Best of the Week: Expo, Exit, Brexit and Grexit

[View web version]( BEST OF THE WEEK And another thing... Welcome to Best of the Week, mostly written in a relatively quiet corner of an expo hall in London’s grimy Kensington Olympia. I’m in town for Marketing Week Live. As a Brit who’s mostly been away for the last decade and a half, it’s discomfiting being back. And if I’ve learned one thing in my hotel room, it’s that Britain’s commercial TV now consists mainly of people shouting at each other. From Piers Morgan arguing with his co-hosts at 6am, to the relationship confrontations of The Jeremy Kyle Show, to the braying of ITV’s Loose Women, British morning television is the equivalent of being on the edge of a pub fight. It’s intriguing to watch, but it isn’t going to do you any good. And that’s before we get to the afternoon back-to-back reruns of Gordon Ramsay shouting at inept hoteliers, berating incompetent restaurateurs and slamming imbecilic cooks, depending on which of his many franchises is being repeated. Then there’s the looping news coverage of knife crime and the Brexit countdown. Is it good to be back? I’m not sure it’s home any more.. I never thought I’d say this, but thank god for the restraint of Australian television. Suddenly Married At First Sight seems tame. Weed on WPP So far on this trip, the Marketing Week Live session I’ve got the most out of was [a valedictory interview with marketing godfather Keith Weed](. Actually, godfather isn’t quite the right word. The chief marketing officer of Unilever, he’s too mild mannered for that. More of a benign uncle, really. This week saw him set out a pragmatic, pre-retirement “seven deadly sins” shopping list of the issues the industry needs to sort. I agree with every point. - The reduced quality of ads. With some exceptions (for instance, the John Lewis Elton John Christmas ad) I can’t think of a less exciting year locally and globally; - The murky world of influencer marketing. There are still a lot of chancers out there. But Weed was confident that in a year’s time, the sector will be a much cleaner place. We’ll see; - Concerns over data. Interesting to see Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg this week sending the strongest signal yet of taking the privacy issue seriously. And also signalling a pivot from open, shared content, to the private conversations taking place across messaging apps. That’s about to become a big theme, I suspect; - Brands funding “bad activity” including online fraud. As Weed pointed out, adtech cannot be excused as merely being the wild west any longer - it’s had long enough to sort itself out; - Fake news. Say no more; - Personalisation. As Weed put it, the point to start retargeting consumers with ads for leaf blowers is not the moment they’ve just bought one online. Very few people intend to start a collection of leaf blowers; - And bombardment of consumers with too many messages. Ditto. Shouting louder doesn’t necessarily shift product. Meanwhile, a further theme came through at the conference - the risk of leaning too heavily on data to drive marketing strategy, at the expense of insight. Across the event, marketers expressed worries that breakthrough ideas come through a creative leap. The idea can’t be found in the data - the purpose of the data should be to sanity check the idea. But there’s a risk that a generation of marketers is being trained out of being able to make the magic leap in the first place. Again, that feels like a theme we’ll return to. And, WPP would be wise to consider very carefully what Weed had to suggest, in his coded, kindly uncle way, about the need for his creative agencies to get their act together. Remember: He’s British. When a Brit says to you that your point of view is “interesting”, he thinks you’re talking nonsense. When he says “With the greatest respect”, he thinks you’re an idiot. And when he says his agencies “now needs to reinvent the creative leading edge”, he may well think their output sucks. WPP should take the hint, or risk losing one of its biggest clients. Unfucked Incidentally, if you do have an appetite for the debate on media agency models, PwC’s [Ben Shepherd had an excellent contribution to make in a piece for Mumbrella]( this week. Arguing that the media model is not, in fact, fucked, Ben suggested: “The significant shifts in media consumption, as well as rapid shifts of attention into ad free channels are important and extremely valuable areas to master for companies looking to increase revenue. This is a massive opportunity, but my belief is the industry needs to adapt rapidly to take advantage of these. Right now the industry is generally made up of entities that call themselves ‘media agencies’. But it doesn’t have to be. Those companies don’t have to keep awkwardly calling themselves agencies either. The term is no longer relevant or accurate.” Quite. StarcomMediavestSparkFoundryMatch449 Still with media agency models, this week we saw [Publicis announce one of those portfolio reshuffles which probably makes sense at a global level while managing to be simultaneously nonsensical locally](. Sometimes Mumbrella’s comment thread puts it best. As commenter Jon said: “So one of the agencies has been called StarcomMediavest, Mediavest and Spark Foundry in the past few years, and the other has been called Match Media, Blue 449 and now also Spark Foundry. How on earth do they convince clients that they understand brands??!? “Another case of really smart, hard-working agency folk being done in by the utter stupidity of global holding groups.” Quite. Grexit Meanwhile, Brexit isn’t the only thing in countdown mode. With another week until D-Day for Trimantium Growthops, I hadn’t expected to return to the topic today. But it’s worth noting that we’ve just seen the worst week for investors in TGO’s short history. When I wrote about Growthops last Saturday, the share price was 66c. It’s lost another 25% since then, with the share price falling consistently over the week. As I write, the number has hit 50c, giving the company a market capitalisation of just $56.5m, not much more than a third of its peak. One Rubicon crossed this week is that the original float raised $70m, at $1 per share. At one point, the magic of the markets had created a company that was worth on paper double that $70m. Now though, each investor’s money is worth precisely half what they each put in a year ago. The market appears to have judged that a company reporting a profit of just $3.5m isn’t worth $140m. And all that’s before those who sold their businesses to create the Growthops conglomerate - including the founders of ad agency AJF - are allowed to sell any of their shares. That comes a week from today. And is followed two days later by the exit as MD (although he remains on the board) of the mastermind of the Growthops project Phillip Kingston. (Grexit, anyone?) The TGO share price is worth watching closely over the next few days, I’d suggest. Road trip By the time you read this, I’ll be on a road trip to frosty Scotland for a few days off, ahead of Advertising Week Europe which is in turn back here in London in a week’s time. I’m woefully underprepared for the sub-zero temperatures forecast for the Hebrides. Please do feel free to share your views with me at tim@mumbrella.com.au. And our deputy editor Josie Tutty - josie@mumbrella.com.au - will be on the newsdesk across this weekend. Have a splendid weekend. Toodlepip... Tim Burrowes Content director, Mumbrella Sponsored Post The [Cooperate]( platform transforms how marketing teams visualise their customer journey, deliver content at each stage of the journey, and see how it performs - from one place. Australian enterprises like [Monash University,]( [SFI Health](, The Heart Foundation, UNSW and TicToc Home Loans can finally manage content across the customer journey, empowering their teams to visualise the entire journey from start to finish, and manage all of the marketing work in-between. Mumbrella | 46-48 Balfour Street Chippendale NSW 2008 Australia This email was sent to {EMAIL}. If you would rather not receive Mumbrella's Best of the Week email you can [unsubscribe]( or [manage subscriptions](. [Facebook]( [LinkedIn]( [Twitter](