Frenemies: The Epic Disruption of the Advertising Industry

COPYRIGHT

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First published in the US by Penguin Press 2018

This UK edition published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2018

FIRST EDITION

Text © Ken Auletta 2018

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Cover photograph © Johnny Ring

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DEDICATION

For Matt and Sam

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Introduction

1. The “Perfect Storm”

2. “Change Sucks”

3. Good-bye, Don Draper

4. The Matchmaker

5. Anxious Clients

6. “Same Height as Napoleon”

7. Frenemies

8. The Rise of Media Agencies

9. The Privacy Time Bomb

10. The Consumer as Frenemy

11. Can Old Media Be New?

12. More Frenemies

13. Marketing Yak-Yaks and Mounting Fear

14. The Client Jury Reaches Its Verdict

15. Cannes Takes Center Stage

16. Mad Men to Math Men

17. Dinosaurs or Cockroaches?

18. Good-bye Old Advertising Axioms

19. “No Rearview Mirror”

Acknowledgments

Endnotes

Bibliography

List of Searchable Terms

Also by Ken Auletta

About the Publisher

INTRODUCTION

In a 1970 TV commercial, a group of child actors portraying Louis Armstrong, Fiorello La Guardia, and Barney Pressman as kids are sitting on a New York City stoop and asking each other what they hope to be one day. Armstrong says he wants to be a musician. La Guardia says he wants to be mayor of New York. The bespectacled Barney Pressman is quiet, so they prod him: “Whaddaya gonna be when you grow up, Barney?” Pausing to adjust his glasses, the future founder of Barneys clothing store says, “I don’t know. But you’ll all need clothing.”

For more than three decades, in books and in my Annals of Communications pieces and profiles for The New Yorker, I have reported on the digital hurricane that has swept across the media industry. I have tried to “follow the money,” to understand the source of the economic harm that has struck newspapers, magazines, television, and radio, all reeling from shrinking advertising revenue—revenue now fueling Google, Facebook, and a myriad of other new digital enterprises. You can almost hear the young Barney Pressman trilling the world, “You’ll all need advertising and marketing.”

Worldwide, advertising and marketing is variously said to be a $1 trillion to $2 trillion industry. Of that astronomical sum, roughly three quarters is categorized as marketing dollars. Often, rather than joining together the words advertising and marketing, we employ the shorthand, advertising. We do so because advertising is a more familiar term, and to utter both terms together is a mouthful. In fact, advertising and marketing are interchangeable. They take different forms, but each involves a sales pitch. A thirty-second TV ad or a full-page ad in a newspaper seeks to sell something, which is also a marketing pitch. A direct mail or newly designed brand name or email solicitation or giveaway coupon is listed as a marketing expenditure, but it’s also an advertising sales pitch. So the two categories are really one.

Yet advertising and marketing, like the media industry it has long subsidized, is convulsed by change, struggling itself to figure out how to sell products on mobile devices without harassing consumers, how to reach a younger generation accustomed to dodging ads, how to capture consumer attention in an age where choices proliferate and a mass audience is rare.

In the course of my work as a journalist, I have tended to shift back and forth between the disrupters and the disrupted. My first book, The Streets Were Paved with Gold, published in 1978, chronicled how New York City had been hit by a Category 5 economic and social storm that shattered its manufacturing base and spurred the flight of its middle class. My focus on the people on the wrong end of change continued in 1981, in a three-part series in The New Yorker that grew into a book, The Underclass. A reporting sojourn to Wall Street in the mid-1980s resulted in Greed and Glory on Wall Street, a battlefield account of the corrosive greed that brought low Lehman Brothers, the oldest partnership on Wall Street, and signaled the Wall Street gluttony that produced insider trading scandals and would bear such disastrous fruit in 2008.

