed.
This is the conundrum for anyone trying to create strategy today.
OUR PROMISE
It is almost impossible to predict the future - but that is the solution every client needs. Not being able to predict the future cannot stop us from imagining it and working out the best path. It has been said that the best way to predict the future is to create it.
In order to create the future, we have to weigh it up.
It is possible to identify patterns based on experience and to project possible scenarios that are of least risk. To do nothing presents higher risk therefore this is a valid strategy.
It is possible to identify existing utility and to project gaps in that utility where new opportunities, services and ideas may lie. To not predict such gaps presents missed opportunity therefore this is also a valid strategy.
It is possible to apply creativity, ingenuity and innovation to develop new ideas that have not previously existed. To not imagine such futures is irresponsible for today’s leadership and therefore is also a valid strategy.
*To all this add the principles of test and learn and a leveraged model to call up the appropriate provider prepared to solve the right problem at the right time.
Given the three fundamental truths above, clients both now and in the future will need to gain these skills from somewhere and that somewhere will be us. Our work will have a direct impact on the business and will be measured in the value delivered.
“For us to be useful we have to drive value rather than provide services.” - The Travelling Wilburys
ONE: BUSINESS - WE HAVE A BUSINESS FOCUS BEFORE ALL ELSE.
Strategic and critical thinking determines the path to value - everything else follows that.
We assist the business to prepare and become ready to respond accordingly to ‘media/marketing’ action.
Chaos and uncertainty define the landscape and test and learn dictates the path.
Execution is all that matters
TWO: SINGULARITY - WE DEVELOP EVERYTHING DIGITALLY AND TRADITIONALLY.
We build the ‘map’ most navigable by the business and most appropriate for maximum media/market exploitation.
We ensure the business is fully aware of the opportunities this presents and is equipped to exploit them.
THREE: CREATIVITY - WE UNDERSTAND HOW TO GET INSIGHT FROM THE DATA.
We infer the media/marketing brief dynamically and in real-time together with the client.
The brief holds the key that unlocks creativity.
Creative ideas and tradecraft drive the value across all media
“Ingenuity, great creative ideas and execution win over bullshit, language, layers of bureaucracy and account managers along for the ride.” - The Travelling Wilburys
FOUR: SCIENCE - INTERPRETING THE MINDSETS OF HUMAN BEINGS IS CENTRAL TO EVERY BUSINESS AND MEDIA CASE.
Empathy, emotion humanity, network, peer and community effects influence everything.
We are always leveraging new tools and technologies to understand sentiment and shifts in opinion at scale and with individuals.
We understand that today’s consumer is increasingly averse/impervious to blunt force promotion.
FIVE: STORY TELLING - WE APPRECIATE THE POWER OF THE BRAND.
We appreciate the different applications of storytelling across different media
We understand the critical importance of meaningful content
We know how to build relationships through real-world experiences and stories that resonate.
We know how to use plain language.
SIX: MEASUREMENT - WE WILL BACK UP THE AMOUNT OF VALUE WE CREATES WITH EVIDENCE.
We invest in tools and technologies that can inform and update progress.
We rest on business models that target performance and mutual value.
“The relationship is a trusted partnership.” - The Travelling Wilburys
A MANIFESTO FOR BUSINESS BY MIKE YERSHON, NICOLE YERSHON & JOHN CASWELL
It was always this way
Marketing is the mechanism (system) by which an Organisation makes its promises to its audiences. It Creates the ‘Meaning’
Manufacturing is the mechanism (system) through which an Organisation makes the promised ‘substance’. (service, solution or product) It does the ‘Making’
The Organisation is the system that connects/coordinates the two. The Management of the above.
A Definition Of Marketing: The Meaning - The brand, the promise, the advertising, media planning/buying, the PR, the messaging, value propositions, the story, the corporate identity, the packaging, the UI/UX - the research and analytics that improve the awareness and course correction and insight and data that drives decision making inside the organisation.
A Definition Of Manufacturing: The Making - The design, creation and making of the substance, product, service or solution. The plant, infrastructure, resources, systems, skills, rules, procedures, techniques and capabilities to make or do what the organisation makes/does.
A Definition Of Organisation: The Managing - Whatever isn’t covered by the above. The management, payroll, strategy and leadership. The decisions that ensure marketing makes the most efficient and effective interface with manufacturing - and vice versa. Managing the partners - eg distribution of what gets made - the substance and so on.
NOW
Enter Disruptive Technology
Digitalisation shortened the time and distance between ‘marketing’ and ‘manufacturing’ and the odds of success for anyone misunderstanding that.
The promise to the audience is right there, fully exposed on display to all of us.
The audience sees what’s made and what’s being made right there.
The promise is palpable, viewable, experienceable and comparable in every dimension. In every sense.
What manufacturing involves is what marketing is.
A Definition Of Digitalisation: The act of automating the core business processes and systems to increase efficiency and effectiveness. The act uses techniques and technology, often third party skills and resources to transform existing business processes or install complete platforms and solutions for increased customer experience, business performance and all the transactions and actions within.
A Definition Of Promise: Everything that we hear, see and sense from a given ‘brand’ enterprise or utility. This promise gets called a wide range of things - brand, awareness, experience, reputation and all the new and evolving components that add up to causing a favourable choice of one solution over another. Omnichannel
The Singularity Of Business
The Definition Of Singularity: In our case the term singularity describes the moment when a system changes so much that its rules and technologies are incomprehensible to previous generations. Think of it as a point-of-no-return in history. Advances in expectations, processes and underlying technology mean that the way we’ve thought and worked are no longer valid.
First
Contemplate food, cars, consumer goods, retailing, fashion, sports goods, movies, computing, holidays - travel, legal services - anything.
Think Amazon, Google, Apple, Deliveroo and Uber and every one of their competitors as well as the online presence of every business on the planet.
Think about how we are influenced by countless channels and a plethora of evolving forms of media.
Social media, websites, activations, experiences, retail shopping excursions, out of home advertising, friendly referrals, consumer comment trails, peer opinion, traditional media channels, apps on our smartphones, product placements, Google searches, comparison website exercises. Everything.
WE CHOOSE
Everything
The making and manufacture of each part of what we choose is open and on display through modern day marketing techniques and technologies.
Everything is increasingly configurable by us - the ingredients in our food, the details on our cars, the services we experience in our taxis/transport and the holidays, hotels and lifestyles we inhabit.
Everything available in any way, at an any time and for anyone with access to a screen and the credit.
All the components (the processes and systems of manufacture) have become more and more transparent as organisations seek to differentiate and create uniquenesses.
Second
Contemplate how close ‘we’ (the audiences) now are to the promises made by every one of these organisations.
Think how close the manufacturing/organisation has to be as they deliver and back up that promise of delivery and experience.
Think of every decision we make along the journey as we choose their ‘promise’.
That’s the work every organisation is doing as they digitalise their businesses.
Summary
We are reaching ‘singularity’ in business.
The place where the meaning, the making and the managing collide.
Through ‘digitalisation’ there is no longer any distance between what we choose through the marketing and the making of it.
We are directly involved with the people designing, building, packaging, distributing, transacting and servicing it.
We are fully implicated in the whole experience at every step because (increasingly) what we do has an immediate impact on what’s being made.
Therefore (however we define the organisation) it’s indivisible from the ‘marketing’ or the ‘making’.
In fact for the failing businesses it’s only the words used to denote them (marketing, manufacturing and organisation) that’s keeping them apart.
The challenge for problem solvers
WE ARE LIVING THROUGH A ‘DIGITAL' TRANSFORMATION. IT’S TRANSIENT. FUTURE GENERATIONS WILL LOOK BACK IN FASCINATION AT OUR PREOCCUPATION WITH THE WORD DIGITAL.
In the future we will stop talking about it as a thing.
It will be normalised. At the heart of the digitalisation of the world right now is the death of the distance between the marketing and the manufacturing and the management.
THE SLOW COLLAPSE OF SILOS
It’s sometimes worth looking at what actually happened.
“It took many years for advertising dollars to flow from radio into television in proportion to the time spent on the two media. The same was true from broadcast television into cable television - the same was true for the flow from print into digital, and from the desktop into mobile.”
“It is always the case that senior leaders at companies and agencies who allocate marketing dollars have grown up on and are most comfortable with prior generations of media.”
To succeed and thrive in the next era of marketing, leaders have to become leaders and stop separating marketing from business. They also have to stop distinguishing between traditional and digital channels. They are all channels.
Ads are still ads - whether on a mobile phone or a 48 sheet poster.
