Worldwide advertising revenues are closing in on $600 billion with Google alone raking in $58.14 billion for the quarter reported on July 25. Big business.
From Contagious, July 18:
Author and consultant Michael Farmer talks about ad agency decline, why selling creativity is a cop out, and why introducing AI to advertising is like pouring gasoline on a fire
Ad agency consultant Michael Farmer made his name with a book, Madison Avenue Manslaughter, that explained in forensic detail how advertising agencies are being run into the ground.
Now, he’s published a second book: an inside account of one creative agency’s attempt to save itself from decline with a new business model.
Madison Avenue Makeover tells of Huge CEO Mat Baxter’s efforts to transform his agency from a service-oriented creative shop into a company that sells fixed-price products that help clients grow.
Over a Zoom call, Farmer spoke to Contagious from his Connecticut home (in a town called, coincidentally, Madison) about the problems that beset agencies, why he believes that focusing on creativity is a cop out, and why introducing AI into advertising is like pouring gasoline on a fire.Your new book is a case study of a creative agency turnaround, told from your perspective as a fly-on-the-wall observer, invited in by the CEO leading the transformation. Why did you decide to take this project?
I’ve been consulting to the industry for 30 years and despite all the problems in the industry, I had never run into a CEO, who said, ‘Oh, my God, this is terrible, we have to do something about it.’
Ironically, I didn’t even know Mat [Baxter, CEO of Huge] that well. We had only exchanged emails over a short period of time. And he wasn’t even experienced at running a creative agency. But I had a lot of regard for him because I knew he had turned around Initiative, the big media agency in New York. So when he said, ‘I'm taking over Huge, and I’m going to do a transformation. I’m not quite sure what I'm going to do yet, but how would you like to document the whole process?’ I thought, how could I ever say no? I probably would have paid to do that project, you know?
In the agency world, no one ever talks about management processes. They sort of pride themselves in the fact that [agencies] run themselves.
In my first book [Madison Avenue Manslaughter], which I was writing when I had Saatchi & Saatchi as a client, Kevin Roberts, the [Worldwide] CEO of Saatchi, told me that I didn't really understand the agency business, even though I’d been doing it 20 years. He said, ‘You don't understand that a creative operation like ours is just like an anthill, where every ant knows his job and has the freedom to do it. And my job as CEO is to make sure they have that freedom.’
And I thought, ‘Well, that's a different view of management because most of the executives that I have seen tried to get their organisations to do something that was not entirely natural, to perform better than each of them would have performed on their own.’
So, you know, here was a guy, Mat Baxter, a young Australian, having a career in media, taking on a stagnant but good agency, and saying, ‘I’m gonna turn it on its head. How would you like to write about it? I thought, ‘Oh, my God, this is God given. I have to say, yes.’...
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