Andy Pearch

Agency

Non-fiction Extracts

Client Service

Suzy is in her seventies and lives in a yellow brick villa – a slice of provincial France in the borough of Hammersmith. Her husband opens the gate and explains she is doing some gardening. There she sits, with her back to me, in a pair of faded denim jeans, surrounded by pots. In one hand she holds a trowel, in the other a cigarette, which dangles above a glass ashtray.

In the long hot summer of 1976, Suzy put on her prettiest frock and rode the bus from Battersea to 197 Knightsbridge, the offices of advertising agency Benton & Bowles, just a stone’s throw from Hyde Park. She was going to meet Allan, a former metals trader, who ran its media department, and Gordon, his number two.

Her recollections of that meeting are foggy; she remembers the phones ringing endlessly, Gordon’s chain-smoking and the interview ending abruptly. How very un-advertising.

The next day Allan called to tell her she’d got the job as a trainee media buyer and there began a working partnership which lasted 20 years.

When she joined the advertising industry, there were very few women in media buying, and none in senior positions. She knew that she would have to be twice as aggressive as any man to be taken seriously. She didn’t care who she upset. People would take notice of her, and she was going to get what she wanted.

Every Friday night Allan would question her endlessly on her TV spot schedules, which taught her the value of attention to detail. She learnt to weigh up every purchase, and this earned her the grudging respect of her male colleagues.

Suzy admired her diminutive boss, who drilled into his team the importance of keeping close to their clients. She acted on his advice; most nights she was out entertaining or networking. She enjoyed life in London and found she didn’t need much sleep.

One of her first assignments was to buy the TV campaign for the movie release of The Stud, starring Joan Collins. She was expected to chaperone Ms Collins at an evening event. Unusually for Suzy, she decided not to attend.

Allan called her in the next morning and announced curtly, “I’m docking you a day’s pay”.

“Sorry, what for?”

“For non-participation”.

“What do you mean?”

“Because you didn’t go to Joan’s event last night”.

Suzy was furious and stormed out. I’ll show you what participation means! It was the first time anyone had said no to her, and it had a profound effect. The experience taught her that clients come before everything; your personal life, your family, everything.

“Nothing like that had ever happened to me, you know,” she says to me now. “I’d lived this rather spoilt life.”

Allan had taught her to be obsessed with client service. “Clients will forgive most things, but never poor results”.

He called her back in a couple of months later and said “I’m going to give you that day’s pay back. Off you go”.

Suzy is a one-off. She smokes like a chimney, she drinks like a distillery, she is a voracious workaholic, but above all, she is a compulsive networker; her life is a Who’s Who of the Great British marketing patriarchy. She has dined with them, stayed at their homes, holidayed with them, and drunk them under the table.

Suzy drops names more frequently than she taps ash from her cigarettes. She spills the gossip on everyone she mentions:

His wife was as mad as a hatter.

We called her Aunt Sally.

He was useless. A nice man but an idiot.

I’d say, oh fuck it, here comes Charles Manson.

He’s just a coke head in my book, and a selfish one at that.

She has no filter, and I’m hanging on every word.

For Suzy, there was no ceiling. It was an advantage being a woman in a man’s world. She could hold her own in male company; she was well-informed, she loved her cricket, she held her drink, she littered her sentences with expletives. She also had charm; she was a woman to whom men were drawn.

Now she is at an age where her powers and her network are inevitably shrinking. She attends a lot of funerals. We reminisce about a mutual client, who started out importing tubs of yoghurt from Germany, selling them out of his van to groceries; an enterprise which eventually became Muller Dairy, the largest dairy supplier in the UK.    

“God, I cried at his memorial”, she says. “Sorry, I’m of that age, people dying. So anyway, where did I get to?”

We return to her story.

When Benton & Bowles were taken over in 1985, Allan was invited to be re-interviewed for his job. Indignant, he walked out of the building, taking his team with him. He sat his colleagues down one by one at a nearby pub, and scrawled his signature on a piece of paper, which he handed to them, announcing “Here’s your contract”.

The next day their client walked into the agency reception and demanded all his media buying files. Twenty minutes later, the client carried out half a dozen boxes and handed them to Allan, who was waiting on the pavement outside.

Panic ensued in the corridors of Benton & Bowles’ management suite. They needed a damage limitation plan. Suzy was picked out as the weakest link. She received an invitation from her CEO to have lunch at the Savoy.

Halfway through the main course, her host stood up to make an announcement.

“Suzy, we want you to stay. We really do.”

He held out his hand and beckoned her to the window. Parked down below was a pink Porsche 911 Carrera.

Suzy laughs, “If it had been a Mercedes the outcome might have been different!”