The leaders in this new world have to grasp these facts and the reality behind changing consumer habits. A new mindset has to emerge. And fast.
Problem solvers will reckon with and calculate strategies based on the different rules and practices that now apply in these new environments. The will decide what capabilities and strategies define success.
INVESTMENT FOLLOWS ATTENTION
U.S. adults spent about 3.5 hours per day on their mobile devices in 2018. - eMarketer
People spending more of their mobile time in app-based environments, rather than browser-based environments. - eMarketer
Apps account for more than 80 per cent of all mobile minutes.
Consumers typically have 30 apps, which they use for different purposes - social media, music, entertainment, games, news, information, calendars.
People spend 97 per cent of their mobile time in their top 10 apps.
This means that we spend more and more of our attention in curated bubbles. We need to trust these decisions because the owners of these bubbles have vested (not always our) interests. This phenomena (app era experience) is a big change from the browser era (experience).
We have to take account of how the mass audiences operate now. Fewer and fewer people sit down and allow the TV to dictate what and when we view.
In the average home, we have access to smarter TV’s with any number of channels and platforms - AppleTV+ Amazon Prime, TV Players (BBC iPlayer) Netflix and literally hundreds more.
THERE’S A NEW WORD - GET WITH IT
We all have access to Radio, we can ask Alexa for anything - and we can subscribe to shopping channels in seconds for delivery of everything to our homes. This is the lens through which marketers now view the opportunity to gain attention and cause transactions.
It’s no surprise therefore that Google and Facebook are in the spotlight. They have huge shares of attention and therefore are enjoying the digital spending spree. Around these behemoths, the halo is amplified by other ‘social media’ (Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok) and online chatter (WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram)
Does the business understand how these platforms work?
Does the business know how to create the right message and mix of investment in these channels?
Does the business know how to create products and services that can be consumed through these channels?
The next tier is also capturing massive consumer attention - Amazon and Alibaba, gaming channels such as Twitch, e-sports, audio, over-the-top streaming apps, Netflix, Apple TV+ and the large social media channels - Twitter, Instagram.
E-commerce is growing 23 per cent annually on a global basis
E-commerce is rising at a much more rapid rate in up-and-coming markets such as India.
The questions arising:
Can we take advantage of the lessons learned in these media and through these platforms?
THE ADVANTAGE OF EXPERIENCE
In the past, circulars, coupons and promotion-rich glossy publications were distributed to consumers in their homes and as they entered stores.
Virtual malls such as Amazon, Flipkart, and MercadoLibre are the latest iteration of in-store advertising. An example - Amazon offers a bewildering array of options for businesses wishing to get to market.
They have a powerful position - they pay for favourable placement on product category pages - they insert paper promotions inside the boxes that are delivered to customers. Additionally, they can run ads on the Twitch streaming property, on Amazon Prime, on Alexa in our homes and in the Whole Foods stores.
Can we create solutions that take advantage of these platforms?
Would the business be able to think differently enough?
CALCULATE THE FUTURE BASED ON THE REALITY
In 2018, Google's ad revenue amounted to almost 116.3 billion US dollars. The company generates advertising revenue through its Google Ads platform, which enables advertisers to display ads, product listings and service offerings across Google’s extensive ad network (properties, partner sites, and apps) to web users.
Amazon will earn almost $10 billion in US net digital ad revenues in 2019. That's an increase of more than 33% over 2018. In the fourth quarter of 2018, Amazon’s revenues, which is mostly advertising, reported $3.4 billion in revenues, up 95 per cent from the year before. Amazon is expected to reach $38 billion in advertising sales in 2023 (According to Pivotal Research)
Amazon is growing faster than any other publisher with at least $1 billion in net US digital ad revenues this year. That will also continue through at least 2021, when Amazon’s ad revenues will grow more than 10 percentage points faster than Facebook’s, and more than twice as quickly as Google’s.
Facebook reported advertising revenue at $16.6 billion for the final quarter of last year, up 30 percent year-over-year. Total revenue earned during the quarter was $16.9 billion, with daily active users (DAU) at 1.52 billion, up 9 percent year over year.
Facebook reports strong ad revenue. Facebook reported its average price per ad decreased 2 percent in the fourth quarter, with the number of ad impressions served across its platforms up 34 percent.
Facebook did not break out advertising revenue by ad product type, but did report 93 percent of ad revenue during the fourth quarter came from mobile advertising.
Facebook Stories ads and Instagram shopping. In response to a question during the earnings call regarding Stories ad adoption, Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg reported two million advertisers were currently using Stories ads — but did not clarify if those were Facebook Stories or Instagram Stories ad units. Facebook did say that Instagram Stories has reached 500 million daily users — half of the platform’s total one billion users.
“I’m confident that we’re going to get there, but I want to make sure that we’re giving the right outlook on how we expect the near future to go,” said Zuckerberg. The CEO said the area he’s most excited about is Instagram shopping and commerce opportunities.
User growth across Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. Facebook had 1.52 billion DAUs during the last quarter of 2018 — up nine percent year-over year — and 2.3 billion monthly active users. Of the 1.52 billion global users during the fourth quarter, 186 million were located in the U.S. and Canada.
Gaming and e-sports are becoming platforms in their own right. Video gaming started as a hobbyist pastime, morphed into an attention magnet, and rapidly grew up into an industry.
Video gaming is growing the fastest of any sport and is regarded as having the highest potential for revenue growth beating soccer and basketball. The total e-sports economy will reach $1.8 billion in 2023, representing 18.3 per cent CAGR.
Sponsorships and streaming advertising are among the leading drivers of revenue growth in e-sports in 2018, according to Outlook.
Podcasts and voice are emerging as a medium. Podcasting advertising revenues rose 61 per cent to $911 million in 2018, and are expected to increase at a 28.5 per cent CAGR through 2023 when they will total $3.2 billion.
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The Mike Yershon Story
“It’s the digital age. Everything is media. That’s why business strategy is indivisible from media strategy.”
— MIKE YERSHON
How It All Happened
Mike Yershon had seen an American 1940s film on the BBC featuring a guy who needed to come up with an advertising campaign for the Farnhight Featherlite, a new car to be launched.
This guy had his blank paper on a draughtsman’s board but the ideas would not come. Then, in the early hours of the morning before the crucial day when he had to deliver, it all came pouring out.
At the age of 16, in the summer of 1959, having left school with no job and no prospects, this story completely appealed to me. So when kind people asked what I wanted to do, I told them “advertising”.
New entrants to the industry came from university or art college, or straight from school. This latter group generally entered the dispatch department as a messenger. My introduction came from the IPA, located in London’s Belgrave Square, exactly where it is today. The Institute of Practitioners in Advertising (IPA) ran a service through which member agencies let it know of vacancies. I was given the names of two agencies to contact. One was Erwin Wasey, Ruthrauff and Ryan, which had moved to new offices in Paddington, and the other was Colman Prentis and Varley (CPV) in Grosvenor Street. I got the job at CPV, and started in November 1959 at £4 per week.
After six months, a vacancy came up in the media department. There were six of us in dispatch, and the five ahead of me all turned the opportunity down. Media was not seen as being worth losing your place in the queue to a heady career progression toward account executive, via the production department. For me it represented an opportunity to get out of dispatch, and who knew where this might lead. There was also a pay rise of ten shillings (50 pence) per week.
The media department consisted of roughly 20 people, organised in three sections: press buying, TV buying and media statistics. My job was to be in media statistics. I had to fill in pink forms using figures from large green books, published each week by an organisation called Television Audience Measurement (TAM). These contained estimated audience numbers for TV commercials appearing in specific commercial breaks for our clients’ brands.
Commercial television had started in the UK four years earlier with one station in London. It had expanded to the Midlands and the north of England by the time I started filling in the forms. Press audience research was provided by the National Readership Survey and I was briefed by my boss to visit the offices of the Daily Mail, where there was an IBM Hollerith machine that could slice and dice the punched cards that formed the readership survey sample.
Over the next few years, media statistics was renamed media planning, and through various reorganisations of the media department I added press buying and TV buying to my role. In addition, I attended evening classes on statistics and economics. These were to stand me in good stead in later years – all education is good. I also took the specialist media examination set by the IPA and passed, gaining the letters AMIPA after my name.
After six years at CPV, I felt the need to move on and responded to an advertisement in Advertisers’ Weekly for a group media planner at McCann Erickson.
MCCANN
Advertising agencies are forever reorganising. At the time of my interview, McCann had the same structure in the media department as CPV had when I started there. So the role of a media planner, in the media planning section, really suited me. I got the job and gave CPV one month’s notice, aiming to begin at McCann in May 1965. To my great surprise, on joining I was told my role had changed to that of a media group head, with a press buyer and TV buyer reporting to me. At the age of 23, I had no experience of managing people but, with the supreme confidence of youth, I just got on with it.
