MEA culpa. I like to think I always act with professionalism and ethics, but sometimes, just sometimes, I can understand why people rate journalists even lower than admen.
Sometimes we just get things wrong. But I can say in all honesty, at B&T at least, this is never because we have any barrow to push, and there isn’t any excuse for error.
Last week I wrote a story about the launch of Group M’s third agency arm Maxus—for this market, essentially a rebranding of Maximize—and estimated the group controlled about $1bn in media billings. The story also said this made the group the largest media group in Australia. It should have said it made the group one of the largest in Australia.
That error aside, the billings estimate was based on figures B&T had on record, supplied to us by the media agencies, and it was a conservative estimate based on those figures.
But the real point of this column is media billings.
Naturally, and justifiably enough, a Group M competitor contacted me to refute the billings estimate. Fair enough. We all know Nielsen Ad Ex collects the data—which it doesn’t release to the industry (although it says it is considering doing so)—giving an independent view of what agencies really bill, and at the very least a much more realistic estimate. This data has made its way into industry hands, however, which is great in terms of clarifying the debate about billings.
The competitor’s beef was that claims of agencies being the largest, or billing the most (and they all do it, just look at their pitch documents), “confuses the clients”. Does it really?
Are consumers confused when this or that washing liquid’s advertising says it’s the best and will give you the brightest whites?
I thought long and hard about the issue of what media agencies actually bill and what they say they do—it’s been a vexed one to say the least—and my conclusion is this: unless agencies are prepared to be upfront and stop inflating billings, they really have no right to complain.
I refer to no agency in particular, but to the whole industry, which is so obsessed with one-upmanship—usually manifested through shrill phone calls to journalists.
The agencies had an easy out this year in B&T’s income and billings issue, declining to comment on billings because of the Sarbanes-Oxley law passed in the USCongress prohibiting public companies from disclosing billings.
The real issue apart from billings estimates is, of course, what will happen to the negotiating groups. With MIMO losing the considerable bulk of Optimedia, which defected to Equmedia, it’s hard to see it continuing to have much power in the market.
And with Starcom and Optimedia banding together for Publicis in the Australian market, it’s not a stretch to think the Equmedia model as it stands (with WPP agencies Mediaedge:cia and Mindshare) isn’t long for this world.
Until an independent measure of media billings is provided to the whole industry, perhaps it’s best not to speak in terms of billings at all… and anyway, my phone will be off the hook.