It’s fair to say that at this point I was a naïf about the advertising industry’s true economic power. That began to change in 1985, when I embarked on a nearly six-year odyssey through the world of network television while reporting my book Three Blind Mice, a report on how the three dominant television networks—CBS, NBC, and ABC—were being disrupted by a new technology, cable. Advertising was central to that story, for unlike cable, the networks were 100 percent reliant on advertising. And so when the estimable Tina Brown, the new editor of The New Yorker, offered a regular platform in the magazine, which she called the Annals of Entertainment, I demurred. I told her that in reporting Three Blind Mice I glimpsed how the world of media was being transformed, and so we needed a broader rubric—the Annals of Communications—because studios and publishers and television and digital companies were increasingly invading each other’s turf.

Over the next quarter century, unsettling change was the subject of much of my work for the magazine and for my books, and the advertising industry was often a backdrop for the stories, and usually an underexplored one. I witnessed the flight of advertisers from old to new media with my reporting for The New Yorker about Google, which led to the book Googled: The End of the World as We Know It. The flight of advertisers from old to new media started in the late 1990s and accelerated in the new century, and its impact was hard to miss. Less obvious was the impact on the ad industry itself. In the public imagination, we were still in the age of Don Draper, but I began to see more and more clearly how this industry that had been intrinsic to the disruption of old media was itself facing fundamental challenges to its existence.

Trying to understand the media without understanding advertising and marketing, its fuel supply, is like trying to understand the auto industry without regard to fuel costs. A war correspondent would be derelict not to try to calculate whether General Patton had enough gas in his Third Army tanks to race across France in 1944 (he did not). But it’s not merely that a reporter covering the communications business would be remiss not to follow the up to $2 trillion advertising and marketing sector; anyone who takes a moment to ponder this pool of money can’t avoid the inescapable truth that capitalism could not exist without marketing. True, the force of marketing is often malign, seeking to manipulate the emotions of consumers. Readers of this book will, hopefully, share my rage at the many tricks marketers practice. But marketing has a purpose in a free society, and intellectual honesty compels us to recognize that those who sell products need a way to share information about them with consumers. In a non-state-dominated economy, advertising is the bridge between seller and buyer. It would seem an obvious statement, but I’ve found it bears repeating. And that bridge is teetering, jolted by consumers annoyed by intrusive ads yet dependent on them for “free” or subsidized media. In this sense, consumers are frenemies.

To dig deeper into this world is to realize that more is being disrupted here than the flow of marketing dollars. The agency edifice itself is being assaulted, as new rivals surface—tech and consulting and public relations and media platform companies—many of whom have long been allied with the agencies and claim still to be. A once comfortable agency business is now assailed by frenemies, companies that both compete and cooperate with them.

For many years, I examined advertising as an aspect of some other story I was telling. It crept up on me that there was much to be learned by turning that around and looking deeply into the advertising industry itself, and through it out onto the wider world—a world of artificial intelligence (AI) and algorithms and big data that raises fundamental issues, including issues of privacy, issues of whether the science of advertising can replace the art, whether relationships still matter, and where—and whether—citizens get their news.

This book is populated by characters who represent the points of tension within this world. You will meet artists like Bob Greenberg, founder of the R/GA agency, who rail at consummate executives like Martin Sorrell, CEO of WPP, the world’s largest advertising and marketing holding company; the scientists, including the engineers at Facebook and IBM, who fervently believe in their machines; the clients, like Unilever’s Keith Weed and GE’s Beth Comstock and Linda Boff, who must wrestle with trust issues between clients and their agencies; and you will meet Michael Kassan, a charming man who relies on relationships to link the artists and managers and clients and scientists.

This book attempts to peer deeply into this world. I sought to step into the shoes of many important actors and frenemies in the marketing world, old and new, disrupters and disrupted alike. It is a world stocked with passionate and creative people, but it is also a world roiled by anxiety. Ultimately, this is a story of a world whose fate is imperiled, and why that fate matters to us all.

1.
THE “PERFECT STORM”

Characterizing the rebates as “criminal extortion,” he said of the giant advertising holding companies, “At least four of them, maybe five, are doing this.”

