Best of the Month: When an industry changes overnight while you’re on holiday (from the archive)

Hello and welcome back to Best of the Month, written exclusively in sunny Singapore for once. For me, despite the lack of international travel this month (more on holidays later), the last four weeks seem to have gone by in a short sharp five minutes. And for all of you, I imagine it’s not much different.

It’s a busy time. Awards season has well and truly kicked off with the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity where Burger King global CMO Fernando Machado stole the show, Asia performed miserably, Whalar became the first influencer agency to win a gold and a questionable winner (‘Speeding Emojis’ by MullenLowe SSP3 for Korean automaker Hyundai) faced 'copycat' accusations. The latter now seems inevitable each year, sadly. 

Some of you will know that Mumbrella doesn’t attend Cannes these days due to the alleged failure of organisers to tackle scam work winning gongs. It seems we are not the only ones who want change. 

Industry heavyweights Bob Hoffman and Gary Vaynerchuk both went on the attack about the French Riviera jamboree. They talked about how inappropriate and irrelevant the festival had become because much of the work “no human ever sees” (Gary Vee) and how the bigwigs “hanging out on yachts gulping putrid rosé” (Hoffman) were unlikely to save an industry still trying to work out if it actually had a future.

Personally, I think industry awards shows are a special and transformative experience so long as they are credible, robust and aligned with the real-world work that is actually driving business returns. The Grand Prix-winning Burger King campaign at Cannes definitely seemed to triumph for the right reasons. And what on earth could possibly be bad about highlighting standout work while applauding those who toiled long and hard to create it? 

In fact, we launched our annual Mumbrella Asia Awards just a couple of weeks back, including jury of nearly 300 experts and 32 categories (with three new categories – AI, consultancy and design). So do get your entries in before the August 1 deadline. As I said when we launched: “Last year was a real tipping point for our awards. We saw 40% growth in terms of the number of entries. It was gratifying to see. Industry leaders are finally starting to recognise the value in our robust live-judging process, where those shortlisted present live to the jurors and take questions about the work.”

All that said, to return to Cannes, I did wonder to myself over the last few days how many more years that particular festival could continue in its current guise though. Putting scam aside, can those Champagne-drenched yacht parties really go on when an industry death spiral looms larger every year – and quarterly financials show red not black – at least for the traditional players? I’m all for celebrations and good times, but luxury boats seem a little detached from the business reality some of these companies are facing at the moment. 

Also, some senior folk have said to me they will not go again until there is a single-use plastics ban at the event (that would be very difficult and expensive to do). Then there is the bad public relations around carbon footprints for all those flying in (again, that’s difficult to avoid unless you scale down the event or conduct it all via conference calls). Not to mention the fact that for a show that is meant to represent the best of the whole industry, independents are frozen out with only the big networks taking home the awards. In what some have called ‘the age of the indie’, that can’t be healthy.

But going back to that looming industry death spiral for a second, which I seem to be writing a variation of each time I put together BOTM nowadays. It now looks inescapable. At least, as I said earlier, for the traditional players. Just on Thursday of this week, Martin Sorrell told me that it was “adapt or die” time for ‘Pavlovian’ ad industry holding companies plagued by huge overheads and a mindset about as far away from agile as you can get. 

Meanwhile, last week the Havas Group CEO and Vivendi chairman Yannick Bolloré uttered the following words: “Togetherness will remain at the heart of everything we do, but it is now the right time for us to set ourselves a new ambition: Make a meaningful difference to brands, businesses and people. The primary focus of everyone at Havas is to create meaningful brands because meaningful brands are better for business and for the world we live in.”

Perhaps he means it. Perhaps not. It does have that hint of managerese, however, to say the very least. 

In contrast, the whole ‘WPP@Unilever’ experiment in Asia does seem to be a more practical shot at doing things differently. Some 70 cherry-picked staff from Ogilvy, Mindshare, Wunderman Thompson and Kantar are working out of the client’s Asia-Pacific headquarters in a co-working space (Level3 by Unilever Foundry) surrounded by marcoms start-ups. 

It is, in effect, a new agency run by top WPP staffers working in the same building (Mapletree Business City) as the client, Their focus is full-service global campaigns. They sit within a start-up community of potential supplier companies too, which can only be a positive thing. I met with the progressive CEO David Dahan this week and his plans sound exciting. Although, at just a month into the new organisation, he told me he doesn’t want to shout too loudly about it just yet. Not until the new entity has more of a track record he can speak publicly about. That seems like good sense at this nascent stage.

On a less positive note, earlier in June I attended an off-the-record Marketing Society get together to discuss a spiky Accenture report that raised the alarm on a “broken marketing culture”. The research stated that two out of three CEOs distrusted their CMOs and only 17% of marketing leaders were deemed to be ‘pioneering’. This suggests it’s not just big agency networks facing questions over the value of their very existence. There just aren’t that many Fernando Machados out there. And it really did feel like a room of worried high-profile marketers. I guess the saving grace is that the issue is finally being discussed now, albeit behind closed doors.

Indeed, Johnson & Johnson has just scrapped the global CMO role completely. And it’s not the first big player to do so. Other brands have been streamlining their marketing departments at pace too. Seth Godin, the well-known author of many books in the marketing space, puts it this way: “The reason that the tenure of a CMO at a big company averages about 18 months is that it takes a year-and-a-half for the boss to realise that pain-free, risk-free, easy miracles aren’t arriving on schedule.”

