• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, July 13, 2022

When I first began covering the ad industry in the early 1980s, my editors at Adweek assigned me two beats, making me both the lead reporter covering media-buying and ad spending, as well as covering some ad agencies as companies. I was lucky that one of the agencies was McCann-Erickson, because it had some of the best thinkers leading its media department, and it also was the ad industry’s – as well as the U.S. government’s – de facto source for ad spending in the U.S. and worldwide.

McCann’s forecasting unit was created by the late Bob Coen, following a grant the agency gave to Harvard University to help define what advertising actually is, and to benchmark its impact on the economy. For decades the McCann forecasting unit overseen by Coen operated as and even-handed, open-source standard for the economics of the ad industry and was widely sourced by virtually every trade body, economist or academic.

That was until recently when the unit -- now operating as part of IPG Mediabrands’ Magna division -- chose to go a different route, at first suppressing some of its data in order to make a profit by selling it, and (as I learned in recent years) doling some of it out as an exclusive to one trade publication (obviously, not MediaPost).

The ironic part of that last development is that the agency lied to me -- and the rest of the world -- about how it was doing that.

It continued to act as if it was operating the way it did under Coen, and later under Brian Wieser (now at GroupM), releasing the results of its annual and mid-year updates magnanimously to everyone as an “even break” so we could all report on it fairly and accurately.

At this point, I should explain a related news-industry development known as the news “embargo,” which has manifested and more or less become a PR and journalism industry standard in which a source asks a journalist in advance if they would like to receive potential news information before it is officially released, as long as they agree not to report on it until then.

I’m not sure why news embargoes have become a standard, but I suspect it mostly has to do with the fact that there is so much information to report on, and news now travels so quickly, that it’s the most efficient way to give lots of journalists access to info in order to ask questions in advance in order to accurately report on what is being released.

So here is the ironic part. After four decades of covering IPG’s even-handed release of its annual and mid-year forecasts, the agency sneakily began breaking its own embargoes -- asking me and other journalists to honor it, but giving it as an exclusive to one publication.

Now, embargoes are not a perfect science, and although there are some commonly understood rules of engagement, anytime human beings are involved in something, things happen, people make mistakes, and embargoes get broken.

When that happens, people normally acknowledge it, apologize for a misunderstanding, and try to do a better job in the future.

After all, we’re only human. But humans have relationships with other humans based on trust and the ability to communicate accurately.

Over the years, I’ve come to admire ad agencies as being some of the best communicators in the world. And that is one of the bases for MediaPost’s annual agency of the year awards: how well they communicate about the things we are looking to recognize them for.

The truth is that I’ve also learned how bad some agencies actually are about communicating about their own organizations, their products and services -- and yes, the news they release.

So when I began noticing how one trade publication was breaking IPG’s embargoed forecast news, I asked why that was happening and the agency’s communications executive said: “Usually we secure a feature for the ad forecasts and follow up with a wider distribution under embargo with our press partners.”

The term “partners” aside, I explained what the definition of the word “embargo” means, and that it obligates both sides -- the source and the journalist -- to honor it.

I also explained that by telling journalists the news was embargoed when it was actually an exclusive to one publication, IPG Mediabrands was lying to us.

I know they were, because it wasn’t a mistake that just happened once, but has happened repeatedly over the the past couple of years.

I asked when IPG made this change and began offering an exclusive to one pub, while asking others to agree to an embargo, but I explained MediaPost would never honor an “embargo” from the company again -- because it doesn’t understand how to honor its own.

Now here is the most ironic part of this column. When I began covering agencies and media-buying back in the day, the media director of McCann-Erickson invited me to go through the agency’s media training program and after I completed it, it gave me a certificate, which also had the motto “Truth Well Told” on it. It was the first time I’d seen the McCann motto, and ever since then I held the agency in higher esteem.

It’s sad it no longer honors its own standard, because if you ask me, it has diluted its reputation, as well as decades of equity Coen, Wieser and others in the organization had built up over time.

I mean, Coen was legend, and was cited by EVERYONE. At one point, he even shared a spreadsheet with me showing his calculations for U.S. ad spending going back to 1776 (it was only newspapers, magazines and some out-of-home, but at least it was a start).

And when Wieser took over for him, I diligently covered how he rebooted Coen’s model from a “top-down” agency ad spending POV to a “bottoms-up” media company ad revenue calculating method. And I also spent time with him when new media emerged (ie. Wieser’s “Social Sojourn”), to try and understand the machinations that go on behind the scenes of the forecasts big agencies release.

These days, it’s not just IPG issuing its forecasts. In addition to GroupM, Publicis’s Zenith has a long history of benchmarking and forecast, as does Dentsu, which released its mid-year update this morning.

And while IPG Mediabrands has shifted from a “truth well told” to one well gaslighted, at least the other big ad agencies continue to be even-handed, truthful, and from what I can tell, accurate about what they are forecasting.

And most of them go out of their way to make sure journalists understand not just what they’re estimating, but how they actually estimated it.

Frankly, I’m not sure I can trust anything coming out of IPG Mediabrands at this point. And given my personal legacy with the agency, that makes me sad.