—Jon Mandel, March 2015 speech to the Association of National Advertisers

Former advertising colleagues were shocked when Jon Mandel morphed into a whistle-blower. Mandel had been a member in good standing of the advertising establishment for nearly four decades, a former chief executive officer of media agency powerhouse MediaCom, a reasonably popular joke-cracking executive with a chubby, beardless face and a full head of dark hair. But he seemed a different person on March 4, 2015, when he stepped onstage before his former clients, the Association of National Advertisers, or ANA, at their annual Media Leadership Conference in Florida. He looked different to old colleagues. He was rail thin and almost completely bald, with a trim grey beard that gave him a severe, almost Mephistophelian look. Before the very advertisers that fund his former agency, Mandel trembled, knowing that former coworkers would “try to kill me professionally” when he accused them of corruption. Agencies, he declared, engaged in a “pervasive” practice of demanding “kickbacks” from media companies and platforms like magazines, newspapers, TV, radio, and Web sites in exchange for their ad dollars. “There are cases where there are rebates that should be going to clients that are instead going to agencies.”

The assertion was atomic to this audience: the ANA represents about seven hundred companies, including Coca-Cola and Procter & Gamble, which spend more than $250 billion annually in the United States to advertise over ten thousand brands. Moreover, Mandel was placing a cloud over the many billions spent worldwide on marketing as well as advertising. Coupled with the ongoing disruption of the industry by Facebook and Google and the Internet, the controversy threatened to upend the flow of monies that finance the public’s news and entertainment.

Wearing a dark suit and open-necked grey shirt, with tiny eyeglasses perched on his bald dome, Mandel spoke out against what he depicted as the rot in the agency world, the world in which he’d spent his entire career. Now, he and his marketing consulting firm, Dogsled Enterprises, were paid by the ANA to prosecute the case against agencies. Most of Mandel’s career had been spent at Grey Advertising, and when WPP, the giant marketing holding company, acquired Grey in 2004 they retained MediaCom and he had served as CEO of this media-buying unit, reporting to GroupM global CEO Irwin Gotlieb.

The practice Mandel accused agencies of is common, and legal, in countries like Brazil and China. It once was common in France and Western Europe, before being declared illegal. Speaking in a high-pitched nasal voice, Mandel claimed that the practice had spread to the United States. The “kickbacks” or rebates, he said, come in several forms: in cash; in a gift of additional ad space that giant advertising holding companies hold on to and resell to other clients; in the form of promises of a larger future media buy in exchange for an ownership stake in the vendor by the agency; or “in the worst case,” the agency resells the purchased ad time to the client and makes money on it. “Have you ever wondered why fees to agencies have gone down and yet the declared profits to these agencies are up?” Mandel asked the audience. He estimated that media and digital companies kick back 18 to 20 percent of the media buy to the agencies, and that the agencies hide kickbacks that total “well into nine figures across agencies.”

Mandel’s blast helped stoke “a perfect storm,” in the words of Andrew Robertson, the CEO of the BBDO agency. Advertising clients were already uneasy with their advertising agencies. They had long complained about steep agency costs and a lack of transparency about how agencies made money. Clients were pleased that the agencies that dominated media buying had leverage over media platforms and could demand better terms, but they worried that agencies kept secrets from them. The trust issue was even more acute because advertising clients were under greater pressure to curb costs and were insecure about the digital disruption that shook the very foundations of their business—from smartphones that turned their banner and pop-up ads into annoyances; to ad-blocking software consumers were embracing to repel ads; to a younger generation grown accustomed to ad-free YouTube and Netflix, and to ad-skipping digital video recorders (DVRs). Mandel’s allegations reinforced these anxieties.

His assertions were damning, but Mandel did not cite a single agency by name. In a presentation sweeping in its condemnation of agencies for their lack of transparency, he was hardly transparent himself. Not about the 18 to 20 percent kickbacks. Not about the figure of at least $100 million in kickbacks he said were collected by agencies. His clear implication was that most agencies were guilty.

