What’s that phrase? Oh yes. What goes around, comes around.

In media terms, I am now officially long in the tooth. 30 years plus behind me. Man and boy and all that (to indulge another cliché).

When I started, “media agencies” weren’t agencies, they were “buying shops”. They were rebels. The non-PC rule breakers, who dared to step outside of the full service model and work for less than the full 15%.

That positioned our sector as perhaps, only one rung above Estate Agents on the ladder of reputable professions.

Then, as the 90’s arrived, media moved up the client-side agenda with the realisation that such a significant slice of their budget warranted a lot more of their time and attention (though with the benefit of hindsight, not enough!).

In parallel, the agency groups swallowed their pride and adopted an “if you can’t beat them, join them” attitude by launching their own media brands, as the fore-runners to the global networks we see today, built upon price incentives, incredulously low fees and, as we now all know, massive media owner kickbacks.

25 years later and, despite it being the worst kept industry secret, the bubble finally burst for the networks when Mr Jon Mandel lifted the lid at the 2015 ANA conference in the US. He basically revealed the degree to which they had been using their clients’ spending to drive sur-commissions and over-riders.

My heart bled for them. Not.

As a long established independent, we have never undertaken an agency deal which guaranteed a volume or share to any one sales house in return for undeclared remuneration. How can you possibly retain planning neutrality when your first priority is not to your clients, but to the media deals which need to be fed?

Compound this with how the networks also approached the world of programmatic media. Pre-defining significant portions of digital budgets to be run through in-house platforms, generating enormous margins at their own discretion.

What started out as a case of “shock horror” surrounding a complete lack of transparency, soon turned into an advertiser backlash against “fake” digital impressions, brand safety concerns and a fundamental erosion of client/agency trust.

So surely, now the cat was most definitely out of the bag, clients would wake up to the fact that it is the independent agencies who are best placed to offer the neutrality and transparency they now seek? For the first time, I hoped the virtue of “independence” would become a clear differentiating benefit; “move your business to a media partner who is focused on its clients’ best interests, not its own share price”.

Has this happened?

Not as far as I can see.

Why?

I suspect because the whole of the media buying sector has been tarred with the same brush. The client response to the revelations has not generally been to seek agencies with completely different DNA, who operate on a foundation of trust, but to adopt FTE fee models, reduce margin and pay expensive lawyers to write water tight contracts – making life difficult for everyone.   

Those discredited networks have slid a long way down a slippery snake and appear to have taken the rest of us with them.

Well I for one intend to start climbing back up that “reputable” ladder, by preaching the Indie gospel …….. Amen.

Paul Phelps (AMS Media Group)