My boss was the deputy media director, who had been promoted from a role as a media planner. He had never bought media. Nor had his boss, the media director, who had a background in research. At the time, many of the agencies had recruited media directors with a research background. In this context, my media planning background and understanding of research was very helpful. But I had also bought media. This was to be very important in the next development, which came when my boss left in 1967.
In a reorganisation, the media director offered me the job of head of media planning and someone else the position of head of media buying. It was nonsense to split planning from buying, and I told the media director how I felt. There was no debate as far as I was concerned and I handed in my notice.
He immediately offered me the job of media manager, saying that if I made a success of it within three months it would be made permanent. When the media director left in 1968, I was promoted to replace him and invited to join the board.
“I was trying to explain to the client how we felt his money should be spent and it just seemed the wrong forum”
From 1968 to 1972, McCann London had a remarkable streak of winning new business in competitive pitches. This propelled the agency into the top five in the UK. The media department played an important role as part of the full-service team. Our lineup for pitches was led by the chairman, followed by the creative director, then the research director, then the director of sales promotion and lastly me, representing media. We never had more than two hours in total and I learned to speak very fast. Media generally ended up with ten minutes.
I felt this was crazy. I was trying to explain to the client how we felt his money should be spent and it just seemed the wrong forum. In addition, there was pressure on the talent in our department, with the best people being offered jobs by our competitors at much more than they were earning with us. In particular, our head of television buying was poached by Media Buying Services at a salary greater than mine. I could not obtain the money I felt we needed for salaries and sufficient additional people to cope with the workload. Agency management instructed me that the media service could not be more than 10% of the agency’s total costs. I was given this figure as it was the amount the IPA said that member agencies spent on their media departments. By the end of 1972, I could not see a way out of the conundrum and prepared to leave the industry.
Looking back, the answer to the question, “Why did media become unbundled from creative?” is bound up with this issue. At the time nearly all agency income was generated by 15% commission paid to agencies recognised by media owner trade bodies. So 10% of the 15% meant the ceiling for the media service was 1.5% of spending.
Once the media agencies in the UK had got under way, they were receiving the 15% commission as they had gained recognition. Roughly 12% was passed back to the advertiser to pay for the creative service. The media agencies were thus able to operate on double the margin available to their cousins in the media departments of full-service agencies. The graphic below shows actual IPA figures in terms of how full-service agencies in London were structured in 1969.
CDP
Early in 1973, McCann pitched for the Nescafé account against the holders Masius Wynne Williams and an English agency, Collett Dickenson Pearce & Partners (CDP), which happened to be located on the other corner of Howland Street.
CDP won the business and we were very disappointed. A few weeks later, I was asked to attend a meeting with the managing director of CDP. Initially I did not wish to meet him, as I was fed up with the way the agency business was treating media and saw no reason for CDP to be any different. But Frank Lowe said things would be different. He backed this up by agreeing to pay what it was going to cost to bring in the best people, in addition to the existing media department staff.
This allowed me to bring in Terry Alexander as a media planner and Steve Caras as a TV buyer, with both of whom I had worked at McCann. Steve had a friend, Alan James, who worked as a TV buyer at Grey and who also joined us. To complete the new top team, John Hewson from Foote Cone & Belding was hired as a media planner.
Within three months the media department was being talked about as the best in town. The agency was also seen as producing the world’s best advertising. This was a win-win for clients, and our business grew dramatically.
During this time, we drove two major developments. The first was in outdoor advertising. By 1975 CDP dominated the 48-sheet sector of the poster medium. To meet the service requirements of men across the country visiting each site and checking correct posting plus quality of visibility, we set up a joint venture with JWT. I became chairman and we needed a name. Sensitivities would not allow either agency’s name to come first, so our finance director came up with Portland Outdoor Advertising, as the offices were to be located on London’s Great Portland Street. Martin Sorrell (later knighted) bought JWT, and then JWT bought out CDP’s 50% shareholding. Portland was then merged with another big outdoor media agency and renamed Kinetic, which today is the largest outdoor media agency in the world.
“On the day my departure was announced, I received a call from a friend who was MD of Leo Burnett London. He wanted to see me for breakfast as soon as possible”
The second development was that we gained Reckitt & Colman Centralised TV Buying. To do this, we competed against four other large full-service advertising agencies, which each had a much greater share of that client’s expenditure than we did. By appointing CDP, the client chose to separate media from creative, a forerunner of the unbundling to come.
I spent four very happy years at CDP. The fifth year was not so happy, however, and I resolved to leave to set up my own business in media.
I had no financial backing as I did not know anyone who had money, so I arranged to remortgage the family home, which would provide sufficient funds to last three months.
On the day my departure was announced, I received a call from a friend who was MD of Leo Burnett London. He wanted to see me for breakfast as soon as possible. When we met at London’s Hyde Park Hotel, he produced a signed blank cheque and asked me to fill in the amount I wanted in order to join them. I figured that, with no offices, no staff and no clients, this sounded a good deal and it would give me the funds to set up on my own at a later date as long as I made a success of the job Burnett needed to revitalise their media department.
LEO BURNETT
The role was vice chairman in charge of media, research and sales promotion, one of the top three people running the agency and reporting to the chairman. In the spring of 1978, media was going to be at the top of the tree in a large full-service agency. This was fine and only right.
One of my first tasks was to appoint a media director and I found a great one in Chris Dickens. I loved working with him to build the resource. By spring 1980, I felt my job had been completed and I could set out again on the path of starting my own business. I did not discuss the idea of the agency separating out media from their full-service structure as it was resolutely committed to the full-service way of working. I found offices above a shoe shop in London’s New Bond Street and opened the doors of Yershon Media Management on April Fools’ Day 1980.
YERSHON MEDIA MANAGEMENT (YMM)
When leaving CDP, I had had an idea in my head to enter the independent media sector in a different way to the others in the market. The idea was to offer consultancy to clients’ marketing directors in the strategic area of media planning. I would sit on their side of the table, working with their brand teams to develop a media planning brief. Then I would work with the agencies to help them develop the best solution.
Two years later, this still seemed a good way to enter the market. This time round I resolved to find offices as the first step, as I had the Burnett funds, which I calculated would last three months. If I ran out of money before gaining a client, I would have been content to look for a job as a media planner/buyer, feeling I had at least given it a go.
The offices were 500 square feet above a shoe shop in Bond Street, one of London’s most fashionable areas. In those days it took three months to obtain a phone line, so I used one belonging to my landlord. Letters were the other form of communication, and I started writing to the marketing directors of all the blue-chip advertisers.
I was fortunate to have my wife to help as a secretary, or the business would truly have been a one-man band. It was challenging but very exciting. A typewriter, two desks, a carpet, a meeting-room table and a car were all purchased with our scarce cash resources, and my phone calls produced one warm lead.
Keith Jacobs, the marketing director of Birds Eye, said I should speak to his secretary and fix a meeting. The first available date turned out to be six weeks later. No other warm leads existed when I met with Keith and his marketing managers, plus the head of marketing services.
I felt the meeting went well, but time was passing, and we were getting close to running out of cash when the wonderful news came through that we had gained the business. My offering was new to the market and Birds Eye was seen as a blue-chip advertiser endorsing it, being a subsidiary of Unilever at the time. This represented a perfect start. It took another six months to gain the second and third clients, which were Seagram and Heinz. This meant I could hire our first senior executive, Colin McLeod, to be in charge of media research. I had met Colin at Burnett and he was prepared to give up his job as media controller of Schweppes to join the fledgling venture. Guinness came a few months later, and I knew I had established a proper business in media consultancy.
The Football League became an important client of YMM. We had been approached in our early days by the commercial director, who I had met when we worked for different agencies and shared the Austin Rover account. The brief was to help the commercial committee optimise the amount of money gained from the sale of non-theatrical rights to ITV and the BBC. We suggested the solution of taking two matches out of the Saturday 3pm kick-offs. One would be offered live to the BBC on Friday nights, and the other live to ITV on Sunday afternoons. This became the forerunner to all TV rights negotiations.
YERSHON MEDIA BUYING (YMB)
Mike Yershon interviewed by Marketing Week in his YMB days
I felt the need to extend into media buying, but this was not easy. There were plenty of buying competitors and I did not know their language, nor how the business model worked. I also wanted to continue growing in consultancy. The solution was to form a separate company from scratch, Yershon Media Buying (YMB), which launched in 1981. Two executives were hired – John Day from Gillette and Colin Robinson from Bates.
