“Follow the money.”— I first heard it put forth by Deep Throat to Bob Woodward in All the President’s Men. Maybe it was Hal Holbrook’s delivery, but I have always believed it to be the purest of all simple truths and the starting point of deductive reasoning. So it is surprising that only now am I applying this logic to Chuck, myself and other Creative Directors in our situation. How is it that after years of steadily climbing the ladder of success, we are struggling so mightily just to find a doggone job? Let’s follow the money. We are in a deep recession and jobs are hard to find. Congratulations, you are a cub reporter. Dig a little deeper. In the late 80’s and early 90’s, any agency handling every client of significance in the Western Hemisphere was bought by one of four holding companies: WPP, Interpublic, Publicis and Omnicom. To accomplish this feat, these 4 holding companies are, of course, publicly-owned and leveraged to the hilt. With all large clients taken, they were left to find money for investors by cutting back the only place they can; people. One would think that was a risky strategy being that advertising is a service business and less people equals less service, but follow the money. Tricky or not, people are the only inventory agencies have, hence, the only viable place for cuts to come from. The agencies walked this tightrope by firing the middle. Upper management is the face of the agencies. They run from client to client putting out fires created by the relatively junior staff doing the actual work. This strategy is necessary because client’s want to see an amount of creative output commensurate with their budget. Quality may be affected but quality is elusive where as quantity is not—follow the money. To keep the whole bigger-is-better myth alive, holding companies have to protect key relationships with their largest clients. The large clients may spend millions of dollars at hundreds of agencies on projects executed by thousands of people, but the big money decisions are made by relatively few people. The biggest of the big money decisions is the TV media buy. This is a multi-million dollar decision that worked in Chuck’s and my favor because the lead agency controlled the Television creative. Clients didn’t want to take chances with their largest single expenditure, so they encouraged elaborate spending on the development and production of the commercials. Ah, the good old commercial days. 2 weeks in LA at Shutters, RSA productions, craft services on the top of a remote mountain top. Blue Ribbon sushi runs from the editing suite and if the work was good enough, a trip to Cannes to see old friends who were now working in Amsterdam. We followed the money all right—right into big trouble: The Internet. The lead agencies Chuck and I worked at tried to treat the Internet as a below-the-line item because there is little money to be made and a lot of man hours involved. Of course, it was to become an important marketing phenomenon as web 2.0 became advertiser funded. Clients got out in front of the agencies by working directly with Internet agencies, which put people outside the network in direct contact with senior clients. --H-o-l-y S-h-i-t!!-- The big four freaked out and bought every Internet agency in sight. You guessed it: More debt. Less people. But now they had to cut into the meat of their operations. People like Chuck and I. To make matters worse, the Internet was introduced into the equation without any significant way to monetize servicing of it. TV and Print were originally based on 15% commission. Even when clients got wise and switched to fees, they were based on the old and extremely profitable formula. The compensation formula introduced by Internet agencies was based on hourly fees. (Gulp.) Now you see why we have to follow the money to get to the bottom of the problem and why things are so bad for Chuck and myself. There is hope though. If we follow the money into the future, and make some fundamental assumptions, we can be reasonably sure that while big marketing departments may want the best bang for their buck, they don’t want to reduce their overall budget. That would go against corporate nature. What will probably happen is that lead agencies will reign in the client, TV and the Internet will merge via cable leaving digital agencies to create below-the-line banner ads and Chuck and I will be back in business.