When Mandel concluded his remarks, ANA CEO Bob Liodice came onstage and energetically shook his hand. “That was fascinating and frightening,” he said, and was “very courageous.” So, Liodice asked, “What should clients do to gain greater transparency?”

“You’ve got to go in somewhat doubtful.”

“You’re saying a prenup is not enough!” Liodice said.

“Yes, and beware: you’ve got to audit not just the agency but the holding company,” Mandel declared.

The stakes are huge, for advertising and marketing dollars subsidize most media and Internet companies. Today, the amount of money spent on advertising and marketing is up to $2 trillion worldwide, says Pivotal Research Group senior analyst Brian Wieser, perhaps the industry’s most widely respected marketing analyst. Based on a Publicis Groupe study, this estimate was backed by Maurice Levy, the CEO of Publicis, and separately by Adam Smith, GroupM’s futures director, who says the estimate “is in the ballpark.” WPP CEO Martin Sorrell insists the true number is close to $1 trillion. Irwin Gotlieb cautions that the figure could be higher, or lower, because these were “soft numbers,” guestimates. For example, Sorrell’s guess does not include marketing awards programs, free coupons, or marketing messages in McDonald’s food tray liners; Wieser’s guess does.

Over lunch some months later, Mandel sipped from a glass of Pellegrino and calmly described the changes in the business that had led to what he considers kickbacks. Agencies, he said, were once “a trusted adviser, just like your lawyer,” and were paid a handsome 15 percent commission. But agencies became part of today’s dominant advertising holding companies—UK-based WPP, U.S.-based Omnicom Group and the Interpublic Group (IPG), France-based Publicis and Havas, and Japan-based Dentsu. Two thirds of global ad expenditures flow through these six companies and through privately held Horizon Media. “What has happened is there is a certain need to grow to show increased profit year to year. At some point the agency business model changed because of the financial pressures. It wasn’t just no more commissions. It was, ‘I don’t care how you make your money. You just better show me ten percent year to year.’ They were incented financially to worry more about themselves.” Over time, clients began to ask, “Is what you’re recommending to me good because it will be great for my business? Or is it because you will be making more money?”

He characterized the rebates as “criminal extortion,” and said of the major holding companies, “At least four of them, maybe five, are doing this.” At lunch Mandel changed his estimate of the unit of money involved from millions to “billions,” which did not inspire confidence. The one company he identified by name as guilty was WPP, for whom he worked before moving in 2006 to take a new job at Nielsen. WPP, he continued, “wanted me to actually set up the thing, ironically, that years later I’m now known for condemning: all those kickbacks. I said to Irwin [Gotlieb], who’s a personal friend—though since March ‘personal friend’ is on the back burner … He wanted me to set this up, to basically take what was going on in Europe and bring it to the U.S. I said, ‘That’s not right.’ He said, ‘We need it to compete.’” His accusations, he admits, are “hard to prove. It’s like sex crimes: ‘He says, she says.’” Gotlieb flatly denies that he had ever encouraged Mandel to set up a rebate system at GroupM’s MediaCom: “Not true. Find one person or one company who would support that statement!”

Michael Kassan was not in the audience when Mandel delivered his broadside, but when he saw the March 6 headline in Advertising Age—FORMER MEDIACOM CEO ALLEGES WIDESPREAD U.S. AGENCY “KICKBACKS”—he knew it would ignite a wildfire. Kassan was troubled. “I felt like the ANA had endorsed his position without evidence,” he says. But Kassan knew Mandel’s assertions would “light a fuse,” and the resulting blaze would produce new business firefighting opportunities for his company, MediaLink, for which he was grateful.