I would market the two companies under the Yershon Media banner, from the same offices with the same staff, and try to avoid client duplication. Buying clients would be offered the full consultancy service within the buying price. The buying company would gain 15% commission as recognised principals, and give 12% back to clients. They could pay for their creative services from the rebate. This strategy worked very well and our first buying client was Granada TV Rentals; this was followed by Coty perfumes, Olivetti, some business from Guinness mail order, and a new womenswear retailer, Next. Guinness awarded the buying company Harp Lager, along with a new product launch for a low-alcohol drink called Kaliber. The consultancy powered ahead, with business from Nationwide Building Society, Renault and ASDA, and more business from Unilever.
In 1985 the consultancy was awarded a piece of development business by Peter Wood. The brand was Direct Line Motor Insurance, and it was taking full pages in the Daily Mail. Response was not considered good enough by Peter and he was put in touch with me by a former Guinness client of mine who had joined a PR company. The agreement was that the ex-Guinness guy would invite Peter and me to lunch and, if we were getting on, then leave. Well, we got on famously. Peter became a client of the consultancy on a fee of £5,000 per month with an agreement that he would switch to being a buying company client when spending grew to over £2m.
“We were good, but I felt the buying market would move to scale, and we were too late into the buying market to compete on a scale basis”
In 1988 things changed in our world. Zenith had been created and TMDH had gone public. We were good, but I felt the buying market would move to scale, and we were too late into the buying market to compete on a scale basis. By this time, YMM was turning over more than £1m per year in fees. YMB’s £20m billings delivered nearly £600,000 a year and our profit was around £300,000 a year. Profits had stuck at this level and I was not confident they would grow to allow us to float on the stock market.
When I was approached by David Reich, the head of TMDH, to have lunch, I knew what was coming and, after much gum-sucking, it was clear that the best option was to sell. TMDH had been started by Chris Ingram as ‘The Media Department’ in 1972, pulling together the media function from a number of full-service agencies owned by KMP, where he was media director. When Chris left in 1976 to set up CIA, his own company, David Reich took over. David and his colleagues built the business from there, including buying it out from KMP. I got on very well with David and looked forward to the next stage of the journey.
SELLING TO TMDH AND HELPING TO CREATE CARAT
The deal involved my joining the public company board and keeping the two Yershon companies going during a three-year earn-out period. We sold on my wedding anniversary, 30 August 1988, for a mix of cash and shares in TMDH.
At my first PLC board meeting, David announced he had been approached by WCRS, who wanted to create Europe’s largest buyer of media, under the Carat brand name. WCRS was a full-service advertising agency, led by Peter Scott. Peter had completed an audacious 50–50 deal with Gilbert and Francis Gross, who had built Carat as a very successful independent media agency in France. For us, it involved a deal to sell 29.9% of TMDH. The deal was done in the knowledge that, if all went well, there was the possibility that an offer could be made in the future for the whole of TMDH.
The next three years involved continuing to grow Yershon Media and helping to set up the UK arm of Carat. Peter Scott had created an umbrella public company, with the Gross brothers as important investors, to hold a number of subsidiaries, including Carat. This was called Aegis. David Reich joined the board of Aegis with responsibility for Carat as COO. To me, this meant David’s focus shifted from the UK, as he was required to build the Carat brand in other markets. In 1991 Aegis bought the remaining 70.1% of TMDH.
My agreement was that I could exit if control passed from TMDH, and in 1992 I resolved to do this. By an amazing coincidence, I received a call from McCann, which wanted me to go back, nearly 20 years after leaving.
MCCANN FOR THE SECOND TIME
Yershon back at McCann, and featured in Campaign magazine
It was eerie.
McCann was in the same offices, the media department was on the same floor, and the clients were broadly the same (with the important additions of Nescafé and Coca-Cola).
Media was under threat from the independents and my job was to reinvigorate the full-service offering. I relished the task, and set about reorganising and improving the motivation of the media department. An interesting piece of learning was that two of the three people I decided to promote were women. There had been very few women who had made it to the top in media and I could see things were going to change. All three became great successes, and Andy Jones went on to hold the top media job at IPG in the UK.
By late autumn 1993, it was clear that my job was done, and I did not wish to stay at the coalface a moment longer than needed. At the time, the big multinational agencies were clinging to full service. I still felt the idea was flawed, but did not fancy taking on the might of McCann from the inside. So I left McCann at the end of 1993 to start a new career, working from home and keeping my hand in the industry I love.
My first client was Peter Wood at Direct Line. We had kept in touch and, when I called asking if there was anything I could do, he said the timing was good as he was taking the company into financial services. Thus began a 20-year new career below the industry radar. Amongst many other things, this has given me the freedom and time to develop an understanding of the new media and encouraging the founders of our wonderful industry sector to tell their stories.
A FULLER HISTORY OF MIKE YERSHON
There’s a lot of talk about the Future Of Work.
Robots, Digitalisation and new business models.
Platforms and technology changed the game.
Business leaders/decision makers (who wish to survive) have to steer the right course. Their job is to take advantage. There’s two questions - will they and how will they execute? In the media business that means being as effective in ‘digital’ as in traditional.
Being prepared is only strategy for business in this century. That’s true for two reasons.
It’s impossible to know what’s happening from one week to the next.
Preparation enables the business to take advantage of whatever happens.
Being prepared for business life after 2020 has to start now. A lot of businesses designed for today will fail by then.
DAVE TROTT ON MIKE YERSHON
The Shape* Of The Successful Business
After decades of proving it we know it’s extremely easy to solve the wrong problem really well.
Experience taught us that a great Ad campaign can leave a badly prepared operation in dire straits.
The smartest and most relevant technology on Earth can gather dust through disuse.
Expensive consulting firms and strategy documents often don’t move the needle.
Certain capabilities are needed to survive. Ingenuity, curiosity, creativity and hands on experience in how media works.
THE LEGENDARY MEDIA MEN
“The answers to today’s questions are not the answers for tomorrow’s. We don’t know tomorrow’s questions. We can only be the best prepared.”
— MIKE YERSHON
At the last count there was at least 120 channels. That’s 120+ ways to interact with the consumer. That's not a challenge that’s the opportunity.
The Nick Manning Story
7TH SEPTEMBER 2017 by THE MEDIA MEN
In the latest chapter of ‘The Media Men’, a compilation of stories of the founders of today’s agencies, Festival of Media Global speaker Nick Manning reveals how lessons in history can help guide and drive the next generation of advertising leaders.
Nick Manning, Ebiquity
History lessons from a life in advertising
In the age of programmatic media and Artificial Intelligence, what can we advertising Old Guard possibly teach today’s ‘digerati’?
Well, as Sir Winston Churchill said, “those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it”, so this is my attempt to help today’s Bright Young Things learn from my successes (and mistakes) to help their own career paths.
In today’s exciting digital age it’s easy to lose sight of some of the essentials that remain true about the advertising industry. It has become more complex, fragmented and technical, to the extent that the wood sometimes get lost for the trees.
This piece addresses the need for today’s rising industry stars to rediscover some of the essential motivating factors that drive the advertising industry and make it stronger.
Having mentioned one Conservative Prime Minister already, I will echo another, John Major, in urging a ‘back to basics’ approach to the future of our industry.
The first part of the article documents my own odyssey, with some lessons that hopefully apply today, while the second part takes a look at how the industry should recapture some of its traditional objectives and values.
Part One: lessons from the past
First things first; this is about advertising, not media. I have always considered myself an ‘adman’ first and foremost, and I just happened to ply my trade in media planning, buying and latterly analytics.
Advertising sometimes gets bad PR, ironically, but at its best it makes a significant contribution to the economy through demand creation. Advertising helps build brands, products and services by connecting content with audiences, so even if you’re currently beavering away in, say, pay-per-click search optimisation, you’re in Advertising, too.
Building a career in advertising is still a great way to be in business, but don’t forget that it is a business, first and foremost, and that it’s better to have a career than a succession of jobs.
All’s well that ends well
My own career didn’t get off to the best of starts.
I’d been in my first job in advertising for three months, and it was first review time. My direct-talking boss delivered his verdict on my performance thus far, summed up with the word ‘adequate’. I was damned with faint praise, but was kept on. Adequate was just about good enough.
I nearly didn’t go into advertising at all. I was a graduate in Modern Languages, so the Careers Office at Oxford came up with an unimaginative list of career choices such as Insurance Broking and Advertising. I failed to get into advertising via the well-worn route of the ‘milk round’, traipsing around advertising agencies, competing with other fresh-faced graduates for one of the coveted graduate positions as an trainee account director.
