Every once in a while the advertising industry puts itself on the couch and asks a rhetorical question: "Do we have an image problem?" As if it were skin acne that could be cured by one of the products they promote so well!
The problems of the ad - and the PR industry for that matter - are more fundamental, and go beyond the oft and overused phrase "perception is reality." As I tell everyone who will listen, eventually reality becomes reality, even in my world of public relations.
That's the way it is with the ad industry. It has a reality problem.
We are living in an age when the relevance of the entire industry is being questioned. If it chose to do so, one company, Google, could drastically alter the landscape on the media side of the business by dealing out the agencies. The 30-second commercial is dying a slow but certain death with changes in viewing patterns and alternative entertainment.
In Eastern Europe, you have up to 20 minute commercial blocks that few watch, other than passively. Internet seems to be more exciting to children and adults than television. Viewing audiences have options of up to 100 channels.
At the same time, the imaginative firepower of individual companies has been corralled behind fences named WPP, Omnicom, Publicis, and Interpublic, the giant holding companies. From a creative standpoint - and even from a substantive business view - I have not seen one agency improved by being gobbled up by a conglomerate.
In my view, decisions that should be client-based are sacrificed on the altar of the bottom line. The word comes from on top to grow revenue by 20 per cent, and minions scurry pell-mell to fulfill the order the best way they can.
Instead of long-term strategy, once proud and independent companies like Young & Rubicam now seemingly make decisions on what actions will impact the next quarterly report. It is seen as a three-month sprint, not a marathon. This is both sad and tragic.
As much as the conglomerates protest and talk about vertical integration of services, they have become anything but communications companies. They are primarily financial institutions that buy, sell, trade, and often shutdown.
As holding companies, they do not create. They morph. They do not bring real value to the client.
By and large, they are among the worst communicators when it comes to responding to business questions from the press, which, in reality, are the people. A notable exception is Sir Martin Sorrell of WPP who is adequate to what should be a normal, leadership task.
The soul-searching, which led the American Association of Advertising Agencies to go out and hire a public relations firm, seems to have begun because the industry has made little progress on minority hiring since the white bread Darrin jostled with Larry Tate on the TV show Bewitched in the 1960s.
This, however, is a mere symptom of a larger distraction problem, surely very important, but a mere hangnail on a patient that has its limbs in danger of amputation. With some attention, a course correction can be made, and I am confident it will be made in more diversification of people at ad companies.
However, a fixation on image over problem solving is a malady that is pervasive in both the ad and PR industries where everyone is a spinmeister, a guru or a maven, and where creative directors are often more known by the conformist nature of their dress (sandals, Che Guevara T-Shirt, earrings - the standard stuff) than their ideas.
Perhaps the most telling case that the ad industry had lost focus was that of Shona Seifert, the Ogilvy & Mather executive who was sent to prison for putting the pedal to the metal in billing the U.S. Office of National Drug Control Policy.
A crime was committed here, but, unlike in drug cases where the feds plea bargain with the lower executives to get to the kingfish dealer, Ms. Seifert - in her own words - "took a bullet" for the higher ups at the agency.
That, in essence, was the real crime. The big fish got off. Ms. Seifert wasn't exactly a pawn, for she was a high O&M executive. However, in the scheme of things, she was mainly a worker bee - not nearly a queen.
In my view, the real crime occurred in the real executive suite, the agency's top dog leadership who quickly distanced itself from the entire mess, at first brushing it off as a record keeping problem and only later engaging in damage control and putting more stringent agency procedures in place dealing with federal contracts.
It is difficult if not impossible to prove, but having worked in the industry a long time, I know that the big, big bosses - the ones that watch the bottom line, watch the stock market ticker and report to the even bigger holding company bosses - created the atmosphere and culture that landed the lady in the calaboose.
"If you are a front-liner, you are more likely to find yourself in the line of fire. And it may be better for others if you take a bullet," she wrote in a judge-mandated Code of Ethics for the Ad industry, which was part of her punishment.
She was talking about the reality of it all, and it had nothing to do with image. One wonders how many Shona Sieferts there are in the ad industry, climbing up the executive ladder and only want to report revenues that please.
One would imagine that one day, when Wall Street's closing bell signals the end of a trading day, that bell will toll to signal the demise of the conglomerates.
By that time, however, folks like Sir Martin will be long retired and in the business hall of fame.
|