As the CEO of MediaLink, the company he founded in 2003, Kassan is arguably the supreme power broker in the advertising and marketing industry. With a staff of 120, MediaLink serves as a hub, linking clients like publishers who seek ad dollars with the agencies and brands that dispense them, and linking brand advertisers to new agencies. MediaLink’s blue-chip client list includes Unilever, AT&T, L’Oréal, Bank of America, Colgate-Palmolive, American Express, NBCUniversal, the New York Times, the Walt Disney Company, Viacom, 21st Century Fox, Verizon, Condé Nast, Hearst, the newspapers of News Corp., including the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post, the Washington Post, Gannett, iHeartMedia, Turner Broadcasting, Bloomberg, Flipboard, and Vox Media, among others.

Anything that provokes clients to seek a new agency is good for Michael Kassan’s business, for MediaLink conducts agency reviews, orchestrating the entire process from helping choose the competing agencies, defining what the client seeks, helping judge the agency’s creative and strategic pitches, to participating as the client reaches a decision. MediaLink also performs a headhunter role, linking executives to vacant agency and client positions. It also introduces start-ups to investor capital, performing as an investment banker. It serves as a sherpa, making introductions between agencies and Silicon Valley and Hollywood, taking clients on tours of Google, Facebook, Twitter, and Microsoft, all companies it has represented. MediaLink also represents agencies, arranging speakers for various advertising conferences, where Kassan induces them to cosponsor MediaLink parties and arranges for their executives to appear on panels. Agency and client executives are regularly invited to record one of Kassan’s one-minute daily radio interviews syndicated on iHeartMedia, which he tapes in bulk once or twice a month.

The ever-affable Kassan, then sixty-four, is a pear-shaped teddy bear of a man with a soft, round, tanned face, the sunny smile of a practiced politician, and the jokey shtick of a stand-up comedian. In an increasingly insecure business assaulted by change and rife with mistrust, “they are a bridge company,” Charlotte Beers, former CEO of Ogilvy & Mather, says of Kassan and MediaLink. “The way we used to talk to each other now needs an interpreter, and that’s MediaLink.” Baffled by the digital revolution, clients seek guidance from what they think of as “a neutral corner.”

If one thought of concentric circles of power within the marketing and advertising world, Michael Kassan belongs in the center, alongside a few others like Martin Sorrell, CEO of WPP, the world’s largest advertising and marketing holding company. Kassan’s influence would place him ahead of most of the CEOs of the other five major holding companies and ahead of their clients. Yet outside of advertising and media industry enclaves, Kassan is virtually unknown. Create a Google Alert for WPP’s Martin Sorrell and up to a dozen stories appear daily; a Google Alert for stories about Kassan generates maybe one mention per month.

After Mandel’s ANA speech, MediaLink’s neutral corner became a destination for the world’s biggest brand advertisers. It was nothing short of a stampede. Starting in the spring of 2015 and running through 2016, advertising clients announced they were putting up for review a total of $50 billion of advertising business, and clients knocked on Kassan’s door asking him to organize agency reviews. In all, MediaLink was hired to orchestrate two thirds of these reviews. Unilever, Procter & Gamble, Coca-Cola, L’Oréal, Kraft Foods, Mondelēz International, Bank of America, General Mills, Sony, 21st Century Fox, Johnson & Johnson, and CVS were just some of the advertisers who put their agency business up for review.

Mandel’s kickbacks speech was a spur for the reviews, but it was hardly the only one. Indeed, its timing was exquisitely awful because advertisers were already being buffeted by change, facing disruptive forces in practically every sector of their business. As Alvin Toffler wrote in Future Shock, any industry bombarded by menacing changes endures “the dizzying disorientation brought on by the premature arrival of the future.”

MediaLink brands itself as a neutral Switzerland, positioned comfortably in the middle, which is an odd definition of neutrality since MediaLink often represents all sides at a negotiating table. Kassan has been strategically shrewd. “He doesn’t do agency reviews because they are wildly profitable,” his friend Irwin Gotlieb says. “He does reviews to gain information and because it gives him influence in the business. He has a small headhunting operation. That makes money. But it also gives him influence because key people in the business know that if they’re going to make a career move they should talk to him. The reason he is able to galvanize people in the industry is that everybody knows he is going to be conducting a review, so they don’t want to piss him off.”

