Frenemies: The Epic Disruption of the Ad Business (and Everything Else) by Ken Auletta Read Free Book Online Page B

protégé and at one point his brother-in-law, but their philosophical differences grew so intense that they stopped speaking to one another. Ogilvy extolled the value of a consistent brand personality shaped by what he called “trivial product differences.” In many an Ogilvy print ad, the headline and graphics were followed by short essays touting the brand. In one famous ad, after the bold headline—“At 60 miles an hour the loudest noise in this new Rolls-Royce comes from the electric clock”—the text enumerated thirteen reasons to buy the luxurious car. In the consumer’s mind, he believed, the brand stood for something.
    Ogilvy broke with Bernbach as well, albeit less vociferously, asserting that Bernbach’s “art” got the better of his content. “What you say in advertising is more important than how you say it,” Ogilvy declared.
    Bernbach firmly disagreed. “Execution can become content,” he replied. “It can be just as important as what you say.” * It was an argument without end.
    Whatever differences divided the industry’s titans, however, they were united in the belief that it was the companies doing the buying—the advertisers—that ultimately wielded the power. Fearful of offending white viewers, initially advertisers vetoed the idea of an all-black variety show starring Sammy Davis, Jr. With tobacco ads making upalmost 10 percent of their ad revenue, network newscasts rarely reported on smoking’s health risks. Over the years, when program schedules were decided, the head of network sales was always in the room, for no network wanted an ad to appear in what was deemed an unfriendly environment. A medium dependent on advertising for its revenue knows that its primary business obligation is to corral an audience for its ads. Bill O’Reilly seemed to be surviving his sexual harassment scandal at Fox, until a group launched a successful boycott campaign against his show’s advertisers. When advertisers fled The O’Reilly Factor in April 2017, Fox News quickly pulled the plug on cable TV’s top-rated anchor.
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    Over time, for industry-specific reasons and also due to a larger shift in American business culture, ad agency clients began to bring more and more scrutiny to bear on the whole cost structure. Jon Mandel’s j’accuse moment did not come out of a clear blue sky. After the 2008 economic crisis in particular, CEOs increasingly turned to their chief financial officers or chief procurement officers to more closely monitor marketing spending. Inevitably, the power of CMOs, who hired the agencies, eroded. “In Don Draper’s days there was never a procurement department,” says Wendy Clark, who has been a CMO of Coca-Cola and AT&T and is today the North American CEO of Bill Bernbach’s former agency, DDB Worldwide. “In new business briefs,” she says, in addition to the CMO “we have two procurement officers in meetings.”
    Irwin Gotlieb saw this beginning to happen in the early 1990s, when procurement officers would hire auditing firms like Accenture and Ebiquity to monitor agencies. They became the agency’s adversary, he explains. “They got compensated for generating savings,” and they had a built-in “conflict of interest. They ran around saying, ‘The sky isfalling!’ And then they sold you umbrellas.” By slicing marketing costs, they boosted short-term company earnings at the expense of the long-term health of companies, he argues, correlating marketing dollars with growth. An inevitable consequence, he says, was a loosening of the bond of trust between client and agency.
    “Today clients are not married to an agency. They are only dating,” observes Kassan. Clients who previously conducted agency reviews every ten years now accelerated their review cycles, sometimes dramatically. Keith Reinhard, the chairman emeritus of DDB Worldwide, retained Anheuser-Busch as a client for thirty-three years, and he dealt directly with the