In fact, they had misjudged Suzy. She was the most likely to go. The rest of the lunch was a write-off. Allan, Suzy and their band of merry media buyers walked away with 90% of Benton & Bowles’ media billings.

She gets up from her seat and reaches into a cupboard behind her.

“Would you like something to drink? I always have a glass of red at midday.”

Langan’s

It’s noon and Café Murano is getting busier now. I pour John Steele another cup of tea and tell him I need to delve into the next chapter of his life history, when he did his first international business deal. He looks tired. He excuses himself to take a comfort break, and while I await his return, I imagine the scene:

In autumn of 1993, John Steele was dining at Langan’s, Piccadilly, with two Italian gentlemen, one of which I recognised as Mario Venatti, who was looking disparagingly at the Steak & Ale pie before him. Langan’s was the restaurant of choice for the doyens of the advertising establishment, the brainchild of chef Peter Langan, restauranteur Richard Shepherd and the actor Michael Caine. Much of adland’s dealmaking was conducted there. Red neon signs, like mastheads, sat across its large square windows, encouraging passers-by to peer into the bright interior to spy on the diners at its tables. The walls were covered in Anglo-French artwork – Hockney, Freud and Bacon were hung alongside French advertising prints. It was an exciting place to dine, to see and to be seen.

A trio of sixty-somethings, the literal heavyweights of TV airtime sales, occupied the best table at the far end of the room. They were huddled in clandestine conversation, tucking extra-large napkins into their shirts as their Chateaubriand arrived. Legend has it the three men once squeezed into a hotel lift, only to discover their combined weights were well beyond its capacity. Thinking better of it, they ascended one by one.

The sales chiefs acknowledged John Steele, seated two tables down to the side, underneath a cluster of framed prints. It was a rarity to see him; he was always out of the country these days. Steele and Venatti looked into each other’s eyes: the merger was agreed. The Milan-based outfit would become Steele’s first and largest European agency, the start of a collection. With the creation of Europe’s single market just around the corner, the deal appeared well-timed. Steele was determined to expand his international footprint as fast as possible.

At a window table to the left, I spotted high-flying Andy Maze, florid muscles bulging underneath a floral shirt, as he crushed half a lemon onto his grilled fish. Judging by his highly aroused state, he was out entertaining a prospective customer. His agency’s anabolic growth, driven by eye-watering media deals promised to new clients, was one of the reasons ITV’s top brass were discussing a merger.    

I studied them all from a distance at a table for four by the entrance. I was toiling away in the basement of Steele’s agency at the time, at the bottom of the food chain. Eager to progress, but ill-equipped to do so, I felt stuck, preoccupied by the feeling that I’d made a huge mistake by setting foot in this world. What I failed to realise then was that the balance of power in the advertising industry is in a continuous state of flux. Nothing stays the same for long. Sentiment and momentum can shift quickly, institutions can unravel, icons can be toppled.

Langan’s became a lot quieter after the Sales Directors merged themselves into early retirements. Their successors had little time for three course lunches. Andy Maze took his expense account elsewhere too, occupying the best table at the celebrity circuit’s new favourite eatery, The Ivy, a shorter walk from his office. 

Steele would never return to Langan’s. He was simply too busy courting media agencies outside the UK. By the decade’s end, he was running agencies in 28 countries with 1,900 employees on the payroll, but he would soon need to call in a big favour from ITV’s new sales bosses, to whom he was a stranger.

Aliens

Day One (a Monday)

“Hello, is that Mr Crowe?”

“Speaking”

“Oh hi. We met a few weeks back at Google. Can you come in tomorrow?”

Day Two

“You know what, Dan, I like you. I do.”

“OK, I sense there’s a but?”

“Yes. To the average Googler, you’re probably the devil incarnate.”

“Oh, why is that then?”

“You’re from old media, sitting here in a suit and tie. You’re the opposite of everything Google is”.

Reaching for his coat. “Well, sir, it’s been a pleasure to meet you, but I guess this is where I make my exit.”

“Goodbye Mr Crowe. Maybe see you around”.

Day Three

“Hello Mr Crowe.”

“Hello. You’re the person from Google, right?”

“Yes, that’s right”

(With irony) “So, you’re phoning me to tell me I’ve got the job?”

“No”

“Ah”

“No, we don’t think you’re right for that role.”

“OK. That’s. Disappointing”

“There’s another role here we’d like to talk to you about”

“Oh?”

“We’d like to invite you in again tomorrow.”

Day Five (Friday)

“Congratulations, Mr Crowe! Your contract will be sent to you this evening.”

“I’m absolutely thrilled. Can’t wait to get started.”

 “Actually, we’d like you to attend our global sales conference.”

“Fair enough. When does it start?”

