The 5 Most Important Ad Industry Stories of 2018

Don’t worry. Advertising will be here, in some form, as long as we humans remain driven by that undying urge to consume. A few brilliant souls will learn how to make it, and fewer still will make themselves rich from it.

Here are the most important industry stories of 2018, as chosen by Adweek’s Editor at Large with feedback from members of the agency community.

Time’s Up, #MeToo and Diet Madison Avenue

Misogyny and advertising have an unfortunate and well-documented history.

As RPA vp, creative director Sarah May Bates put it in an all-too-familiar refrain, “I know many women who have experienced physical and verbal harassment at work, but said nothing for fear they’d lose their jobs.”

This year, the conversation unquestionably changed; whether that change was dramatic enough to permanently impact the industry for the better remains a matter for debate. #MeToo officially hit the business in December 2017, when The Martin Agency fired CCO Joe Alexander. A long-held spark then became an open flame that proved marketing was not immune to the movement that has taken down top personalities in media, entertainment, politics and professional sports.

“We saw name after name get outed on the [anonymous] Instagram account Diet Madison Avenue,” said Bates. Few of the industry’s most notable agencies went unscathed as the topic drowned out all others for the first few months of the year.

In a great cosmic coincidence, WPP reached a settlement in the Erin Johnson sexual harassment case just as the #MeToo conversation hit its peak in April.

That first phase ended almost as soon as it began in mid-year when Diet Madison Avenue, which sparked an entirely new debate about punishment and online anonymity, went silent after being sued for defamation. Executive firings continued around the world with little or no context, but the mood reflected uncertainty over what could and should come next.

“There was a lot of soul searching and action planning against how we create more inclusive and equitable environments in our industry,” said Barbarian CEO Cathy Butler, who described the shift as “long overdue, and critical to our industry’s survival in the future.”

Beyond the headlines, dozens of women donated hundreds of hours to Time’s Up Advertising (and other efforts) at little or no benefit to themselves. But systemic change is slow and bumpy, as we saw when one of the industry’s most visible women agreed to step down from the group’s steering committee after acknowledging that she had not been completely honest regarding her decision to hire a former agency lead for a big pitch that ultimately went nowhere.

Why was this all happening at once? An appealing narrative held that our newly conscious culture would no longer allow the almost exclusively male egos who long held free rein over the ad business to act with impunity. But as much as we wanted that story to be true, it didn’t always add up. One couldn’t help but make the easy comparison to Mad Men, that self-indulgent portrait of an abused and abusive man whose final revelation held that nothing much matters as long as you can find new ways to sell sugar water to teenagers.

So has the era of invincible executives truly ended? Brace yourself for an unfortunate truth, because most of the worst offenders will never be outed, and their victims’ stories will remain untold. For now, the answer to the big question may lie in the number who have publicly acknowledged and apologized for their behavior over the past year: zero.

Frenemies forever

One thing is now crystal clear: Facebook deals in data; more than many of its 2 billion-plus users ever knew possible.

This might not have come as a surprise to the platform’s partners, but it shocked much of the rest of the world. March’s Cambridge Analytica reveal began a nine-month series of controversies and congressional appearances that fed plenty of #DeleteYourAccount stories and led some prominent marketers to question whether Facebook could be trusted to manage even the mundane data of so many customers.

Carla Serrano, CEO of Publicis New York and chief strategy officer of the larger Publicis Groupe, said 2018’s most significant story concerned “how our personal data has been mismanaged and manipulated for commerce by platforms and companies.” She then called upon the agency world to “hold the moral high ground in service of our clients.”

How feasible is this position?

As the year drew to an end, Initiative CEO Mat Baxter wrote in a public LinkedIn post that he would be “advising clients to stay off the platform entirely” until the loss of ad dollars could facilitate a public reckoning and attendant policy changes. For his trouble, he earned an even more public rebuke from both Facebook’s vp of global marketing solutions, Carolyn Everson, and IPG CEO and chairman Michael Roth.

Maybe agency executives will soon feel free to criticize Facebook. But that day does not yet appear to have arrived.

The duopoly remains fully intact. The vast majority of consumers still don’t bother to read agreements before clicking “accept” to mainline ad-supported content straight into their cerebral cortexes. Facebook’s user growth may have hit a wall, but that fact almost certainly has more to do with market saturation than outrage over Cambridge Analytica or data sharing deals.

“The coming regulations will be a trim, not a buzz cut,” said RPA chief creative officer Joe Baratelli.

But at least that scrutiny has arrived. Facebook has now earned a permanent space under the microscope–and since Mark Zuckerberg’s company controls approximately 20 percent of the U.S. digital advertising market, whatever happens next will undoubtedly be one of the biggest stories of 2019 as well.

Turmoil at the top for WPP

Matters of personal finance, rather than alleged misbehavior, led to the resignation of a man who spent three decades as the de facto face of advertising.

