• by Mark Naples , July 2, 2004

I guess it's news to some, but I've been wondering about this for about 17 years. That's what I began thinking when Devin Leonard's Fortune Magazine article was circulated among Bill McCloskey's One Hundred Club email group this week, by my colleague Cory Treffiletti.

Back in 1987, I was a minion in Ogilvy's Washington DC office, and I had no idea why a guy who would name his holding company "Wire and Plastic Products" (WPP) would want to buy huge multinational advertising and PR firms and lump them together under one group. Martin Sorrell eventually purchased Young & Rubicam, Hill & Knowlton, Burson-Marstellar, J. Walter Thompson and so many others, building an enormous empire. But, WPP was only the largest for a short time, eventually being passed by Omnicom and rivaled in size by Interpublic.

The spin on such consolidation for clients and investors was usually something along the lines of this - with this kind of scale come efficiencies. But, I never heard anyone - and I mean anyone - who was on the client facing side of the business make this claim.

Sure, this kind of scale benefits media buyers in terms of their negotiations. But, more than a few among us who have had to sell clients ideas and who are conversely accountable for their clients' results have had an increasingly real struggle in these supersized firms, as so much of the ad budget is ultimately spent on non-advertising related items, like debt service. Those of you who are account executives - have you ever tried to figure our how much of your billable rate actually reaches your paycheck?

Think about it - compare the number of media options today with the number back in 1987. How can the agency business be in the mess that this Fortune piece depicts? Perhaps more to the point - how can so many of the agency celebrities interviewed for the piece allow themselves to seem like they're rearranging the deck furniture on the Titanic as she steams headlong to her doom?

As far as I'm concerned, the whole article, and perhaps the state of the major agency business, can be distilled to two quotes in this compelling piece. From Donny Deutsch, CEO of Deutsch Inc. "If you landed here from Mars and you looked at the elements of society--commerce, pop culture, humanity--advertising defines us more as a civilization than anything else out there. It's selling in its most grotesque obviousness. It's human manipulation. Yet it's charming. It's something we all participate in. It's what makes all the engines go. It's what allows television to exist. It's what drives people to stores."

Compare that quote to this from Peter Sealey, a visiting professor of marketing at Stanford University, who argues that the average ad agency CEO is as blissfully unaware of the perils his industry faces as a French cavalry lieutenant in 1914. "You ask him how things are going, and he says, 'Fine. Look at the horses. You like the horses?' Meanwhile, there's a goddamn German 200 miles away building the first tank."

Mr. Leonard wisely juxtaposes these next to each other. On the one hand, we have the high-minded CEO discussing cultural norms and on the other, an academic, of all people, bringing reality into focus.

Well guess what, kids? The tank today is OUR business, the Internet, which provides a kind of accountability that no other kind of marketing has ever managed. But there's more to this than that. It's not just that the Web doesn't have to bring viewers into stores when it already HAS stores on their desktops, and campaigns can tell buyers not only what users entered "stores," but how much they spent.

Of course, Search can take that even further, enabling marketers to discern what words drew users in, and what other words will be likely to work next. This level of accountability provided by the Web can, when executed properly, foster a kind of service attitude and overall mindset that major agencies may have begun to lose 17 years ago when they began to consolidate. It's easier to be service oriented when the service you're providing contains meaningful accountability. Which means more: "Your campaign was effective because our focus group liked it and your product enjoyed a 3% lift in awareness?" Or, "You made $1.60 online in aggregate for every keyword buy this month, and your site did $1.1 million in sales from that rich media campaign." If you're the client, which statement says "service" to you?

New hires were always encouraged to read "Ogilvy on Advertising" upon joining O & M back in the day. I'm sure a number of you have read it, and can recall such mantras as "moving the needle" that reminded us that the only truly meaningful measure of an ads' effectiveness was how well it drove sales. Ogilvy, I'm told, consistently reminded his people that they were in the business of selling. As the MBAs who are running these holding companies might say, to use a cliché I promise never to use again here, at the end of the day, that's the business we're in. And if you can combine that mindset with strategic service, AND prove that you're "moving the needle," you'll always win. Old-style Madison Avenue agencies can't do that and never could. But interactive can.