After a bland summer, Adland also managed to provide us with some breaking news alongside wars and natural disasters.
After seeing the latest campaign for a major global airline made “in house,” I really wondered why we are the only industry where our clients think they can do our job better than us? Would anyone dare defend themselves in a court without a lawyer if their life was on the line? Would you build a tower without any engineering background or fix a broken leg without a doctor? That question puzzles me even more when I see clients bragging about their creative output, which is usually at best mediocre, but often downright appalling. Is doing the agency’s work in house a way for marketers to save their job by offsetting their salaries against agency fees? Or is it their ego taking over? In any case, it’s a small saving and a misallocation of resources that leads to a massive waste of money in media and production. I also wonder, who is doing the marketing if everybody’s busy doing the creatives’ work? Funnily enough, I do not see any client bragging about doing their media planning and buying in house. That would be much easier actually with AI tools, and it would save much more money. But I guess there is absolutely no fun there, and you can’t really brag about it, can you?
Publicis’s Pepsi coup is a game changer. The Pepsi win for Publicis has already had massive consequences for the ongoing Coca-Cola pitch. Basically, all that relentless agency fee trimming by procurement through the past decade has probably ended up backfiring this summer. Indeed, the destruction of our industry with continuous revenue cuts has led to massive consolidations with 3 key players surviving (WPP, Omnicom and Publicis). We actually did not have to wait long for the first evidence of the consequences of that reduction in supply: Following the pitchless win of Pepsi, Publicis walked out in the middle of the ongoing Coca-Cola pitch, leaving Coke with only 2 possible alternatives: the incumbent WPP, which it probably wanted out of, or Omnicom, Pepsi’s agency! This is the proof that clients now have very limited options unless they go with independents. They have created a monster that may have shifted the power dynamic to their detriment. I am quite sure that Coca-Cola is not amused to say the least. But this is only the beginning in my opinion. When the offer is limited, clients no longer have the cards in their hands, to paraphrase a famous American President! Maybe agencies will finally be paid a fair price again.
Welcome back everyone, and let’s see how viable in-housing mediocrity is in an increasingly competitive market, and whether the holding triopoly will finally rebalance the agency-client relationship.
#makeadvertisinggreatagain
