The 2015 media plan – a work of fiction

Brand name: Swallow Throat Spray
 
Message delivery plan Fiscal 2015 shown at constant 2008 currencies
(ignores switch from US$ to Euro on Jan 1st 2012)
 
The US / Canada audience delivery of the season (and indeed franchise) finale of Found released by Microsoft’s Disney division in May of 2014 is a relevant illustration of the watershed advertisers are [...]

Alexander Schmidt-Vogel: The challenge in a nutshell

ASV, long time CEO of Mediacom, made a comment at the Venice Festival which I should have remarked on at the time.
To paraphrase ‘Can anyone think of another industry where 90% of its effort is dedicated to the creation and distribution of material that 90% of the population does not want?’
Clearly the reference is to advertising and [...]

Mobility and addressability – Greeks bearing gifts

Graciela from Mediaedge:cia Athens suggests that in Greece and elsewhere that mobile devices represents the best distributed addressable channel. Of course she is right. In EVERY market mobile penetration exceeds that of the PC internet but the mobile internet is not quite so well distributed.
It’s safe to assume that the mobile internet in aggregate will [...]

The world is bottom up

Time for a grandiose, macro view of the universe, post. For around 4000 years our world has been run top down. From the Egyptians, Greeks and Romans, to the Ottomans, Spanish, British and French, to the American, Russians and Chinese, nations have tried to define a societal ‘way’ and impose that ‘way’ on their own [...]

In a word – addressability

Addressability is the concept at the centre of media change. Addressability is a binary characteristic of a media channel. Can a message be delivered to a known individual or household and does that individual or household have the opportunity to respond or interact with that message in a way that allows them to be identified?
Addressability [...]

David Verklin

Carat North America announced today that David Verklin was stepping down as its CEO. This will prompt a good deal of informed coverage of which this is not part. 
I don’t know David terribly well but I do know this. He was the first, the loudest and most insistent voice in the media agency community to demand that [...]

What business are we really in?

Let’s say for a moment that the notion of media planning and buying is substituted by the idea of brand owned content distribution. 
In such a paradigm the obvious first question is ‘where can you distribute brand content’. 
There are three macro buckets: 

Paid media – about which we know a lot but worry about diminishing levels of [...]

Venice – last word

Well that’s it. The Who was Who of media heads home. Sensational networking and renewal of friendships but what else?
Well certainly no great breakthroughs. The great and good were cautious but unanimous in the view that renewal of talent, proposition and compensation were the necessary ingredients of profitable growth. All true but hardly ‘this just [...]

CEO panel 4 – beauty and the beast

Maria Luisa Francoli from MPG and Dominic Proctor from Mindshare.
Organizational change to drive accountability and creativity is both a priority and an opportunity to create businesses that sit at the heart of marketing services.
The question is speed of execution and maintaining organizational fluidity given the zero likelihood of the destination being the same by the [...]

CEO panel – the stallion speaks

A home fixture for Mainardo de Nardis of Aegis, also up the charming Nick Brien of IPG.
MdN says that collaborating with people outside your ownership group is easier than with your co-owned partners. He would say that wouldn’t he?
Nick inevitably disagrees and sees it as behavioral rather than structural.
On to the intersting matter of consolidation [...]