Every issue, I try to step back and have a look at what’s going on in the market, the bigger picture, and find a topic that I think is most pressing to write my editorial on. Sometimes it’s easy. There’s something so all encompassing that it’s obvious. Sometimes it’s harder to see through the noise of the daily news cycle - the people moves, the wins, the losses, the launches, the restructures.
This time around it has been nigh on impossible. There are so many big moves going on in the market, so much change at such a pace that the noise is the big picture. It sums up exactly what we, and the entire industry from creative agencies, to advertisers, to media agencies and owners are battling every single day.
The TV networks have been front of the news cycle. Nine’s write down shows the colossal struggle of doing business every day. How do the TV networks deal with the shift in audience patterns and behaviours quickly enough? The new technologies and platforms that challenge their traditional role and make it increasingly difficult to deliver to shareholders at the same time as delivering what consumers demand. Programmatic trading is coming to TV ad buying for the first time thanks to MCN’s latest launch (more on page 14). Yet more progress but with it disruption.
Then there are the seismic shifts in the agency world. Independent media agencies being bought by global groups has a huge impact on both those agencies and clients involved but also on the broader market dynamic.
Who will rise up to fill the space in the independent world left by Match moving into the ZenithOptimedia network?
STW has been forced by the current climate to massively restructure its organisation and consolidate its huge number of business because it had become bloated and spiralled into an unmanageable network of smaller shops and units that make it impossible to operate effectively in such competitive and highly charged environment.
In the US, a raft of media agency reviews has spawned out of mistrust from advertisers about agency practices – that all has a knock on impact here as the local incumbents on these accounts are fast finding out.
Then there are the threats and challenges coming down the tubes that our market is as yet blind to. Like adblockers. In the US has advertisers and the likes of Google freaking out - but on the ground here, the digital advertising sphere has yet to fully grasp the implications of. More on page 10. These things are the local incarnations of global themes.
None of which are going away. I sit back and sometimes I just think fuck. What next?
This column was first published in the June 12 print issue of AdNews. Want more? Subscribe to AdNews in Print, or get it on iPad.