• by Maarten Albarda , Featured Contributor, February 23, 2015

Forgive me for not talking about the Oscars, but I once again find reason to rant on the basis of a bunch of news stories that caught my eye last week.

The Wall Street Journal reported that certain U.S. TV channels have started speeding up the replay of some TV shows like "Seinfeld" or "Friends" in order to free up more minutes they can sell. According to Nielsen, Discovery Communications, Viacom Networks, A&E, and Hearst have all added about two minutes of commercial airtime to every hour of TV broadcast. This means that for each hour of TV, a whopping 20 minutes is often devoted to commercials.

The flawed and eventually deadly-tailspin reasoning that these TV networks apply goes as follows: Ratings are down and we now have to sell our airtime for less; let’s add more spots so our net total income remains more or less the same.

By doing so, these  networks are of course adding to the commercial clutter that is chasing viewers into the arms of alternatives like Hulu, Netflix, Amazon, etc. Last week it was reported that cord-cutting among Millennials is growing faster than at any time previously. One investment firm downgraded its assessment of the three main cable distributors significantly. And Discovery Communications reported poor Q4 numbers and gave an unfavorable guidance for the year 2015, driven by an especially weak U.S. market. Do I need to go on?

Luckily, marketers have their media agencies to help them guide decisions on where to invest their media dollars, right? Wrong.

There was some seriously bad news from down under. Turns out that both Dentsu Aegis and Group M in Australia have admitted to negotiating “value banks” using their respective combined client billings with Australian media owners. “Value banks” is apparently the new name for what is widely known as sur-commissions or volume bonuses. The problem is that Group M was found to charge clients for media space that the company itself had gotten for free as a result of its negotiated value bank.

The Australian media agency scene is scrambling to tell clients that all is fine. Said one media agency director: “We have a partnership model with the media, and we are all about mutual value creation.” Apparently mutual value creation omits those pesky clients whose money it ultimately is.

Also last week, Starcom announced it’s moving its programmatic buyers away from a centralized office into the brand teams within the media agency -- because of the flack clients were giving agencies about the “independence” of their advice on programmatic ad placement. (With programmatic as a separate profit center, agencies were accused of caring more about their P&L than allocating their clients’ money to the best place. Imagine that!). Starcom’s move is actually positive, although it remains to be seen if the move is smoke and mirrors or a true unbundling of its programmatic P&L.

One thing is certain: if media agencies continue to corrode their business practices through questionable tactics, they will find themselves replaced more often by alternatives. Just as the TV networks are finding with the cord-cutters.