Failure was inevitable as I knew very little about advertising (or business), hadn’t researched it much, and probably didn’t really know or care too much about it. I was conditioned to know I needed a job, but not how to get one. In those days, everyone coming out of school or college got a job of sorts quite easily, and internships were unknown. However, getting into the ad agencies was hard even then, and the rejection letters duly arrived.
And I nearly didn’t go into the media side of advertising at all. The smart folk at the Careers Office told me that only highly numerate people should consider media planning and buying, so a Languages graduate wouldn’t go far.
So after advertising rejected me (and I had incorrectly rejected Media), my default option was insurance. It didn’t suit me and I didn’t suit it.
Then good fortune struck. A school friend of mine was selling TV advertising airtime to agencies. He’d been approached for an interview at a media agency for a role buying TV airtime, but he didn’t want to leave his current job. Fortunately, he suggested I go for the interview instead.
It all sounds implausible now, but I was a substitute interviewee brought off the bench without any real knowledge of the industry.
So I sat across the desk from Barry Croucher, the man who later used the ‘adequate‘ word, and when he asked me what my academic qualifications were, he started laughing. It turned out that my description of my exam track-record as ‘the usual‘ (9 ‘O’ Levels, 3 ‘A’ levels at the top grade and a degree from Oxford) was not so ‘usual‘ in the world of media. Barry was the proud owner of one ‘O’ Level and joined the industry straight from school, as many did in those days.
I’d gone from the ad agency ‘milk round’ where everyone had top-flight degrees after glittering Public School careers (First XV, Head Boy, etc) to a more obscure part of the industry which most people had joined without troubling the higher groves of academe. When I joined Chris Ingram Associates (CIA) in early 1980, I found myself to be one of the very few graduates in one of the very few (at that time) independent media agencies.
CIA had been set up in 1976 by Chris Ingram, one of the leading lights of the Media Independent movement. He also became the most successful of the new generation of pioneers, eventually selling his company for a lot of money, allowing him to become a serious patron of modern art and the owner of Woking Football Club (not normally associated with each other but there is probably a ‘statues’ joke available).
Having started as a trainee TV planner/buyer, I went on to be one of the team who helped pioneer the independent media agency sector (now a multi-billion dollar business) and I subsequently co-founded a media agency which continued the legacy of the early Davy Crocketts such as Chris.
I got into the industry through luck, but these days anyone applying to enter the industry would be expected to be both interested in (and ostensibly passionate about) working in Advertising, would have done lots of homework, would almost certainly have had relevant internships, and may have a number of interviews, including test exercises. It’s much more competitive now, and people have to work hard to get in through the front door (or know someone who can let them in at the side gate).
Internships do matter. One sure-fire way of triage for an interviewer when looking at a big sheaf of CVs is to favour those candidates who have earned some early stripes in a related role, even if unpaid, and especially if the word ‘digital’ is on your CV, contrived or not.
And while internships can get you up the leader board, a strong CV is vital, with extra-curricular achievements as well as good academic qualifications. So think ‘personal statement’. A lively interest in business is mandatory.
OK, it’s a cliché, but advertising is still one of the best, most exciting industries to be in, especially if you don’t want the predictability and slightly stultifying (for me) rigour of the ‘real’ professions (don’t write in). For those who thrive on variety and a slight sense of trepidation, there isn’t much that can beat it. But you have to work hard to get into it, and really want to. If this applies to you, you’ll get in. And if you work hard enough, you’ll do well.
So you’ll like advertising if you like variety. If you prefer something more predictable, stop at accountancy in the careers alphabet.
I started ‘adequately’ in this industry but worked hard and developed a strong interest in the business. It can lead you to many interesting places populated by many fascinating people.
Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose
The advertising world has changed beyond recognition, largely thanks to technological change and globalisation. The media industry has been transformed, with thousands of ways of reaching and engaging with people through an almost infinite array of channels and content options.
However, there was also plenty that was new when I joined the industry. Channel Four only began broadcasting in November 1982, two years after I started, and in the 80s and 90s we were having fun inventing new ways to use TV and other existing media.
Yet the fundamental role of marketing and advertising hasn’t changed. Business still needs to find innovative ways to attract new customers, build demand and generate preference. Half the fun is inventing better ways to gain the public’s attention. The job’s the same, even if we’ve swapped ITV for Instagram, and magazines for mobiles.
However, the media agency world really has changed. CIA was one of the first standalone ‘Media Independents’, a new concept for advertisers who did not need or want flashy ads, but needed good media planning and buying (well, mostly low cost buying). These clients were among the early adopters of the new Media Independents who aimed to kick sand in the eyes of the flabby, complacent advertising agencies. This wasn’t ‘proper’ advertising, filmed in Barbados, but it was K-Tel Records and the Ronco ‘Buttoneer’ (look it up). Low cost production and low cost media did the job.
In those days, the traditional Ad Agencies did everything for the ‘proper’ brands, and they enjoyed a seat at the right hand of the client Top Brass; the fees were generous, the fine wine flowed freely and weekends shooting on country estates ensued.
However, a group of maverick, entrepreneurial media directors from the Ad Agency sector saw an opportunity to carve a niche for themselves by setting up independent businesses which only did media planning and buying. Those pioneers were the progenitors of the massive media buying groups of today, although none could have foreseen just how far the independent media agency sector has travelled since the mid-70s.
The journey was fraught in the early years. The Ad Agencies didn’t like the upstarts trying to eat their expensive lunches, especially as media was the most lucrative aspect of the Ad Agency business; they received 15% commissions on the money spent by their clients and it was easy income, with no real conditions attached. The Ad Agency sector of the 1980s enjoyed a boom time, with plenty of nice offices, cars, parties and much powdering of noses.
Like the wine, money flowed freely, but little reached the basement level where the troglodyte, less expensively educated media folk lived, so some of the media directors saw an opportunity to elevate media into a proper business.
At that time media was infamously allocated ten minutes between the end of the creative presentation and lunch. The long-suffering media directors had to engage clients in the rather less interesting world of spots and spaces, while stomachs growled around the room and the ‘suit’ held up five fingers instead of the expected ten.
I have been fortunate to both witness and participate in the development of the media agency business from those embryonic days in the 80s to today’s world, where the media agency networks are global, employ many thousands of people, provide a glittering array of services to clients and generate hundreds of millions of pounds in profit for their shareholders.
However, the 70s Wild West was a rough old place for the settlers who set up their own media agencies. The concept of independent media services was controversial and unpopular. The Advertising Agency sector did its best to snuff out the embryonic media independents as they represented a real threat to the most profitable part of their business. Some of the breakaway ‘meeja johnnies’ were looked down on, having joined the industry straight out of school, and that school wasn’t Eton.
For us novice foot soldiers it was a steep learning curve. I began my career as a trainee TV buyer, securing ad slots on the UK’s TV stations, ranging from the bigger London players (Thames and London Weekend Television) to the small but perfectly-formed Border TV, at just 1.2% of the UK population and 5% of the sheep.
Quaintly, TV airtime was bought via a series of ‘options’, a choice of ad slots in programmes which were read out over the phone and recorded by us in illuminated script by quills on parchment (well, not quite). In those days, the target audiences were as sophisticated as ‘All Adults’, rather than the highly sophisticated segmentation-derived programmatic pseudo-audiences of today. And people really were a lot more alike in those days anyway.
We entered the bookings onto our outsourced booking system (TEMPO) by filling in electrostatic punch-cards. These were collected in the late afternoon, sent off for processing overnight and our map-sized print-outs would arrive the following morning, minus the spots where we’d filled in the punch-cards incorrectly (well, it was often done after a liquid lunch). There were no desk-top computers in those days, and tablets were things that Moses took for headaches. People met or spoke to each other on the phone, which seems hard to believe these days.
Oh, and most of our TV spots were ‘pre-empted’ (outbid) on a (rigged) auction basis, long before Google, so huge amounts of our time were wasted; but we had so much time available that no-one complained too much. Maybe real-time bidding isn’t so original after all.
Thirty seven years on, it’s interesting to note how much has changed, but also how little. The industry has a history of reinventing itself, but the principles remain the same. Innovation is a constant, and in the 1980s we invented new ways to use media. Today the opportunity to innovate is infinite, and that’s a large part of the attraction of the business for people who like to stretch their imaginations.
So, whatever your role, stretch the boundaries and try something new. See each day as a learning opportunity.
Those were the days…weren’t they?
