UK’s top media minds progress plans for recalibrating the media landscape

Behind that small overall bump, though, there’s evidence of a familiar story: increased spend in ‘short-term’ channels like direct marketing, “stagnation” in ‘main media’ categories, and substantial reductions in other ‘longer-term’ efforts like market research.

So while some optimism can be gleaned from the confidence to increase spend, plenty of media heads will see in the numbers another small step in a direction that erodes spend on traditional, high-quality channels and favors the rapid results of digital channels. Here are two data points that tell that longer-term story: Warc estimates that $16bn in ad spend has been pulled from quality publishers in recent years, while WPP Media this year added up that 81.6% of all ad revenues coming from digital channels.

It’s concerns like these that led veteran media men Brian Jacobs (vet of Leo Burnett Universal McCann) and Nick Manning (the “Manning” in Manning Gottlieb) to set up Advertising: Who Cares? some 18 months ago.

Their goal is to unpick the complicated thicket of organizational structures, incentives, players and data behind a media landscape in which they see increasing opacity and complexity, decreasing trust, and roadblocks to the virtuous cycle of quality media and quality advertising on which the modern ad business was built.

The effort has since turned into a movement of some 70 active members and 700 signed-up supporters. Last week, the group met for its second annual Summit at the Vue cinema in London’s Leicester Square – an appropriate venue for a volunteer coalition rallying behind traditional media.

The movement, Jacobs said in an opening address, spreads its net wide across topics from talent acquisition to trust, measurement and creativity precisely because what they’re trying to address is a multifaceted problem with no easy solution. “Everything is connected,” Manning said. “Everything is joined up. If you want to change things, you’ve got to change everything.”

If that sounds ambitious, that’s because it is: Manning pegs the movement’s goal as nothing less than “to help advertising recovers its place as a key contributor to business and society and to help advertising get its swagger back.”

To tackle that multifaceted problem, the organization is set up across nine decentralized ‘workstreams’ led by some legendary figures from the UK advertising biz – the likes of Jenn Biggam (The7Stars, former director of Carat), Denise Turner (former managing partner of Havas Media Group, now research director at the IPA) and Tina Fegent (former commercial director at Grey, now the most familiar face in procurement). The likes of David Weldon (a legendary advertising director at the likes of the Coca-Cola Company, now president emeritus at the World Federation of Advertisers) were on hand for an advertiser’s point of view.

Ahead of the conference, we revealed the efforts of one of these workstreams making a case for reversing the flow of ad spend away from “quality media”. Other workstreams are beginning to bear more tangible fruit. One group led by planning bigwig Sall Weavers took the stage to announce a new industry organization, the Media Planning Group, modeled on and partnered with a similar group for account people, the Account Planning Group.

The move is a practical response to a situation in which, Weavers says, planners and strategists “feel that their craft, their skill that they’ve spent decades honing, is being at best reduced to a conversation about media plumbing (‘what piece of tech should we use to give a message to an audience?’) And at worst to a job that can be done in a couple of milliseconds by AI.” The group, Weavers says, will be open for membership by the end of the year.

The core of a complex problem

While the AWC summit has one rule – “no moaning” – its argument for change conjures a few villains. Some are abstract (short-termism, complexity, lack of transparency), but some are more easily connected to real organizations. While the movement is keen to avoid criticisms of ‘platform-bashing,’ this unavoidably has a core component in arguing for less spend on the dominant social and tech platforms (which one speaker, the Guardian’s James Fleetham, described as “the most powerful sales tool ever invented… and Instagram might be the apex predator of advertising”) that have become so effective at gathering spend.

AWC is not the first movement to make the case that the balance of power has shifted too far in favor of these platforms – and nor is it the first to grapple with the difficulty of making that case while avoiding appearances of sour-grape complaint from a business backwardly-dreaming of halcyon days that are never to return. But in his opening address, Manning didn’t shy away from an impassioned argument that we’re looking at an existential challenge, based on the oldest principle in the book: follow the money.

“Advertising now represents the vast majority of the revenue and profit of the world’s largest corporations,” Manning said. “That’s never happened before. In former times, the biggest companies in the world were big advertising spenders. Now, they’re the big advertising takers. The most popular media channels on Earth today only exist because of advertising and they are now an unimaginable source of corporate and personal wealth for a relatively small group of people.

“The big platforms and software companies control how billions of people worldwide experience advertising every day, many times a day… The true economic power in advertising lies with the platform owners and software companies, their stock and bond holders, the fund managers, the financiers, the accountants, lawyers and advertisers who cluster around those companies. According to Warc, and it should know, five companies (Alphabet, Meta, Amazon, Alibaba and Bytedance) now take 50% of all global ad revenue and, crucially, 70% of all incremental ad revenues.

“They control the advertising on their platforms. How much there is, who sees it and where, which bids for the auction and which ads get amplified by the algorithm. Decisions about advertising have been made by software engineers who don’t necessarily know very much about advertising, but who are told, ‘Let’s just get the money in...’ Advertising revenue for Alphabet, Meta and Amazon is growing at 15-20% a year. TikTok is growing at 25% a year. Alphabet’s market cap grew by $230bn the day after the DOJ absolved it of an ad monopoly; that growth is four times the combined worth of the Big Six advertising companies... And that’s just the beginning. Google, Meta, Adobe, Salesforce, Microsoft and others are locked in an arms race to monetize AI. They’re developing agents to plan, buy and analyze advertising – not just generate advertising revenue.”

Manning’s case, though, isn’t (just) that this shift in the concentration of power in the ad world is a bad thing in itself; it’s that it leads to an opaque and monocultural media ecosystem which embattles effectiveness and makes it harder to do the kind of highly creative work that marketers got in the business to do. “We are in a crisis and that crisis is advertising effectiveness. Too much advertising that doesn’t work interrupts and irritates the public or disappears into the void... We’re in a bit of a doom loop, built on a vast excess of low-cost and low- or nil-worth media inventory.”

Crises in creativity, talent and relationships?

If the AWC movement has a thesis, it’s that the tendrils of this multiheaded problem can be felt throughout the industry – in its perceptions among the workforce, in its approaches to creativity and in strained relationships.

Consultant and researcher Crispin Reed laid out evidence of a complicated perception of the business among young people, citing one interview conducted last year in which he was asked, “Why would I want to join an industry that bombards me with rubbish?”

From a questionnaire filled in by 200 students, Reed found that 10% would consider joining the advertising and marketing industries – joint top in a ranking alongside the civil service (10%) and ahead of the likes of banking and finance (9%), tech (8%) and medicine (6%). But in an industry with well-publicized worries about low starting salaries, new entrants to the industry’s top concern being money may be another warning factor.

Dillah Zakbah, deputy executive creative director at Fold7, argues that the industry can only thrive again if we “rebuild creativity for the world we actually live in,” arguing that “creativity doesn’t need saving – agencies do.”

In a series of provocative prompts, Zakbah argued for systemic creative reform for an industry that still reflects much of the organizational structure first designed for the ad business of the 1950s, adding: “Like most things from the 1950s, it hasn’t aged that well.”

Arguing that we should “kill the creative department,” “kill the creative team,” “kill the creative overpromise,” “kill the creative pitch” and “kill creative awards,” Zakbah made a case for managers to “stop managing creativity and start believing in it.”

“I don’t think AI is killing creativity,” Zakbah said. “I think our obsession with efficiency is.”

The Drum will be publishing more reporting and analysis from other Advertising: Who Cares? workstreams in the coming days.