Fans of the old TV series Chicago Hope or ER may recall this charming expression as the phrase the docs used to describe patients who weren’t dead yet, but “had one foot in the grave and the other on a banana peel” as the saying goes. A saying that appears to have more and more application to the advertising industry with every passing day.
Witness the widely reported deliberations of Bank of America as it tries to determine which agency holding company–not agency, agency holding company–will be the lucky recipient of its business. Not to mention Sears Holdings’ decision to dump Ogilvy & Mather and consolidate all its business with Y&R, both of which are part of WPP.
Now it doesn’t take a whole lot of reading between the lines to figure out the crux of the matter here is money. Sure, there’s been much ink devoted to “integration” and someone has to have used the word “synergy” somewhere, but anyone who’s been around this industry a while knows that all this bundling (or should that be “bungling”?) of services under the aegis of achieving greater “efficiencies” is nothing more than code for getting the best deal on things.
Why, for example, is Bank of America conducting its discussions at the holding company level? One can be reasonably sure it’s not because Sir Martin is going to be writing bank ads anytime soon. No, Bank of America is playing Wal-Mart. And the holding companies are huddled around it like so many cowering vendors camped outside of Bentonville, Arkansas.
And the O&M versus Y&R move was even more patently transparent. Eddie Lampert wanted the best deal and mirabile dictu, which of the two WPP shops was the low bidder? The one that is currently in more desperate straits of course, Y&R.
But all of this wheeling and dealing doesn’t come without a price, a price called headcount. All the bundled-together, independent operating units that will ultimately give Bank of America the “efficiencies” it so craves will not be automatically forgiven by their holding company for the financial results they’ve promised to deliver. So something’s going to have to go. And since people are the most expensive “somethings” all of these companies have, that’s where the cuts will come. It’s really no different than a package travel deal. When you buy a vacation package, you don’t expect or get the best of everything. You get the best price. Likewise, when a client gets a package deal from an advertising holding company, it doesn’t necessarily get the best; it gets whatever the companies can cobble together and still make money.
And I can guarantee you that all those statements about “O&M staffers moving over to Y&R” notwithstanding, when the dust settles there will be fewer heads working on Sears’ behalf than there were before. The reason I’m so sure of this is that I worked for two WPP-owned agencies and I saw first hand how the management of headcount is viewed by that firm with almost religious fervor.
Which is a problem in this business. Because at the end of the day, in advertising, heads are the only things that count. That’s where ideas are generated and what business are we in if it isn’t the idea-manufacturing business? Ask any client what the most important, value-add our industry contributes and you’ll hear some variation on the word ideas. Ideas that can move their business in unexpected ways. Ideas that will make their brands more powerful and thus, more valuable. Ideas they wouldn’t come up with in a million years.
Yet, for all the evolution of business processes over the last couple of decades and the resultant improvements in efficiency and productivity, nothing has done what a thousand years of human evolution has been unable to do: alter the correlation between the number of heads and the number of ideas generated within each. In maddeningly un-Six Sigma like fashion, ideas persist in trickling out of heads more or less one at a time. Something that hasn’t gone unnoticed by clients who complain incessantly about their agency’s paucity of ideas. But in their obsessive pursuit of efficiences, they’ve effectively cut their own throats. With the advertising industry, being ever the “service business” it is, happily supplying the knives.
So where does this all lead? With apologies to WS, “boil, bubble, toil and trouble” if you ask me. Unless clients quickly figure out what it is they’re really paying us for and what we need to deliver it. In other words, clients need to start using their heads and stop forcing us to count ours.
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