Bosses slam media and 'partnership'

Regional industry bosses singled out the media and unscrupulous clients for criticism during an IAA-organised forum at last week’s Media and Marketing Show, suggesting that media had failed to help out agencies, clients had taken advantage, and that “partnership” was a myth.

Memac Ogilvy supremo Eddie Moutran led the charge, saying: “To me, what I see is a partnership in good times – in bad times, it’s each to his own.”

Moutran acknowledged the bad debt and receivables situation, stating that agencies couldn’t hide behind simply saying the problem didn’t exist.

“And we’re talking, not the normal bad debt where every agency at the end of the year can easily put a little bit of its income to one side and address it, but bad debts that could drive you into bankruptcy. The media houses earn 2%, 3%, 5%, depending on their policies – and you have clients asking for 30-40% discounts, on huge amounts. Now, I don’t know who’s capitalised to that extent – we’re certainly not,” said Moutran.

He then moved on to the media, apparently referencing the agency/media forum from the summer (which didn't go well for the agencies): “So we tried to get together, and all of a sudden – and I’m going to say it openly – the media didn’t want to know! While if the media’s in trouble, the first thing they’ll do is call the agencies: ‘Come and help me out. Let’s do something.’”

Moutran also criticised unscrupulous clients: “Some clients are doing great, but some clients are taking advantage of the situation. Even if they’re not in trouble, they pretend they’re in trouble to cut costs. So it’s really unfortunate, we’ve not made a very good partnership, in my opinion.

“The media even refused to talk about better payment terms! That’s partnership,” ended Moutran, with just a touch of contempt evident in his voice.

None of the other bosses offered any serious disagreement to the Memac boss’s point of view, with the majority echoing the theme to a greater or lesser extent – especially as far as “partnership” went.

“Now, you tell me all the clients do strongly believe in a business partnership, I will tell you that some of them talk about it but don’t practice it. But we’re running a business – sometimes you don’t like it, but you accept it,” said Leo Burnett MENA chief exec Raja Trad.

Menacom’s Joseph Ghossoub dismissed the idea utterly: “We talk about partnership, but this partnership never existed. It never existed, it never will exist, will never be. Why? We’re in different places, in different forums, looking after our own businesses.”

And JWT MENA boss Roy Haddad simply said: “I don’t believe in partnership.”

So, not very happy overall, then, with the other edges of the joyous media triangle in which we work. The media houses and clients would no doubt have something to say too, but this was the ad men’s moment, and they were happy to apportion blame.

Indeed, Leo Burnett’s Trad also hit out at his fellow agencies, suggesting that the undercutting tactics put in place by some were ruining things for everyone.

“I think we’ve blamed it on others, but we have to blame it on ourselves – the agencies and the groups. Because some of us are ready to go and buy the client for any price. In some cases we say the clients are taking advantage of the agencies and calling nine agencies to come and pitch,” said Trad.

“Yes, but in so many cases the clients are not choosing agencies because of added value, but because of the very low prices that some groups are ready to go down to, and get the client at any price,” he added.

We’ll let you, our kindly readers, play the game of “Guess Who He Was Referring To”. Given the inter-agency politics that make life in this industry just so much fun, we can take a couple of guesses in the privacy of our own little minds.

Less ambiguous was the later criticism around the question of how to present credible creative awards. The “one agency” at the centre of the Lynx fiasco (that’s Fortune Promoseven, in case anyone had forgotten) came in for a couple of potshots, but the awards organisers came in for heavier criticism, for failing to deal .

“We should point fingers – if somebody is doing it, and it is a malpractice and it is obvious to all, the people responsible should not be allowed to enter the awards next year. If we are not accountable... ok, it’s nice to sit and talk about morality and integrity and all this – it means a lot to some, it doesn’t mean a lot to all,” said Trad.

“So the organisers should be blunt enough to say there is a mechanism; those who don’t follow the rules are out. Everybody is doing it – why in the MENA region don’t we want to do it? Everybody is doing it. At the end of the day everyone should be responsible for their own doings,” he added, in an apparent swipe at Lynx organisers Cannes Lions, which recently failed to follow The One Show and others in promising to ban agencies and creatives that enter scam or copied work.

We had feared that the IAA forum, representing the majority of the big agency groups, would turn into a yawn-fest, with each Boss trotting out a few bland platitudes or non-controversial “controversy”.

For the most part this didn’t happen, and while in such a public forum we could never hope go get anything close to the full picture, the audience did at least get a good sense of where the Bosses stood on the issues discussed (which also included the less-electrifying subjects of “future leaders”, recruitment and retention of talent, and was 2009 a bad year. Feel free to guess that last one).

Overall, the impression we got from our advertising overlords was that they were pretty pissed off, about a range of issues – especially the feeling that agencies have been left holding the debt baby.

IAA president Lance De Masi, who moderated the panel, did his best to keep things moving along from topic to topic, and keep the Bosses in line. We might have been tempted to run longer with certain topics, such as the debt issue, at the expense of some of the fluffier questions – as in fact Raja Trad tried to do at one point, as he asked for right-of-reply – but we can understand the desire to keep such a potentially difficult forum under a tight rein.

At the end of the discussion, De Masi and others made noises suggesting there might be future events along similar lines. While no-one dissented, we’d imagine it might be a struggle to get these people in a room and on a stage together again – but it would be good to see.