Martin Sorrell continues to deny everything save for the fact that he might have held his own employees to exacting standards. But his sudden fall was one more reminder that the old rules no longer apply—at least when one’s board of directors votes another way.

Still, the bleeding continued.

“The biggest agency story of the year is the chaos that has surrounded WPP,” said managing partner Gosha Khuchua of Fetch. “Clients are increasingly looking for leaner and more agile networks.”

Sorrell’s successor, Mark Read, quickly began the unenviable job of turning advertising’s biggest brand into just that sort of network after a rushed September introduction. In another unfortunate coincidence, his official appointment came just days after WPP’s largest client, Ford, picked Wieden + Kennedy New York to lead its comeback campaign.

A series of additional losses including United Airlines, American Express and GSK left WPP playing defense, with polite British investors driven to voice their concerns and Read aggressively wielding the consolidation card.

The new CEO’s strategy was obvious to anyone familiar with his work at Wunderman: focus on data to strengthen the network’s larger tech-driven offering. He ended the year with a string of bold moves including the consolidation of U.S. healthcare agencies, mergers of VML and Y&R and JWT and Wunderman, and the elimination of several hundred jobs in a three-year turnaround plan.

There, all along, was Martin Sorrell, building his lineup and biding his time while sniping from the sidelines. In July, he outbid his former company for MediaMonks, and in September he said WPP had “wasted” time looking for his successor.

Out with the old and in with the indie

“In yet another example of how ‘digital eats the world,’ JWT, the world’s oldest ad agency, was merged with Wunderman this year to form Wunderman Thompson,” said Isobar U.S. vp Chris Hogue.

The Dentsu Aegis executive credited Read with having the “chutzpah to do what was needed,” calling JWT a “dinosaur” that “tried to rely on [its] storied history and traditional processes for too long” and describing its merger as “a forced evolution.”

He was not the only industry leader on the agency or client side who felt this way in a year that saw even more brands look to justify their ad agency budgets, pivoting to project work and signing with leaner indie shops. When even Budweiser announces that it will no longer retain an agency of record, the trend is official.

But there’s still plenty of work out there for the right players.

“Slim agencies have taken so much business from holding companies that one could surmise by reading the trade press that the industry is in dire straits,” said Chris Denny, founder and president of Santa Rosa, Calif.-based The Engine Is Red. Marcus Thomas partner and chief client officer Mark Bachman added that daily stories about holding company struggles “seemed to overshadow the fact that hundreds of brands are doing business building campaigns with hundreds of progressive independent agencies.”

Note, for example, that three of Adweek’s four Agency of the Year winners were independents.

Derek van den Bosch, chief operating officer of RED Interactive, said, “More than ever, brands seek specialty partners and are comfortable taking on and managing a roster of agencies.” Some, like Playstation, will pick a group of winning shops and then pay them to pitch against each other.

Canny executives could follow the Sorrell model and find ways to all but replace those traditional agencies by buying up all the services around them, subsequently assigning content creation work to MediaMonks and handling buying via MightyHive. “Leave it to the man that built the modern holding company model to totally upend it,” said Obviously CEO and founder Mae Karwowski.

The myth of in-housing as a cure-all also took a hit this year with Intel and Thomson Reuters walking back their Pepsi-flavored ambitions, while other clients discovered that media operations like programmatic are not as simple as they seem.

Yes, the consultancies are still coming. PMG CEO George Popstefanov called Adweek’s report on Accenture bidding to acquire MDC Partners “an amazing shift in market behavior, despite the outcome” that signals an “existential threat to traditional agencies.”

But Denny argued that “a cadre of new outfits built by people” who previously ran big accounts at name brand agencies spent 2018 learning to make more with less while teaching the industry at large to do the same. They may not all be Wieden + Kennedy, but the names that survive will be better positioned than predecessors weighed down by legacy bureaucracies.

And as The Tombras Group president Dooley Tombras put it when speaking on behalf of mid-size agency owners, “If you’re worried about the future of the holding company shop you’re at, we’re hiring.”

It takes an Army of Papa Johns

In an industry famous for uneven relationships, two stood out this year: the U.S. Army’s bumpy 12-year ride with IPG and Papa John’s partnerships with everyone trying to save John Schnatter from himself.

The stories could not, at first glance, be more different. One centered on a man who casually dropped the N-word, admitted it, then accused the agency paid to help him recover from his previous racially-insensitive fumble of attempting to “extort” millions from the chain. Maybe he should have just gone with Kanye.

The other concerned the U.S. government spending hundreds of millions in taxpayer dollars on programs that may or may not have helped recruit new soldiers while dealing with complaints from lawmakers, investigating an allegedly improper relationship, and earning a costly rebuke from the Trump Administration.

Both stories led to account losses. But only one included a “do not engage” list of Twitter antagonists and a group of ads made from re-purposed Schnatter footage that most of the public sadly never saw.

Here’s to keeping things every bit as interesting in 2019.