Irwin Gotlieb, chairman of WPP’s mega media network GroupM, has previously admitted: "What scares me most is the shift of audiences away from advertising supported TV."
Preach it,
brother! Candor! From the head of The Big Black Box, an amazing and utterly invigorating confession because it means the answer to this puzzle is a jump ball!
Gotlieb believes media agencies
should unite to encourage Netflix to accept paid ads. What a unique idea! I wonder what all the people who pay for ad-free video content would think? Or whether they'd pay less to watch
some ads? Or the video is free if they watch ads? I think we've tried this before.
Finally, Gotlieb served up his perspective that the U.S. market is being held back (to the
detriment of the consumer) because content producers and TV companies won’t collaborate better. Pity the consumer suffering this fate. Can’t you see the hard-to-reach 18–24-year-old
male suffering through another episode of NCIS? Oh, the humanity!
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To have a revered and august lion of this industry speak up with such bold candor should be a wake-up call to all advertisers.
Apparently, scale — of which GroupM has much— doesn’t buy you confidence or control the way it used to. If Gotlieb doesn’t have the answers, it’s time for all of
us to abandon the old thinking.
What’s troubling is that his self-confessed greatest fear isn’t the fake news sites happily collecting advertisers’ money, the persistent bots
visiting those sites to create traffic or the fact that Nielsen can’t decide if ESPN’s base is eroding or not.
His worry is that he can’t decode a declining linear TV
channel.
Here’s a modest proposal: If, in fact, GroupM’s scale has hit a ceiling, it is now officially incumbent upon the rest of the media agency world to manage our clients
through complexity and fragmentation, with creativity and a respect for scarcity. Scale doesn’t deliver agility, and the lower TV rates that big shops promise are chasing a dwindling supply of
linear TV audience.
Supply, meet demand. It’s time for the small and mid-sized agencies to rise up against the false promise of scale.
Scale promised efficiency and valuable data
to inform investment decisions. What it seems to have delivered, though, is declining transparency and badly limited agility. This combination should not be acceptable to advertisers.
Efficiency is important, but it must not come at the expense of agency accountability or the ability to move money where it delivers the greatest effect.
We won’t hope our way to
a better TV universe through addressable ads, and our chances of convincing Netflix to replicate a version of the decades-old broadcast TV model are nil. We’ll survive this turmoil and thrive in
a new environment by embracing the new with agility rather than clinging to the old.
The iceberg is melting. Who's your better ally — a frightened giant who wants to remodel the cathedral
or a scrappy boat builder?