Marketing loves a good virtue signal, until it comes with a price tag. In an industry obsessed with growth, targets and winning at all costs, principles tend to hold strong – right up until they cost you revenue. That’s when the real test begins, and when the gap between what we say and what we do becomes impossible to ignore, writes Mark Leone, partner at Madclarity, in this week’s Mad Reality Check.
A few weeks ago, we turned down a new business opportunity. It’s the fourth time this has happened in the past 12 months. It is the most I can recall in any 12-month period. We must be getting better at working it out. And like most, we learned the hard way.
It reminded me of the adage…
“A principle isn’t a principle until it costs you money.”
Interestingly one of the few old sayings used in our industry that isn’t attributed to either Churchill or Ogilvy, instead the legendary Bill Bernbach. None of us were there to know who said what, but it is a nice story, so I hope it is true.
Sadly, many aren’t in the position to make this call with growth targets to meet, internal pressure to deliver “the numbers” and global policies to adhere to. We aren’t naïve, we understand why this happens. We know how fortunate we are.
This is the reason it stood out in my mind. Opening the trade press, we see a lot of virtuous commentary in our industry. But there is much less action.
In this case, we had been asked to pitch. The potential project required working with the company’s marketing team in facilitating a media agency review. Most people who don’t do what we do, find that funny. Yes, sometimes we pitch to run a pitch.
When we saw the brief, the red flags were there. Amongst them, no obvious engagement with marketing in the process, procurement driven, with several rounds of pricing submissions. We knew what this would mean for the agency review. It’s not the way we recommend running a review and not one we would be happy to facilitate.
We politely declined, explaining why.
Earlier I referenced the virtuous industry commentary. Pitching is at the top of that list. If we as consultants and facilitators comply, how will anything get better? Talk of signing pledges and moaning about bad actors won’t amount to anything, if we are all complicit. To my knowledge, we were the only consultants to withdraw.
It didn’t take too long to think of more industry examples where the talk doesn’t match the behaviour. I’m not even referring to holding groups and principal media this time, most people know my thoughts on this. There are many more hiding in plain sight.
Like the independent agencies engaging in rebate deals – spruiking the transparency of leaving the holdco world, to quietly indulge themselves. It isn’t all of them, but more of them are doing it than most realise.
The walled gardens who like to point out the flaws in measurement of rival media but won’t allow any meaningful independent measurement on their own platforms.
The industry bodies who herald the launch of new measurement tools bringing greater transparency, who in the same breath inexplicably deny access for the broader market.
And recently, the story of compliance auditors doing paid work for agencies. The same agencies advertisers engage them to audit. I would’ve thought this is almost the definition of a conflict of interest. What happens the next time they find something particularly damning in an audit of these agencies? What will they do?
Using Bernbach’s definition as the standard, principles are few and far between in the real world. Well, in our world anyway. Sadly, in some workplaces, having principles and keeping your job can’t co-exist.