I began in a three man department and we enjoyed ourselves. Much of the business with the TV sales houses was done person-to-person, usually at lunchtime and always with plenty of alcoholic assistance. For some people afternoons didn’t really exist and they woke up late at night in the railway sidings.
On Fridays we would decamp to a leafy suburb, have a real lunch (with food in it) and graze through the afternoon without a thought about work, as there was little work to do.
These were politically incorrect times, and one of our team (OK, the boss) kept a selection of ‘exotic’ magazines in a filing cabinet for the amusement of some, but it wasn’t unusual back then for daily banter to mimic the very worst of the ‘Carry On‘ movies, which turned sexual innuendo into a sort of art form. My Jesuit schooling hadn’t prepared me for this, but it was like a second childhood with added multiple entendres.
‘O Tempora, o mores’, as I thought but didn’t say at the time.
The Media Independent sector grew in strength and simply provided advertisers with better media planning and buying. We cared about our craft, and were able to out-perform the Ad Agencies by being more expert, agile, and cheaper.
I flourished once I’d finally got the hang of it and found myself rising rapidly through the ranks of a small business, being made a board director within five years. This doesn’t happen much these days, but the pace was different then and people could get promotions and pay rises at a rate that doesn’t exist in the megalithic media agency world of today, unless you’ve got ‘digital’ in your job title.
I’ve worked hard (sometimes) and played hard at other times, but we did a good job for our clients. As a result, CIA grew and grew, as did the other Media Independents, and the sector was getting too powerful for the somewhat complacent Ad Agencies to ignore. In time, they would be obliged to join in the party; one turning point was when Saatchi & Saatchi, the poster child of the Ad Agency world, acquired Ray Morgan & Partners (a successful Media Independent) to form Zenith, now a large, global media agency network in the Publicis group.
It was perhaps inevitable that the new Media Independents would look at merging to accelerate growth, or for some founders it was a chance to cash in their chips. CIA and TMD, staunch rivals, seriously considered getting together, a possibility which led us senior CIA people to consider a breakaway. We plotters met in a bar called the Tappit Hen just off Trafalgar Square, and over copious quantities of red wine hatched our plan to set up on our own if CIA merged with TMD. Fortunately none of this happened, saving us from ourselves; we were serious but incredibly naïve, but everyone was learning back then.
CIA floated on the junior stock market in 1988 and the founding shareholders were able to crystallise the value of their early years, but those of us who hadn’t been there at the start missed out. The flotation did allow CIA to buy a lesser rival called Billett and Co the following year, and we found ourselves with a new boss, the eponymous founder of the acquired company.
Four of the key directors, including myself, had a sense of having helped build the business but had missed out on the flotation. Knowing when to move on is another constant in a career path, and those of us who had missed out on CIA’s flotation began to prepare our exits.
Fortune favours the brave…again
Serendipity intervened, as it often does. It was quite common in those days for the Media Independents to provide media services to a new generation of creative ad agencies, who were busily eating into the business of the older and somewhat flat-footed agencies, by the simple means of producing better creative work.
One such agency was the snappily-named Simons, Palmer, Denton, Clemmow and Johnson, a highly entrepreneurial start-up with big ambitions. They came to see CIA, and I talked to them alongside a colleague called Colin Gottlieb. We hit it off with the Simons Palmer team, and soon afterwards we became their outsourced media planning and buying partners, forming a successful combination. So successful, in fact, that Simons Palmer approached Colin and myself to break away from CIA and launch a media agency business with them instead.
We called it Manning Gottlieb Media, MGM for short.
We wanted to create a business where media would make a significant difference to our clients. We wrote a ‘manifesto’ for the business, including the following words written 27 years ago, and relevant now:
“Given an ever-increasing choice, today’s media literate generation is developing a butterfly mentality in their media use…viewers, listeners..are swiftly moving targets and, as media specialists, we have to adopt an equally light-footed approach to media choice and tactics.
MGM has been created to put imagination back into media.
MGM will deliver what advertisers really need-imaginative media solutions allied to sharp negotiation. In other words, media that sells.”
Colin and I resigned directly to Chris Ingram in August 1990. We were joined by another CIA stalwart, Robert Ffitch, and I can vividly recall the three of us shuffling nervously into Chris’s office, armed with our resignation letters. This was all rather unexpected from Chris’s point-of-view and he asked for time to think about his response. When we informed him that there would be an article in the following day’s edition of Campaign, the advertising trade publication, it was obvious to Chris that we were on our way.
Setting up our own business just felt right. I’m a big believer in instinct, and we didn’t look back as we set out on our new adventure. Creating one’s own business remains many people’s ambition, and we were diving into it headlong. That’s often the best way.
If you’re the kind of person who fancies taking a risk or two and setting something up, there is still little to beat it.
From humble beginnings….
Manning Gottlieb Media began its official life that August, but Colin and I were obliged to spend our three months’ notice period on ‘garden leave’, so away from the office but on-call, while CIA attempted to shore up the client relationships that we had painstakingly nurtured.
Colin and I were not free to join our own agency until November 1990, when we took up residence in Simons Palmer’s offices. Robert Ffitch effectively began MGM before we arrived, and remained a stalwart of the agency until 2016, helping it to achieve great heights over 26 years.
We were joined shortly afterwards by Hilary Taylor (now Jeffrey) and we formed the agency based on a successful formula which continues to this day, 27 years on. One reason for our success was teamwork and the relationship between Colin, Robert, Hilary and myself. We had specific skills and worked very effectively together.
We heard that one CIA Director had charmingly predicted that we’d be ‘dead in the water by Christmas’, but a number of our ex-clients came with us, for which we remain suitably grateful.
However, we had launched into a recession. We initially sheltered in the sponsoring warmth of Simons Palmer’s swish and expensive offices in Noel Street in Soho; these were tough times for us all, but we placed our first ad, a small, black and white space for Greenpeace, and we were underway.
Meanwhile, we had received a phone call from David Reich, the boss of TMD Carat, our toughest competitor. David bought a 19% stake in our business for £66,000, and TMD Carat provided us with ‘air cover’ and added credibility. David’s investment would eventually pay back handsomely.
New business was not slow to arrive, with Simons Palmer succeeding in persuading some of the clients they won to include MGM in the service. Some of the earlier wins were small, such as the Science Museum, but later on a number of significant spenders such as Nike and Virgin Atlantic came in from this route.
As a brand, Nike was only just setting out in the UK in the early 90s, and Simons Palmer and MGM were appointed to handle the non-TV business. This led to some innovative uses of outdoor media (thanks to Colin) which broke new ground at that time, and helped burnish our reputation.
One day my brick-like mobile phone rang and a former CIA client requested a meeting; he’d moved on to another company called Helene Curtis, and they wanted to launch a new brand called Salon Selectives. Could we help?
We began work shortly after without a ‘Request for Proposal’, or a pitch and initially without a contract, and thus began a highly rewarding client/agency relationship, and a major boost to our business.
In 1995 we and Simons Palmer jointly won the launch of Sony’s new games console, the original PlayStation, leading to another long-term relationship, and the Goldfish credit card followed in 1996.
Clients like Nike, Virgin and Goldfish were ‘disruptor’ brands who needed something innovative, both in creative and media terms, and we delivered in spades. Some of the advertising produced by Simons Palmer still stands out as examples of how great work can help transform the fortunes of a brand, and it certainly inspired us.
The Goldfish credit card launch in 1996 was remarkable primarily because it involved a number of agencies working intensively together over a three month period, and it remains a textbook example of integrated thinking, planning and execution across a range of channels represented by different specialist agencies. It’s what clients today say they miss.
The best advertising work comes from experts from different disciplines working together to create something special; this is still true today. And the experts don’t all have to work at the same company, but need to share a common purpose.
Whatever your role, you should aim to work in harmony alongside people who represent other aspects of the industry. It provides a better result and is more interesting and enjoyable. But don’t be precious.
The best of times…the worst of times
MGM prospered because we forged extremely close client relationships and produced great work. The advertisers we suited best wanted creativity in media; we provided this and got to know our clients very well. They trusted us, we worked incredibly hard and produced innovative work. We put our clients first and this is still the best way to grow a business.
Proof of this came when Simons Palmer lost the Virgin Atlantic account when Richard Branson (ennobled later) hated their first TV commercial and they were fired. MGM however had done great work and held onto the media business when the creative account was awarded to another new agency, Rainey, Kelly, Campbell, Roalfe (another example of snappy agency names). Our relationship with RKCR also turned into a strong, enduring one, and we produced some of our best work while partnering with them. The three-way relationship between Virgin Atlantic, RKCR and MGM was the best of any I’ve known. We respected each other and the client folk trusted us all.
