Yearning for the days of Don Draper
Frenemies: The Epic Disruption of the Ad Business (and Everything Else), by Ken Auletta
It is telling that one of the most prominent and memorable figures in Ken Auletta’s new book, Frenemies: The Epic Disruption of the Ad Business (and Everything Else), is Don Draper, the fictional executive at the center of the celebrated television series Mad Men. Draper, a 1960s ad man whose brilliant creative campaigns made clients swoon, is a convenient stand-in for the advertising industry of yore, a simpler time when corporations paid agencies big money to reach consumers through newspapers, magazines, billboards and the emerging 30-second spot on television.
The real-life advertising and marketing executives Auletta quotes in Frenemies talk about Draper like he’s an actual person.
“Back in Don Draper’s day you had three major networks. You had people’s attention. People had fewer choices,” Beth Comstock, a former General Electric executive whose portfolio included market- ing and advertising, tells Auletta.
“The biggest difference from Don Draper days is data,” says Keith Weed, Unilever’s chief marketing and communications officer.
Martin Sorrell, the former CEO of advertising conglomerate WPP, adds, “Seventy-five per cent of our revenues comes from things – $15 billion of nearly $20 billion – Don Draper wouldn’t recognize.”
You can hardly blame today’s marketing executives for feeling a little nostalgic for a less-tumultuous time. The average tenure for a corporate chief marketing officer is less than four years, about half the shelf life of most CEOs. Publishers, facing declining revenue from traditional advertising, have started their own studios to create “native advertising” for clients, cutting out agencies. And the lifeblood of the business is no longer creativity – though commercials still have the ability to pull at heartstrings or go viral – but rather computers, which use algorithms to place advertising on websites and, as Unilever’s Weed notes, produce data that can be used to precisely target consumers to buy more stuff.
The challenge for Madison Avenue and its clients, of course, is that its partners in this new world – Google, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft – collect, control and manipulate far more information about consumers than agencies and marketers do. Sorrell applies the word frenemies, a portmanteau of friends and enemies, to describe the uneasy relationship between marketers and technology platforms, but there’s little doubt which parties have the upper hand.
Auletta’s book, completed before Facebook admitted that consulting firm Cambridge Analytica gained access to data on 87 million users, doesn’t go nearly deep enough into privacy concerns, despite an entire chapter titled The Privacy Time Bomb. He unquestioningly quotes Ricky Van Veen of Facebook as saying “privacy is overrated.”
Auletta zeroes in on Michael Kassan, founder of MediaLink, a consultancy that works with publishers, big brands, ad agencies and digital platforms. Kassan is an expedient choice to help guide the reader through the changing industry landscape, as his firm touches every part of the ecosystem.
Frenemies culminates in the 2017 sale of MediaLink to Ascential, a British company that owns the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. Kassan, described by Auletta as the “supreme power broker in the advertising and marketing industry,” fetched $207 million for MediaLink.
By contrast, Alphabet, Google’s parent company, is valued by the market at about $800 billion.