フレネミース by Ken Auletta

After five years in Tokyo, The Rittenhouses have moved back to New York.

And which English-language book did I read first?

“Frenemies, The Epic Disruption of the Ad Business” by veteran New Yorker magazine writer Ken Auletta.

読んでいましたか？

If not, here’s a quick synopsis. 

Chapter 1 opens with fire.

Former CEO of Mediacom, Jon Mandel, makes a featured appearance at the ANA’s 2015 conference and tells the room that they are being cheated by their agencies because non-transparent rebates are being taken from media buys, and not passed back.

There is an ominous tone and the word “criminal extortion” is mentioned, though not in reference to any single agency or individual.

This is followed by a wave of client-agency reviews across the industry in which business relationships and practices are made more transparent. 

This book grabs you from the get-go.

Along the way many high-altitude industry names are dropped in a certain pattern. 

Martin Sorrell. Maurice Levy. Bob Greenberg. Carolyn Everson. Michael Kassan. 

Procter & Gamble. Coca-Cola. Mondelez. Delta. Bank of America. MediaLink.

Michael Kassan? MediaLink?

Aside from this somewhat overly-friendly and perhaps non-objective treatment of Kassan and MediaLink (at times Auletta describes Kassan as if they are in love with each other), the book is generally well-observed and reported.

A few favorites:

1. Programmatic consumption. When AI agents work on behalf of consumers to make purchase decisions, it will have a profound impact on marketing communications. Very little is known about how to market to AI agents, but presumably they are not as responsive to emotional appeals as people are. And they probably watch a lot less network television.

2. R/GA’s business model is super-diversified, including a “connected spaces” architectural practice that emerged from the agency's own spatial design needs. The backstory reminded me of how AWS started as a result of Amazon’s enormous cloud computing requirements. The interviews with Bob Greenberg alone are worth the price of the book.

3. Facebook’s Client Council and Creative Council were an excellent way to take advice directly from key consituents and also to stake out territory between marketers and agencies, rather than downstream. So smart.

4. Sir Martin Sorrell’s family name was changed from Spitzberg to Sorrell due to fears of anti-semitism. It makes me feel very differently about the life of privileges (Cambridge, Harvard education, etc.) that I associated with him before. I’m still not a big fan since he took a huge bonus the same year that my pension was outsourced.

One missed opportunity:

In my opinion, Auletta could have paid more attention to the issue of speculative, non-revenue-producing work expected of agencies when they participate in new business pitches. It came up, but it was given little space. In aggregate, as observed by past chairman of the 4A’s Bill Koenigsberg, the agency review process can feel unfair and at times excessive. Certainly an important dynamic in the Frenemy cycle, that Auletta otherwise captures so well in this book.

買ってください！.