Around this time, Zenith was launched as the first real ‘factory ship’ for bulk media buying, and the trend towards the commoditisation of media began. Our relationship with Carat helped, as they enjoyed strong credibility in the media buying market; we were able to claim that our clients enjoyed the creativity of media planning and good media rates, and this was not only true, but arguably what some clients say they lack today.
In a bland, undifferentiated market, MGM stood out for our constructive approach to media owner relationships, which seemed perfectly logical to us but wasn’t the norm. The media owners found us receptive and accommodating, unlike so many of our rivals, and helped us innovate in media. Relationships with media owners are even more valuable now.
MGM had fled the Simons Palmer nest in Soho and set up in their original space in Covent Garden, a small warren of offices that suited our slightly offbeat approach. Independent businesses that succeed usually attract potential purchasers. MGM was no exception, and we had a few clumsy overtures and even looked seriously at being acquired by PHD (who set up a year before us) to form the ‘Harlem Globetrotters’ (without the height) of the new media agency world, but perhaps fortunately that didn’t happen.
Simons Palmer, our sponsor and shareholder, was acquired in 1997 by TBWA, an advertising agency within the Omnicom group. As a result, we found ourselves part-owned and within the orbit of one of the big marketing communications groups.
This was a welcome development as it opened up international horizons for MGM. As a UK business, our ability to grow was limited and especially so in an industry which was rapidly globalising. This began in earnest when the media departments of two of the oldest Ad Agencies, JWT and Ogilvy and Mather, were fused into MindShare, arguably marking the point where the unbundling of media from Ad Agencies came of age.
Shortly after TBWA bought a minority stake in MGM, Colin and I set out for New York to see Omnicom, TBWA’s parent company. Fortunately Colin did most of the talking, as usual, as we sat (nervously in my case) with the Chairman and CEO of Omnicom. The conversation went well and so we became majority-owned by TBWA, and therefore Omnicom. We’d joined the big league without wholly giving up our autonomy by virtue of retaining a shareholding; Carat exited handsomely, after an interesting eleventh hour attempt to buy MGM themselves.
Retaining a stake worked very well for us. We still felt like it was our business, and we could make sensible business decisions rather than pump up the profit.
Following the Omnicom deal, MGM became Manning Gottlieb OMD to signal our new ownership. Our agency enjoyed a purple patch during the dotcom boom with a crazy rash of new business. It was like the Klondyke Gold Rush; we were interviewing daily and offering jobs on the spot, knowing that any candidates would be snapped up by someone else if we didn’t get there first. Tim Pearson, the current CEO of Manning Gottlieb OMD, was one person we hired on the same day as his first interview.
We doubled our headcount in a year. This level of growth was unhealthy, and when the dotcom crash inevitably happened, Manning Gottlieb OMD suffered accordingly.
Just before the crash, Omnicom had decided that it needed to strengthen OMD’s operations and turn it into a fully-functioning international media agency network. This would prove to be a hugely complex and difficult job, so they wisely chose Colin Gottlieb to do this in Europe. They needed someone of his drive and determination to carry out a tough plan, so Colin effectively left Manning Gottlieb OMD to become the CEO of OMD’s operations in Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA), a role he continues brilliantly to this day, and now as CEO of Omnicom Media Group in EMEA.
I found myself as the sole CEO of the agency Colin and I had founded, at a difficult time for the world. The nadir was a meeting on September 12th 2001, the day after the 9/11 attacks. The world felt like it was collapsing that day. We had some of the senior Omnicom people in London for a tough conversation and they couldn’t even phone home to their families. It doesn’t get any worse than that. The events of 9/11 put everything into a different context, and made our own difficulties seem insignificant.
We had seen the best and worst of times in short order. Triumph and disaster are impostors, as Kipling said, but ups and downs are a natural cycle in life and in business. It is easy to forget this during the less good times. It’s worth remembering that all things do pass, and it’s only business. Time heals.
Into the modern era….
The next turning-point was one of the most important in this narrative, both for me and as part of the wider industry trend towards globalisation.
Colin’s appointment as CEO of OMD EMEA was a concerted attempt by Omnicom to form a proper media agency network to compete with the others.
Colin swiftly turned OMD’s European operations into a powerful player. One breakthrough moment was when OMD won the European business for Sony in 2002, a point at which we also began to emerge from the economic headwinds of the dotcom crash.
Manning Gottlieb OMD had worked with Sony Music since 1997, and this was the first time that we had worked alongside OMD UK, who had the Sony Consumer Electronics business. The partnership worked, albeit with the growing pains of two teams collaborating for virtually the first time.
The most significant aspect for me was that I became an international media person overnight, with no prior experience. I was charged with running both the Sony Music and Sony Pictures accounts across Europe, and I set about doing this as though it was the most natural thing in the world.
Around this time Manning Gottlieb OMD hit some choppy water, and in hindsight I had failed to take the right steps to backfill my CEO’s role, especially with one bemusing attempt to have three people jointly run our agency. I had yet to fully learn the classic tenet of ‘one ship, one captain’, and a strong clearly-defined leader of any business is critical.
So is focus, and I’d become distracted by the new attractions of international business. Running a media agency is more than a full-time job.
Pride comes before a fall….
In 2002 we had won the AA (previously Automobile Association) business, with the best pitch presentation we’d ever given. We came up with media ideas which stand the test of time, firmly rooted in the creative idea. It was another breakthrough, proving we could handle a large client and make very significant media cost commitments as part of OMD.
Times were good. Memories of the dotcom crash were receding, and there was a real sense of pride and achievement, and as we headed off in August 2003 to our Summer party, the sun shone, we played games (‘It’s a Knockout’) and the team was on great form.
So maybe I didn’t think too much about a call I got on my way down to the Summer party venue from a client asking to see me more or less immediately.
The client informed me that he had offered to set up two of our key people in their own business by offering them his account, which was pretty significant at that time.
The two people in question (Andrew Stephens and Ben Hayes) were two of our star performers, so we stood to lose two great operators and a big chunk of business. So, without thinking too hard about it, nor even asking permission, I told Andrew and Ben how hard it is to operate in a tough, competitive market such as the media agency world, so why didn’t they allow Manning Gottlieb OMD to take a stake in their business to provide the kind of ‘air cover’ we’d enjoyed from Carat in 1990? It had been a good lesson.
Andrew and Ben said ‘yes’, and their business, Goodstuff, has gone on to great things, including being voted ‘Media Agency of the Year’ by Campaign magazine.
Playing in the Big League…
The following year, 2004, was even more significant, both for me and the development of the media agency industry.
I was asked by Colin Gottlieb to lead OMD’s operations in the UK. The media agency market had evolved still further, with more consolidation and internationalisation. The big communications groups were actively forming quasi-holding companies and Omnicom was no exception.
Subsequently Tess Alps, then in charge of PHD, and I set out to create a joint venture to bring together the negotiation power of OMD and PHD. We created OPera, a company which would act on behalf of OMD and PHD in a number of common areas, including media negotiations.
The Summer of 2004 was the hardest period of my entire career. My new role involved pulling together a number of business entities across three different buildings with very disparate cultures. It was tough, but it worked.
I aimed to make the process of harmonising the OMD UK Group as consensual as possible, as I am firmly of the view that people like to be involved in determining their futures. It takes longer but it’s worth it.
Through perseverance, teamwork and goodwill our team succeeded in reshaping the business to meet the new media environment, and I decided that it was time to move on to the next challenge.
Knowing when to pass the baton on to the next generation is never easy, but there is a right time for everything and this was it. I had been in the media agency world for 27 years, and I left it in April 2007 with great memories of the people I’d met along the way, many of whom remain friends to this day.
The next chapter…to the present day
I knew I needed a change, but I didn’t know what it would be. I was excited rather than daunted by the absence of anything on the horizon. One common characteristic of this story is maybe that some inner self-confidence tells me that opportunity is always out there.
In October 2006, I had been reintroduced to Michael Greenlees, who had started and grown an advertising group called Gold, Greenlees, Trott in the 1980s. It was successful, floated, grew rapidly and was eventually also acquired by Omnicom, around the time MGM was acquired. I only met Mike once, briefly, in 1998 before he moved to the USA and was made CEO of TBWA Worldwide.
After his time in New York, which had also included periods with other companies, including a private equity player, Mike and his family were moving back to the UK. A mutual contact suggested we talk together and so we met in a hotel on Wimbledon Common in October 2006, close to where we both lived. We found that we shared a lot of views and values, and kept in touch as various opportunities emerged.
