In a year when many of the most iconic media agency brands were
sunset, our May 29 column ("In Memoriam: GroupM, Other Media Agency Brands
Too") was the most-read Planning & Buying Insider column of the year.
The post, which was triggered by WPP killing the GroupM brand and replacing it with "WPP Media" actually presaged
other big agency media brands -- Including IPG Mediabrands, Magna, etc. -- being killed later in the year, thanks to Omnicom's acquisition of Interpublic.
The second most-read was a column
("The Media Planners Is Dead, Long Live The Platform" reporting on a
Google-commissioned report by Madison and Wall's Brian Wieser suggesting that the craft of media-planning itself might be dead -- or dying -- due to the emergence of self-serve platforms and their
increasingly powerful and user-friendly media-planning applications.
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Third up was a column ("Forget About The Bots, Here's How Humans Decide") about a surprising
communications planning study released by WPP Media late in the year that reinforced decades of coms planning benchmarks about which sources influence consumers most. (Hint, it's not bots -- yet.)
The fourth most-read P&BI column of the year came from regular guest contributor, Golin's Paul Parton ("Precision In Performance"), who addressed our industry's insatiable need for more and more ad glut --
more than 5.3 trillion impressions, by his estimate -- and what that portends for all of us.
The fifth most-read was about Dentsu's shift to using bots to synthesize human respondents in its
primary consumer research ("Dentsu Begins Using Bots To Synthesize Human
Respondents For Planning & Buying") and the implications of that.
Lastly, I feel it important to also call out the sixth most-read column this year, because it was indeed about an
historic event: "The First Agentic Media Buy, More To Come."