St John’s Wood was developed in the early 1800s as a genteel London suburb, with low density villas as opposed to the terraces familiar in the East and South of the Capital. As such there would have been plenty of business for ostlers (or stablemen) and ready employment for lamplighters who strode along the streets at dusk and dawn with the long poles that were the tools of their trade.
Of course both occupations have long since disappeared. As I walked briskly yesterday afternoon from Lord’s to the Tube at the end of the ISBA Conference, I fell to wondering if admen and marketers could suffer the same fate.
This was ISBA’s 25th Annual Conference. In years gone by the relationship with agencies would have been a key agenda item. Prominent agency leaders would have been speaking. Marketer delegates would have felt like ‘clients’. How very different this March. As snow flurries freshened up the Nursery Ground, agencies were conspicuous by their absence from the agenda – nor were there many agency attendees.
In the morning, delegates were regaled with presentations on EU regulation, newspapers, social media and brand purposing. We saw ads, but they were mere illustrations (and mostly unattributed) from EffectiveBrands, a marketing consultancy firm dedicated to taking their clients global.
Isn’t that what BBDO, McCann, Ogilvy and co used to do? Of course it was Ogilvy who were responsible for the legendary Dove case history. Sad therefore that in the EffectiveBrands presentation their ads were shown but not credited to the agency.
If the morning had been awkward viewing for sensitive agencies, the afternoon was hardly a comfort blanket for the legion of marketers in the room. First, any complacency would have been blown away by the performance of this year’s crop of Marketing Academy students (mainly 30 somethings from clients and agencies). Not only were their communication and presentation skills ahead of what their seniors managed earlier. Their message was encouragingly and chillingly clear:
• The role of marketing needs to be redefined to deal with its many critics
• Marketing has to be seen to be ‘doing the right thing’, rather than just push products and services. A moral code is needed
• The talent pool needs to be urgently refreshed with people with more diverse backgrounds and experience.
Then we heard from a panel of seasoned marketers who had made it to the Boardroom – no mean feat, given that only 40 of the FTSE Top 350 companies have a marketer on their boards. Were these super-successful ex-marketers reassuring about the profession that had been their pathway to glory? Absolutely not. They were also worried about the talent pool. They criticised marketers who were full of jargon and short on numbers and accountability. They said marketers were often un-cooperative and not on the right agenda. They want marketers to be more widely experienced – preferably in consumer-facing roles. They said that marketers should have a single-minded focus on driving sales and top line growth. They encouraged marketers to pick up experience internationally, so they can learn new things and become less insular. They bemoaned the loss of so many of the old ‘marketing universities’. Steve Langan spelled it out: ‘marketing is a tool to an end, not an end in itself’.
It’s a tough environment for both agencies and clients. We all know that. What I took out of the ISBA Conference was that neither can take the security of their position in the world for granted. It is now apparently open season to talk about marketing communications and say little about agencies. Also for both the new generation and those with years of experience to talk about the future of marketing in much less than admiring language.
But there’s always hope. I suppose ostlers graduated to work in garages, while the lamplighters were the forerunners of today’s energy companies!

For a business built around vocabulary, advertising is beginning to struggle with its own semantics. We seem to be saddled with the cumbersome ‘marketing communications’ to embrace the expanded suite of ways in which paid communications can impact consumers and other target audiences. It really started with direct marketing and sales promotion, which demonstrably weren’t advertising, in that they weren’t delivered via the traditional media. And PR which was, but on an earned, not paid basis.

Now there are so many more activity areas: sponsorship, digital, content, events, guerrilla, buzz, social and so on. Is ‘Marketing Communications’ the correct cover-all. Or can we make a case for using the word ‘Advertising’ – albeit in an expanded and differentiated context. That’s what the late great Steve Jobs thought. He reckoned that anything the brand did was advertising.

If you are promoting a brand, an organisation or a cause, that’s advertising in a real sense. The collateral vocabulary supports that view. We are admen or adwomen, working in adland, making ads – not adverts please. We have paid our admission fees. We are addicted to our way of life. We are fuelled by adrenalin. It all adds up.