I had enjoyed numerous other conversations with interested parties, and was on the verge of joining another agency group when Mike persuaded me to join him at a company called Thomson Intermedia (TI), which I barely knew. The company had floated on the AIM index of the London Stock Exchange in 2000 but had not grown in line with expectations. The founders, Steve and Sarah-Jane Thomson, had agreed to stand aside and hand over to a new management team. Mike had been offered the role of CEO, and asked me if I’d like to join him.
TI had acquired in 2004 a company called Billetts, founded by the person whose media agency CIA had acquired in 1989, not long before I left CIA. John Billett had gone on to create a successful company which specialised in media benchmarking, a service whereby advertisers could compare their media performance versus pooled averages. TI was in the business of advertising monitoring, providing competitive information, and wanted to access the Billetts data to provide a picture of how much advertisers were really spending using average media pricing.
Michael and I walked into the TI offices on Charing Cross Road on September 27th 2007. I knew very little about the business and had to start from scratch.
By this time we were in the throes of the global economic downturn caused by the implosion of the financial markets in 2007/8. We were getting used to new expressions such as ‘sub-prime’ and ‘credit crunch’, while getting to grips with a relatively complex business. It was a tough time for everyone, and we started the process of rebuilding the business in the face of strong headwinds.
We rebranded TI corporately as Ebiquity in September 2008, and transitioned our client-facing businesses to the Ebiquity brand on February 14th 2011. We had moved to new offices which were brighter and better, and we set about growing the business.
We embarked on a series of acquisitions which both broadened our geographic coverage and also our range of services. I travelled around the world as we acquired companies in such diverse places as Russia and Australia.
In 2012 we acquired another international media benchmarking business called Fairbrother Lenz Eley; this was an interestingly circular move as it had been established by Ian Fairbrother, who had been my closest colleague in the TV buying department at CIA when I joined the company in 1980. Ian had gone on to create his own successful business in media measurement.
During this time, I learned a huge amount about business generally under Michael Greenlees’ tutelage, and was heavily involved in the expansion into other countries and our acquisitions. My career previously had been very UK-based, but my time at Ebiquity has led me to travel all over the world, seeing places and meeting people that have opened my eyes in various ways. They say that travel broadens the mind, and it has much the same effect on the waistline. However, I cannot recommend getting involved in international business highly enough.
We have been turning Ebiquity into a broadly-based marketing analytics business, operating globally with particular strengths in media measurement.
We summarise Ebiquity’s purpose as ‘creating clarity’ in a world that offers immense choice to advertisers, where data is critical and with new skills needed to make sense of the plethora of data available. There is no question that the advertising industry is now much more interested in measurement and accountability, and proving its value to the advertiser. Whether all the right things are being measured is debatable, but the trend towards measurability is strong and laudable.
While Ebiquity is very different to the media agencies, it mirrors the changes in the industry that have affected the agency business. Globalisation and the role of data analytics are two of the key features of the modern media world, and anyone setting out to build a career in advertising should aim to be a global citizen and get to know as much as possible about the technology and data driving today’s industry. You don’t need to be a statistician or data geek to thrive in this new world, but a smattering of the new language is helpful (especially as acronyms are rife).
It’s also a good idea to understand the new marketing industry, where customer and user experience are important parts of the way companies build their business.
I spent 27 years in the media agency world and now ten years at Ebiquity. It’s a long time, but the advertising world changes constantly and I learn something new every day. It’s never less than interesting and the shape of the industry continues to provide limitless opportunity as well as the kind of problems it is interesting to solve.
Ebiquity lives at the heart of industry change, helping advertisers get to grips with the dynamic nature of the market. We also help them get the basics right, as they still count too, as John Major pointed out.
Part Two: Back to basics
My 27 year career on the media agency side provided highly rewarding experiences based around relationships, teamwork and doing things better. We worked hand-in-glove with our clients and their other agency partners, mostly in harmony, and we sweated blood to make their advertising work harder.
We knew our clients’ business inside-out, went to their sales conferences, sat through their (often very dull) research presentations, and bought their products. We prided ourselves on our expertise, and strove to provide fresh and orginal ideas, coupled with high standards of media strategy, planning and execution. We cared, deeply and perhaps naively.
A strong bond of trust grew between ourselves and our clients, and we put their interests first.
It worked and the money followed. We earned every penny and delivered great value for our clients, often neglecting our own best interests in the pursuit of client success. This still seems like a natural way to run a service business.
The globalisation of the advertising industry has changed the industry for ever. The big holding companies provide a dazzling array of resources to advertisers, and have responded to the need to broaden their services while delivering globally.
There is an increasingly important role for media agencies to play in a world of infinite choice for advertisers. It takes huge expertise and experience to help navigate advertisers through the turbulent waters of the new media ocean, with data analytics increasingly driving decision-making. There is no doubt that the media agencies have a bright future, especially as they broaden their proposition.
However, this comes at a price and the economic model for media agencies has been stretched by the client need for more services more quickly, and their ability (and sometimes willingness) to fund them. The media agency market is still wildly competitive, despite consolidation, and some media agencies have expanded their revenue sources through media trading-related means to fund the expansion of their services and increase or maintain profitability.
It can be argued that the media agencies (or, more accurately, their owners) have become embroiled in a tug-of-war between their duties to their clients and their obligations to their shareholders. It’s a difficult circle to square.
A case in point was the 2016 study in the US market, conducted by the ANA, where media trading incentives were examined. Results from a sample-based study showed that some media agencies may be receiving benefits from media owners in return for spend commitments.
In a world where such incentives exist, the bond of trust between the client and their media agencies may become looser, as clients may ask questions regarding their media agency partners’ commercial interests.
Trust will only be restored when clients agree to pay appropriately for the services they receive and media agencies adopt transparent models of trading. This will take some years to happen, but it will be essential if the advertising industry is to attain the level of professional robustness we should all aspire to.
As part of its 2016 initiative, the ANA commissioned Ebiquity to provide recommendations for its members as to how they should achieve better accountability and transparency in media. I spent several fascinating weeks in the US with some of the smartest people in the industry trying to find a better way of working. Whether we succeeded will be judged by others, but in many ways we set out to recreate the conditions in which MGM used to thrive: a real dedication to client success, where the financial rewards were shared in the right proportions.
One of the most attractive characteristics of the advertising industry has always been its contribution to the economy. Advertising boosts demand for goods and services and supports the premium branded market. Advertising provides content that informs and entertains (at its best). Advertising may suffer from bad PR at times but it has traditionally been both popular with the public and seen as beneficial.
However, the growth of digital and the new emphasis on data may have led to a loss of some of this perspective. Increasingly, advertising is being used for short-term gain, rather than long-term brand-building.
Some of this may be down to general short-term thinking within companies (who may be under pressure from shareholders), but it can be argued that the apparent instant gratification of online advertising may have contributed to this trend.
It is possible to measure the response to online advertising and paid-for social media via clicks and ‘likes’, but these are flimsy ways to determine success. Some brands who work on a direct-sell model may benefit from online advertising driving people to their websites, but many brands do not have the luxury of such a close link between advertising and sales.
At MGM we worked with great creative agencies such as TBWA, Simons Palmer and RKCR, and the combination of original, well-crafted creative work and considered media thinking led to both short-term and long-term business results.
Companies such as John Lewis have shown that really powerful creative work can be effective both short- and long-term, but the headlong rush for lower-cost efficiency has arguably led to a dilution of creative standards and potential harm to brand health.
Some of the craft of advertising has been lost to automation. The lathe has given way to the laser, but the best products are often produced by workshops, not factories.
This applies to media just as much as it does to creative content. Good media planning comes from a strong understanding of the client’s business, their customers and how those customers interact with a range of channels (not just the ones you can advertise on). The right research and data has always been critical, but now the job cannot be done properly without it, and planning should be conducted neutrally. Channel selection that is pre-determined by bias or media trading considerations may lead to compromises that can harm effectiveness.
While much has changed in the 37 years since I joined the ad industry, the basics remain reassuringly unchanged. Good advertising is still the result of great and clever creative work (so, content) that touches a nerve with its audience and attracts their fleeting attention.
But that work has to reach the right people in the right way, and that’s still crucial, too. There is a lot of art to good media, and while data is now vital to the creation of good media, the combination of right and left brain cannot be beaten, even by the savviest of tomorrow’s robots.
Change is constant in media, and change should be welcomed. Much of the career satisfaction to be derived from working in the advertising industry comes from never being sure what will happen next. This is what makes it endlessly fascinating.