• by Joe Mandese , September 4, 2013

Based on their ability to get others to help spread their opinions about the ad industry, Madison Avenue’s most influential pundits are not -- for the most part -- inside agencies, their clients’ brand marketing organizations, Wall Street analysts or even the trade press that have traditionally covered them. They are largely bloggers and  consultants who have learned to utilize social and mainstream media to spread their point-of-view, and the influence that comes with that.

With this column, MAD will begin publishing a weekly chart ranking the people -- and organizations -- most influencing the “conversation” about Madison Avenue. The rankings, which are based on a proprietary method developed by Appinions, utilizes a score that is based not just on the raw volume of impressions generated, but the sentiment, relevance and impact of what they are impressing.

Utilizing that metric, Cnet technology blogger Chris Matyszczyk was the No. 1 influencer on Madison Avenue during the 30-day period leading up to this week’s “MAD Mentions” chart. Appinions utilizes a rolling 60-day average to compute its scores, each week’s chart will reflect the most recent week’s worth of data.

Interestingly, while Matyszczyk has dominated the recent ad industry conversation by focusing on how technology is impacting advertising -- and vice versa -- he is categorized by Appinions as a “temporal” influencer, meaning his influence is related to the opinions he is making during a moment in time. Most of the top rankers fall into what Appinions describes as “earned” influencers, meaning the clout of their opinions is relatively constant on Madison Avenue. A third category -- so-called “long tail” influencers from way down the blogosphere -- generally do not rank near the top of Madison Avenue’s spin chain.

An example of Matyszczyk’s temporal influence was his Sept. 1 post: “Ad agencies: We'd rather work with Google than Apple,” in which he opined that something, “has become twisted of late. No, not with ad execs -- they still slavishly follow trends in the hope of bathing in their reflected glory. Rather, Apple is straining to maintain its veneer of indisputable sexiness.”

Matyszczyk attributed some of that twist to Apple’s own Madison Avenue handiwork, its advertising, which he described as, “wayward for some time. It's been partly hamstrung by a lack of new products to advertise. However, the recent attempts to offer high-falutin' philosophy have enjoyed all the fine writing of a corporate manual.”

Interestingly, only two actual Madison Avenue execs -- WPP boss Martin Sorrell and Advice Interactive’s Bernadette Coleman -- ranked in the top 25. Coleman, who runs a search marketing shop, is also an active blogger, and no doubt understands how to optimize her own results. Sorrell is heavily quoted in the mainstream media and by various bloggers for his opinions about the ad industry, especially Publicis’ and Omnciom’s recent merger announcement. Ironically, neither Publicis chief Maurice Levy, nor Omnicom’s John Wren, ranked in this week’s chart.

Most of the top rankers are tech industry bloggers or journalists, and given the topicality of Comicon, comic book industry pundits too.

Only two marketers -- Hyundai Motor India’s Rakesh Srivastava and Nintendo’s Scott Moffitt -- made this week’s list.

Among the more temporal opinion-makers were Canadian physician Yoni Freedhoff, who spread his opinions about the deceptive marketing practices of Coca-Cola and “other food and beverage marketers” who he says are utilizing health and nutrition information in their marketing as a form of “health haloing.”