The lead story in the latest edition of Campaign (29th June) is about Lloyds Banking Group allegedly calling a pitch on a project called Project Verde. In the first paragraph the journalist Anne Cassidy says, “Lloyds has called a multimillion-pound pitch to create the advertising to support the launch”.

I think the quote is very interesting from two aspects: the pitch (not the assignment that follows) being multimillion-pound), and the assertion that the pitch (not the relationship that follows with the winning agency) is to create the campaign.

I have no knowledge at all whether the story itself is true, or whether the idea is to create the campaign at the pitch itself. I can easily understand that the campaign would cost a few bob, and that the agency list would be on the lines of the quality mixture of established players and newcomers listed.

LBG and the agencies (if they are indeed under consideration) are consenting adults. It is a free country and an open market between clients and agencies. My question is more generalised: should it be the function of a pitch to create a launch campaign? Or would it be better for our industry if clients chose agency partners on the basis of track record, reputation and people – and then briefed the winning agency to create a campaign within a working commercial relationship?

At AAI we started the Mutual Decision™ initiative to try and promote quicker, less expensive, more effective, and less exploitative pitches. That is because we believe that agency/client relationships are likely to last longer, and be more productive and successful if they start that way. There is no evidence that agencies who are good at speculative creative sprints deliver more value over the long term. There is conclusive evidence that around four out of five “winning campaigns” fail to reach the marketplace, also that the cost of big pitches is massive.

It was my favourite quote of last week, and regular readers will know how much I would like to see the infamous fee system (resource packages/FTEs) bite the dust – if only we can come up with something fairer and better. The fee system not only encourages inefficiency. It also has nothing to do with either deliverables or outcomes. It is purely an input measure, and encourages agencies to use bigger teams, at higher percentage utilisation, for longer periods – for no intrinsic benefit.

Intellectual heroes like Tim Williams of Ignition Group out of Salt Lake City (www.ignitiongroup.com) have been beavering away for years now, looking for new solutions, alongside innovative clients, agencies, and indeed consultants like ourselves.

But the quotation in the headline did not come from adland. It was from Lord Neuberger, the Master of the Rolls (Britain’s second most senior judge), and he was talking about solicitors. He said, ‘Businesses that base their charges simply on costs do not deserve to succeed, or even survive……Rather than treating time as the commodity which is being sold, we should be adopting an approach where skill and experience are the commodities which are sold’. And of course he is right – in the generality, and about any industry, like ad agencies, which was misguided enough to ape the solicitor’s business model.

Remuneration is back in the headlines – but for different reasons. The 7th May edition of Advertising Age has a disturbing article by Jack Neff on “nonworking media spending”, variously known as non-productive marketing spending. It is apparently a scourge which mighty advertisers like Unilever and PepsiCo are committed to reduce in favour of “working media”. The wasteful stuff is creative development and content creation. Working media spending is the money spent to run that content.

“Experts” have calculated that the target maximum for so-called nonworking media should be around 15%. To show how scientifically this figure has been arrived at, Mr Neff was told that it related to the old 15% commission level!

So the very companies that have been trumpeting the need for top level strategic and creative input from their agencies are now allegedly trying to reduce creative and content costs and devote the saving to media and other delivery mechanisms. At the zenith of the space era, this would have meant NASA spending more on rockets and less on the satellites and space stations they were propelling outside the earth’s atmosphere. Misguided lunacy, in other words.

The splendidly named Jordan Bitterman, SVP Social Media Platforms at Digitas, says that so far from reducing nonworking media to 15%, ambitious companies in the digital arena should be looking at raising it to 50%, because earned media, followed by owned media consistently drives purchasing well ahead of paid media.

In a related development, several heavy-hitting companies (Miller Coors, Sprint, Bank of America and GM) have recently moved to a dedicated holding company model. Why? Was it for greater strategic advantage and creative firepower? I think not. Industry commentators are convinced it has been to drive even tougher remuneration deals. I bet they are right.

To return to the top of this piece, the wretched fee system has a lot to answer for. As long as charging for inputs is the default setting, the agency world is super-vulnerable. Lord Neuberger is even more on the ball than he imagined.