The agencies were indeed pissed off about Mandel’s speech and agonized about the subsequent tsunami of reviews, which were akin to an audition to keep your job, knowing that your competition would be auditioning to take it from you. Clients putting individual agencies up for review was common; the torrent of reviews was not. The “pitchapapalooza” reviews meant a cruel summer of long hours and canceled vacations in order to create new pitches to clients. Top agency executives frantically tried to reassure and soothe clients. Laura Desmond, then the global CEO of Starcom MediaVest, the media agency arm of Publicis, estimated that over the summer of 2015 the reviews consumed eighteen thousand hours of her agency employees’ time. Agencies had to prepare creative and strategic presentations for current as well as prospective clients. Presentations are time consuming and expensive—about $1.5 million for each, Bob Greenberg, the founder and CEO of R/GA says—and the expense is shouldered by the agencies, not the clients.

The advertising agency community reacted angrily to Mandel’s speech, no one more so than Irwin Gotlieb. He had had a paternal relationship with Mandel, once recommending him as his successor as chairman of a prestigious industry committee. He denied Mandel’s assertions, saying that he had removed Mandel from a trading role at the firm because they had a trading head and “you can only have one head of trading.” So, he continued, “Why would I have a conversation about rebates with someone not involved in trading?”

The day after Mandel’s speech, Gotlieb had GroupM’s lawyers deliver a letter to Mandel accusing him of violating his separation agreement and the “significant compensation” received in return for agreeing not to disparage GroupM. The law firm warned that it was “considering its options,” and urged him to keep his mouth shut. Martin Sorrell suggests that when Mandel left WPP’s employ he did not do so voluntarily; instead of saying he was terminated, Sorrell said, “He was exited.”

The near universal complaint from agencies was that in his speech Mandel named not a single transgressor, and thus was making a blanket condemnation of all agencies. It was not uncommon to hear agency executives accuse Mandel of McCarthyism. “It was irresponsible,” charged Bill Koenigsberg, founder and CEO of Horizon Media, the largest privately held advertising and marketing agency, and the chairman of the American Association of Advertising Agencies (the 4A’s). “It should not have been allowed in a public forum to paint an entire industry with a broad brush without any evidence.”

Yet there is certainly smoke here, if not fire. Rebates are common outside the United States, and media buying is an increasingly global process. And as more and more advertising is being done by machines (called programmatic advertising) across a large number of media platforms, the opportunities to conduct speculative price arbitrage to bank lower prices for ads for later use arguably becomes reasonable business practice. The clients want to share the rewards. The agencies say clients are unwilling to share the risks, so why shouldn’t agencies be rewarded for taking risks?

Of course, the issues raised by this controversy were broader than just rebates. Is advertising a relationship business, where accounts are won and lost on the golf course and over three-martini lunches, as had been caricatured for decades? Or is it a creative business, where consumers’ hearts and minds are captured by big, original ideas articulated with aesthetic brilliance, as the doyens of the Creative Revolution claimed? Or is it, increasingly, a science, in which leadership will gravitate to those who can capture and analyze the most data, as Silicon Valley and its digital gurus claim?

Did Gotlieb’s WPP, which is headquartered in the UK, hide U.S. rebates?

“We don’t do rebates in the U.S.,” Gotlieb firmly answered, leaving no doubt that it was not a practice with which he or WPP were involved. But he left a clear impression that maybe others partook in the United States. Dave Morgan, the CEO of Simulmedia, a marketing technology company that uses data to target TV ad buys, believes most do it. “Mandel is telling the absolute truth,” he says. “Kickbacks are massive in the U.S. I’ve been shaken down constantly. They tell us that if I get fifty million dollars, I have to pay them five million.”