CANNES — The fact that many the world’s biggest brands recently started to review their long-held agency relations, putting them out to tender once again, is making agencies nervous but will refocus their minds on results, according to one agency boss.
Adweek reports, in the last six months, as advertising technology opportunities swirl around them, 20 big brands like Coca-Cola and L’Oreal have reviewed media spending worth $17.3 billion.
“There is a degree of nervousness amongst clients,” Dominic Proctor, the Global President GroupM, tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “There’s a lot of clients who are struggling with this confusion, the chaos of all the different options available to them – how to go to market, how much to spend, which countries to spend it in, which media to spend it in. What it means for us is pressure, these are intensely big competitions for us.”
That’s the agency perspective, but what are brands getting out of what has been dubbed “pitchapalooza“?
“The process of holding a review helps to clarify some of those decisions,” Proctor concedes. “There were a lot of pictures two years ago where the clients have not received the value … they are going back to the well.
“The implications for the industry is that they become … procurement-driven pricing spreadsheet competitions. That’s just seriously bad news if that’s all they are. It drives out creativity, data, future thinking … and ends up being in number on a sheet.”
Beet.TV partnered with Teads for events on the yacht and sponsored this series of videos.
