Madison Avenue Manslaughter Quotes

“Acknowledge and accept that clients are governed by shareholder value concerns, and that the mission of the agency needs to be refocused on helping clients improve brand growth and profitability. Agency creativity is a factor that contributes to delivering results, but creativity is a factor, not an end in itself. Agency creativity no longer delivers results automatically, as it did during much of the Creative Revolution. It’s time to abandon the tired “we’re creative” marketing positioning associated with the creative paradigm, and to step up to the challenge of saying “we’re committed to delivering results.”
― Michael Farmer, Madison Avenue Manslaughter: An Inside View of Fee-Cutting Clients, Profithungry Owners and Declining Ad Agencies

“The real agency problem resides in the C-suite of ad agencies, and it is to the C-suite that we must turn to find leadership for the required changes. This won’t happen unless agency CEOs finally admit that poor pricing is the fundamental problem that must be solved. Agency CEOs have the responsibility to solve the price problem. It’s time to get started.”
― Michael Farmer, Madison Avenue Manslaughter: An Inside View of Fee-Cutting Clients, Profithungry Owners and Declining Ad Agencies

“The auditing of time sheet hours is a time wasting process that can be eliminated if contracts focus on paying agencies for deliverables rather than for man-hours.”
― Michael Farmer, Madison Avenue Manslaughter: An Inside View of Fee-Cutting Clients, Profithungry Owners and Declining Ad Agencies

“Agencies need to initiate the creation of marketing and strategic performance partnerships that see themselves and their clients as co-equal partners, each with specific responsibilities and roles, each of them committed to finding successful, results-generating marketing paths for the advertisers’ brands.”
― Michael Farmer, Madison Avenue Manslaughter: An Inside View of Fee-Cutting Clients, Profithungry Owners and Declining Ad Agencies

“Creativity is to ads as product quality is to cars, airplanes and electronic equipment – it’s absolutely necessary, and it needs to be built-in to the product, but it is not the only factor that matters, and it hardly provides sustainable differentiation from one agency to another. True, one agency will be “hot” for a given period and will grow and win business (one thinks of Crispin Porter + Bogusky or mcgarrybowen in recent years), but then the wheel turns, and the hot creative agencies of today become targets for other upstarts – like Droga5, 72andSunny, or Anomaly – and are eventually superseded in the same way that professional tennis stars are eventually vanquished at Wimbledon.”
― Michael Farmer, Madison Avenue Manslaughter: An Inside View of Fee-Cutting Clients, Profithungry Owners and Declining Ad Agencies

“Who is responsible for an agency’s operational response to growing workloads and declining fees? In today’s agency culture, it’s everyone… and no one. The agency management culture is fragmented and divided. Everyone does his/her own thing. An integrated counter-attack is hard to organize, and in practice, it simply does not happen. At the end of the year, the finance director has the ultimate responsibility to deliver the agency’s profit margin, and this is often done through cost reductions – a blunt instrument, indeed, but the laissez-faire culture does not allow for much fine-tuning during the year. The agency management culture is a barrier to change. It”
― Michael Farmer, Madison Avenue Manslaughter: An Inside View of Fee-Cutting Clients, Profithungry Owners and Declining Ad Agencies

“Accountability for agency operations is fragmented. Each office in a network is a separate profit center. Each department in an office self-defines its missions. Creative heads focus on creativity; finance directors focus on headcounts, overhead and budgeted/ actual costs and profits; client heads manage the service that they provide to their ‘disorganized’ clients and keep them coming back for more. (Despite this there seem to be very few happy clients.) Managing”
― Michael Farmer, Madison Avenue Manslaughter: An Inside View of Fee-Cutting Clients, Profithungry Owners and Declining Ad Agencies

