You Should Align with Clients Against the Media

We can get lost in the present and easily lose the trends that are happening right under our noses. That’s especially true if they happen slowly. We focus on the individual trees without noticing that the entire forest is moving. Let’s look at the big arc of history.

Then

Walk back in time with me. There were a few limited daily newspapers and they wanted advertisers. The relationship between large brands and their agencies was well-established and thriving. This was the heyday of the big agencies that did real creative, most of which were later absorbed into the holdcos, and many of which are no longer here.

So, with all those established relationships in place, what did the media do? They decided to use agencies to snag ad spending from those brands. There were far fewer agencies, they held great sway at clients, and so it was a smart play: get one agency on board, and that agency would bring their dozen clients with them.

And thus, the agency commission of 15% was born (or 17.65% if you were in accounting and wanted to maintain the integrity of that number).

What happened next is entirely predictable, too. End clients tried to bypass the agencies to save the commission, and in order to counter that (because the media still cared about agencies at that point), the media outlets implemented a revised policy. Only “recognized” agencies would be granted that commission. The entire purpose of that was to make sure that client-side departments couldn’t bypass agencies. It wasn’t about the money, either, as media outlets would make the same money either way. No, it was to protect the agency relationship and incentivize them to keep shoveling ad buys their way. That went away in about 1975, of course, and after that the media no longer needed agencies.

Now

I would suggest to you that the last 50 years have given us a slow slide, where agencies have slowly lost power as they have been disintermediated by the media…and then by the clients themselves. This is how the power structure has migrated:

	Pre-1975	1975-2023	2024
No. 1	Clients	Clients	Media
No. 2	Agencies	Media	Clients
No. 3	Media	Agencies	Agencies

Clients need the media right now and not the other way around. Agencies have zero power with the media, although there is a minor (and ultimately unsuccessful, I believe) attempt for agencies to buy bundles of media and resell in pieces to their clients.

Next

The point I would like to make is about how you fit into this landscape. Your job, I believe, is to side with your client…against the media. That means to help them understand it, to eliminate (incredibly widespread media) fraud, find ways to get results in disruptive ways, and so on.

In our new world, we know less about attribution than we ever have, and the winners will be the human storytellers who create campaigns and digital tools that connect beautifully with consumers, preserving those direct relationship that are less dependent on media spend.