“Monday, it’s in San Francisco. We’ve booked you on the plane out tomorrow. You’ll sign your contract there before joining us at the conference.”

Dan would be there. He could live with the chaos if he could feed off the adrenalin of his new employer.

Day Eight

Reads name badge. “Oh hi, Dan. I like your jacket. Very European. So, what do you do?”

Reads name badge. “Hi Eva. Actually, I think I’m your new boss.”

“But that’s…” looking at her colleague a couple of metres away, who is staring into her coffee cup. 

“Yeah, I know. I think she’s running the Nordics now”.

******

Google would change the shape, purpose, the entire order of the advertising ecosystem. Essentially, Google was a door opener. It made small, niche brands discoverable, and by doing so, it shifted power away from everything big, slow and physical. Google brought new audiences and consumers to brands that weren’t on the radar, sold by retailers which may have only existed for a few weeks.

Google made thousands of people into millionaires. It grew local enterprises into global businesses in the space of a few months, by dint of a few clicks. It broke down borders, turned local heroes into international icons. The only limitation was how fast you could get your website up and running, and how long it would take to load.

Dan tells me about a band of people from the hospitality industry, who asked if they could visit Google’s US HQ. When they arrived, they spent time getting to know Google’s systems, how they were all inter-connected, how their algorithms worked. They asked the right questions, what’s the best way to do this, what if we want to do that?

They created an online travel business, and within two years they were Google’s largest client globally. They owned the auction, raising the cost of entry for everyone else, which reinforced their position.

Google gave a precise answer to a vague question, not just one answer but several alternatives, and the brands that flowed down its pages weren’t always the brands you’d heard of. In so doing Google undermined brand equity, the magic barrier erected by the mega brands that advertising had taken years to build. Brands’ histories and their consumers’ memories were being unpicked.

Google threatened to unpick the media agency model too. Half of Google’s revenues came directly from a long tail of small to medium sized enterprises. The media agency networks only accounted for 10% of Google revenues. They had little or no leverage.

“You only pay each time the audience is interested in your business. Traditional media agencies couldn’t get their heads around it at all.”  Dan recalls.  

I understood their confusion. Unlike traditional media, where the available space is known, the price negotiated in advance and the ad copy dropped in later, a digital ad placement doesn’t exist until consumers engage with the content, only to disappear again the instant they move on to another page or site. There is no negotiation; the price of media is determined by an algorithm.

Google’s senior management didn’t trust agencies. They didn’t seem to like agencies. At weekly sales meetings, Dan would be asked how many clients his team had persuaded to ditch their agency and go direct. That was his measure of success. In 2005 Google scrapped agency commissions. It was a declaration of war by a company with a 3 percent market share.

Google replaced agency commission with a new scheme called Best Practice Funding, which was essentially a rebate rewarding clients if their share of spend exceeded their share of search queries. The target was set by an algorithm, driven off Google data. If you hit your volume target, you got your rebate. It was a brutal exercise in levelling up, coercing under-investing brands to match the earlier adopters. If media agencies wanted their rebate, they’d have to double, triple, quadruple their spending, and more. 

The rebates weren’t that big, but they were material for the agencies. And the money started to flow in. Another blow landed by Google. No-one had pushed agencies around like this before.

When Dan was appointed, it gave agencies hope. At last, here was someone they could work with, who understood their business.

As soon as he was behind his desk, another bombshell hit. Google scrapped Best Practice Funding. It had surpassed its goals; it was time for Google to change the rules of the game again. The agencies went ballistic. There was a big hole in their rebate revenue. Ski trips would have to be cancelled.

“I had to tell them we weren’t doing it anymore and get my arse kicked.”

He describes the scene.

“This is war, Dan.” 

“Guys, please don’t shoot the messenger.”

“But you ARE Google. The only person we know at Google is you. We don’t know any of those aliens”

“Guys, let’s go for lunch”

“Dan, we fucking HATE your business. We love you, we trust you, but we don’t trust a word that anyone says at Google”

“I guess lunch is off then?”

Google’s next move would raise the stakes even further. In 2007 it unveiled an agreement to buy DoubleClick, an automated platform for the buying and selling of digital display advertising, for $3.1bn. Industry rivals claimed it would give Google unprecedented control of the online advertising market.

US regulators concluded the deal was “unlikely to substantially lessen competition”. The decision created a global behemoth and strengthened America’s grip on the advertising market. Google was now the gatekeeper to performance marketing and brand advertising on the web. Its market capitalisation was $150bn, valuing it at more than eight times the size of Omnicom, America’s largest advertising holding company. By expanding the advertising market and automating its product, Google was weakening further the power of the Big Six. The agencies saw the writing on the wall. There was nowhere else to go, they’d better hitch a ride