“Agency turnaround plans must be developed by agency top management teams and carried out with vigor throughout their agencies, with a goal to develop the full support and engagement of client heads and their client service teams. This will not be easy, since these plans will require an executive leadership style that has little precedent in most agencies’ history. The requirement for senior executives to manage agency operations with a tougher mindset is inconsistent with the laissez-faire style associated with agency self-organization, which has been the traditional way agencies have been run to date. Leadership”
― Michael Farmer, Madison Avenue Manslaughter: An Inside View of Fee-Cutting Clients, Profithungry Owners and Declining Ad Agencies

“Procurement sets fees based on a negotiated agreement about agency headcounts and costs, and (separately) marketing generates workloads for the agencies. Agencies, who measure client health through profitability measures alone, have no rigorous way to factor in client workloads. TABLE”
― Michael Farmer, Madison Avenue Manslaughter: An Inside View of Fee-Cutting Clients, Profithungry Owners and Declining Ad Agencies

“Poor leadership” is a major cause of job dissatisfaction and low morale. More than half of those with low morale rated the leadership at their company as “inadequate.”34”
― Michael Farmer, Madison Avenue Manslaughter: An Inside View of Fee-Cutting Clients, Profithungry Owners and Declining Ad Agencies

“Digital technology did not really lend itself to a simple division of labor between creative (generating the ideas) and production (executing the ideas). In an increasing number of cases, creativity was all in the execution, especially in YouTube, Facebook and Twitter. Balkanization”
― Michael Farmer, Madison Avenue Manslaughter: An Inside View of Fee-Cutting Clients, Profithungry Owners and Declining Ad Agencies

“The cultural divides within the advertising industry became wider when web pages became part of the marketing mix, beginning in 1995. Early web pages were like printed catalogs, and traditional advertising agencies knew how to design catalogs – they were just pictures and words in a different medium, right? The rub was that web pages seemed to clients and agencies more like the domain of software folk, like computer programmers, rather than the domain of traditional copywriters and art directors. An automotive company that wanted to put up web pages to help consumers choose car models and features was more likely to go to a group of programmers than to a traditional agency. The web production costs were exceptionally high, too – the hours spent by web designers and programmers far outstripped the creative hours spent on catalogs. Wasn’t the business of web design (and later, web advertising) a separate business? Traditional”
― Michael Farmer, Madison Avenue Manslaughter: An Inside View of Fee-Cutting Clients, Profithungry Owners and Declining Ad Agencies

“Balkanization is a feature of the ad agency industry, but it is not a universal phenomenon across all service industries. Somehow, management consulting firms (again!) expanded their technical capabilities and specialties under one brand name. They added specialist consultants, to be sure, but at the same time, they expect their senior partners to become adept at understanding a growing number of disciplines.”
― Michael Farmer, Madison Avenue Manslaughter: An Inside View of Fee-Cutting Clients, Profithungry Owners and Declining Ad Agencies

“Ironically, the increase in numbers of the strategic planners had the effect of releasing the client service people from any previous responsibilities they had for brand strategic thinking – leaving them free simply to coordinate with their clients and give them all the service they needed. One”
― Michael Farmer, Madison Avenue Manslaughter: An Inside View of Fee-Cutting Clients, Profithungry Owners and Declining Ad Agencies

“There was a new trend for agencies to hire and parade before their clients “strategic planners,” an ideal originally imported from the UK; but these were not strategists in the same way that management consultants were strategists. Instead, agency strategic planners were experts in customer segmentation and behavior, excellent at designing market research and reading the results of market research reports. The planners were called, in some quarters, “the conscience of the consumer” – they upheld long-term brand values on behalf of consumers and helped to resist any attempts by the creative department to go “off brand” in the pursuit of cute ideas that would dilute “brand values.” In short, the strategic planners were consumer experts, brand developers and brand policemen. They were an important innovation, but they hardly signaled new strategic directions for ad agencies, and their efforts did not have the slightest impact on their clients’ concerns about achieving improved shareholder value. Ironically,”
― Michael Farmer, Madison Avenue Manslaughter: An Inside View of Fee-Cutting Clients, Profithungry Owners and Declining Ad Agencies

