Ordinary Advertising

I was re-reading some articles I’d saved and a certain number jumped out at me. This article in The Economist was about the increasing number of global businesses that are choosing to award their advertising accounts to a single worldwide agency or holding company (don’t get me started). But what really struck me was the fact that in its recent pitch to win the HSBC financial services account, WPP said with great pride that it had assembled a 600-person team drawn from its constellation of advertising and marketing services companies to service this $600MM account.

That math is easy enough even I can do it in my head. So a ratio of one person per million dollars in billings now gets you bragging rights? Does that ever underscore how things have changed. And not for the better, either.

Realizing that the industry average is now slightly less than one person per MM, I guess WPP’s 1:1 is practically philanthropic on its part. But it calls to mind the steady erosion of staffing over the last 30 years and painfully points to a primary source of the industry’s growing weakness. Over the 20+ years I worked in the mainstream of this business, the number of people to billings went from maybe a little over 3 to 1.5 or so (accompanied by a roughly 50% decline in the average agency tenure on a piece of business–surprise, surprise). But looking back to the 60s and 70s, I’ve seen headcounts as high as 10 per million referenced.

Now you can chalk some of this up to the efficiency of personal computers and whatnot, but I think the greater amount must be credited to a certain deficiency–of foresight and understanding of what is required to create extraordinary advertising on a regular basis.

Case in point: A number of us working on the BMW motorcycle account years ago got some very nice advertising out of an extremely obscure fact that was dug up by a young assistant account executive by the name of Steve Rothman. Among many other things, Steve had the often thankless task of reading every motorcycle magazine from all corners of the globe every month in hopes of finding some nugget the creative department might find useful. And “nugget” is the right word because it really was like mining. Steve (and all the others like him at the better agencies around) might go months without finding anything. But when he finally did, it was pure gold for both BMW and its advertising.

The likelihood of that happening today is virtually nil because there simply are no “Steves” pouring over these magazines, which probably goes a long way toward explaining why advertising seems to be so long on style and short on substance these days. And is thus even more likely than before to end up ordinary.

Oh sure, clients have managed to grind agency fees down to a fraction of what they once were, but what have they received in return? A fraction of a person per million in advertising (except for that ever-so-generous WPP/HSBC arrangement) and an even smaller fraction of the intellectual capital agencies once invested in their clients’ success.

I believe that’s what’s known as a lose-lose proposition.