The whole shebang reminds me of where journalism was at just over a decade ago in 2008 post-global financial crisis. Print was about to be decapitated by the internet, but those of us in the industry had doubts about how quickly it would happen. We still had spikes on our desks, where we would impale sheets of paper relating to dead stories, for goodness sake. Plus none of us knew what journalism 2.0 might look like. And so we carried on regardless. Sound familiar?

Some time later in 2013, I came back from a holiday in Portugal (back then I had a Blackberry that I used to turn off for the duration of my time off in order to tune out; I know, this seems unthinkable now) to find that the parent company I was working for had gone into administration. Around 250 people lost their jobs overnight. We knew it was coming, but we were still in denial somewhat. The bad omens like stationery orders being refused by the accounts department and a change management guru roaming the corridors had simply been ignored by us all until the bitter end. Complacency was widespread. People retained the belief that better times were just around the corner. They weren’t. Company insolvency was. 

The aftermath was a gut-wrenching time for all. It felt like the world had been turned upside down by forces we knew existed, but could not fully comprehend. Initially myself, I suddenly felt like I’d chosen the wrong career. I concluded I’d been reckless in pursuing my passion (writing and editing) as a profession, rather than something more stable and safe. 

Thankfully, a long run through the forest and some deep thinking soon snapped me out of my stupor. Pretty quickly, I had job offers on the table. My career took a different direction dictated, to a certain degree, by me looking at the industry through a whole new optic. One that valued openness, agility and commercial awareness to a much greater degree.

Since that time in 2013, the pace of change has been brutal for traditional publishers. Those that have survived until now are either engaged in the depressing journey of managed decline (squeezing every last penny out of the assets, and the staff, before the ship goes down) or they have completely rebooted their business model. For example, Mumbrella is online and events only. It could not be any other way.

Two books I read this month really clarified things further for me. The first was ‘Business for Bohemians’ by the British founder of The Idler magazine Tom Hodgkinson. In it, he maps out a very personal journey of finally accepting there was no money in journalism anymore and pivoting to an events model by way of a Kickstarter funding campaign that turned his “lifestyle business” into a million-pound company. 

The second book was ‘Reluctant Editor’ by the launch editor of the Singaporean newspaper Today (now digital only, by the way), one PN Balji. I enjoyed his tales of excitable print newsrooms and testy sub editors immensely. It was only afterwards I realised that my reading experience was a pure nostalgia play. That world no longer exists. A young Balji today would either be out of work or would need to completely re-learn a new skillset to get gainful employment. Them’s the facts.

None of this should surprise us though. We’ve seen the music business go from record sales to concert receipts and Spotify (via Napster along the way). We’ve seen TV go from advertising revenue to streaming subscriptions (via Pirate Bay along the journey). And we’ve seen journalism go from print advertising to digital, events and subscriptions (via internet disruption). Relatively speaking, all of this happened in the blink of an eye. 

So to advertising then. Sorrell says that of the US$500 billion in annual global ad spending, some US$200bn of that is digital while US$300 billion is still in “old stuff” – meaning traditional mediums like print and television ads. But he warns: “The days of tentpole campaigns are numbered. It’s difficult for them [the ad agency networks] to move quickly, particularly if its a listed company, as it’s tough to take the long-term view.”

My advice, based on my cathartic own experience, would be to take the long-term view as soon as you possibly can and to start to open up new ways of working quick smart. In turn, this will hopefully bring new revenue streams and ensure that the transition to marketing 2.0 is not as painful as the transition to journalism 2.0 has been for many in the industry. 

Perhaps the WPP@Unilever approach is a great option. There will be many other alternative models that emerge too. We can be sure of that. The trick is to embrace them. To test and learn with a view to moving to something new beyond the failing industry status quo, the “broken marketing culture” Accenture refers to.

And don’t turn off your phone when you go on holiday. You might just return home to find an industry that has changed overnight.

Now just before I leave you in peace, some housekeeping from me. The ‘call for sessions’ for our flagship three-day five-stream Mumbrella360 Asia conference in Singapore is about to close. So if you’ve got any ideas for speakers/sessions on the organic programme, do submit them here before close of play on Tuesday (July 2). Without a doubt, it’s going to be the best media and marketing conference in Asia this year – and I’m pretty sure there will be insightful words that help us all chart a way forward for the industry. You don’t want to miss it.

In addition to 360, we are also running a one-day Finance Marketing Summit on August 29 in Singapore. It’s a great programme with top brands like Visa and Standard Chartered Bank plus real diversity in terms of speakers and topics.

Plus you can get a bargain with the earlybird ticket price of $299 until July 16. After that, the full $399 ticket price will kick in so get your skates on. Again, the goal will be to spread best practice, learn from bad practice and help each other to grow the segment despite the market pressures outlined above.

Well, that’s about it from me for this month. Thanks for reading. As always, feel free to drop me an email with your feedback at [email protected] – and if you make it I’ll see you in person at the Finance or 360 events.

Until next time. Over and out.

Dean Carroll

Mumbrella (Asia) general manager