“Shareholder value became, from the 1990s onwards, a driver of management consulting success and, somewhat sadly, of advertising agency marginalization.”
― Michael Farmer, Madison Avenue Manslaughter: An Inside View of Fee-Cutting Clients, Profithungry Owners and Declining Ad Agencies

“Agencies missed the significance of “shareholder value” and the change in priorities that it represented to their clients. They assumed, perhaps, that creativity and big ideas were eternal verities – that they were what clients needed under any circumstances. Shareholder value was just another management trend, buzzword of the month – nothing to worry about. The”
― Michael Farmer, Madison Avenue Manslaughter: An Inside View of Fee-Cutting Clients, Profithungry Owners and Declining Ad Agencies

“The obsession with quarterly earnings came about because personal compensation was increasingly tied to what happened to the share price. Improving market capitalization became the number one job for senior executives. Success would lead to personal wealth. Sadly,”
― Michael Farmer, Madison Avenue Manslaughter: An Inside View of Fee-Cutting Clients, Profithungry Owners and Declining Ad Agencies

“The cozy relationship between chief executives and advertising agencies had unravelled, as other strategic advisers like investment bankers and strategic management consultants jumped to the head of the queue. The”
― Michael Farmer, Madison Avenue Manslaughter: An Inside View of Fee-Cutting Clients, Profithungry Owners and Declining Ad Agencies

“It was never mentioned at the time, but the widespread pursuit of shareholder value initiatives put marketing in the back seat among other strategic priorities. There were easier ways of growing the top- and bottom-lines than by gambling on marketing. Marketing was uncertain and difficult in the recession-prone, post-Golden-Age decades.”
― Michael Farmer, Madison Avenue Manslaughter: An Inside View of Fee-Cutting Clients, Profithungry Owners and Declining Ad Agencies

“Recession, advertising slow-downs, media spin-offs, procurement department investigations, client globalization initiatives, fee-based remuneration schemes and holding company ownership added significant complexity to ad agency operations by 1990. The simplicity of the Golden Age and the Creative Revolution was long gone, whether recognized or not.”
― Michael Farmer, Madison Avenue Manslaughter: An Inside View of Fee-Cutting Clients, Profithungry Owners and Declining Ad Agencies

“Holding companies did not kill all the fun, to be sure, but their involvement was like that of a sober spouse at a cocktail party, reminding you of tomorrow’s hangover if you indulge too much.”
― Michael Farmer, Madison Avenue Manslaughter: An Inside View of Fee-Cutting Clients, Profithungry Owners and Declining Ad Agencies

“Jules Verne’s protagonist Phileas Fogg burned his ship’s furniture for fuel to reach Liverpool on his way around the world in 80 days. There is no Liverpool within reach for today’s big ad agencies.”
― Michael Farmer, Madison Avenue Manslaughter: An Inside View of Fee-Cutting Clients, Profithungry Owners and Declining Ad Agencies

“This is an industry that no longer reflects strategically how to create value in the face of disruptive change.”
― Michael Farmer, Madison Avenue Manslaughter: An Inside View of Fee-Cutting Clients, Profithungry Owners and Declining Ad Agencies

“What has my readers scratching their heads, though, is why advertisers, whose cumulative actions have painted ad agencies into a corner, marginalizing their agencies as partners, do not see any relationship between their poor brand performance and the commoditization of agency services and fees.”
― Michael Farmer, Madison Avenue Manslaughter: An Inside View of Fee-Cutting Clients, Profithungry Owners and Declining Ad Agencies

“Ad agencies continue to believe that improved creativity is the answer for agency and client problems.”
― Michael Farmer, Madison Avenue Manslaughter: An Inside View of Fee-Cutting Clients, Profithungry Owners and Declining Ad Agencies