Gideon Spanier: Whole new ball game for battered Mad Men

Four teams endured four days of brutal competition in Twickenham Stadium earlier this month but they weren’t playing rugby. GlaxoSmithKline, owner of brands such as Aquafresh, Horlicks and Zovirax, used the west London venue for the final round of its £1.3 billion global media-buying account review.

GSK’s negotiators visited each agency in their assigned room to push them on pricing and capabilities. By the time Publicis Groupe was declared the winner, some of the agencies felt bruised.

McDonald’s is another brand to test ad agencies’ nerves. They spent months working on the hamburger giant’s £100 million UK media pitch — only for the client to halt the process abruptly, apparently for internal reasons.

They are just two examples of how life in agency land is tough. This year has been particularly difficult because so many big advertisers, including American Express, Ford, HSBC, Mars, Shell and Sky, have reviewed agency arrangements.

No wonder the Mad Men feel they are being driven mad by the relentless cycle of agency reviews, but this change is structural as well as cyclical. Three big trends are under way:

Advertisers want more control over their communications and data and greater speed and flexibility as their businesses are rapidly changing, becoming more digital.

They are bringing some marketing services into their own offices. When WPP recently lost Ford’s creative account to rival Omnicom, the car giant created 100 marketing roles in-house. Barclaycard, Unilever, TSB and Vodafone have also brought some agency services into their own offices.

There has been a “fundamental” shift in how advertisers think about the role of ad agencies, as Mark Read, WPP’s new chief executive, puts it. Now they are pushing a more experience-led, always-on strategy, rather than 30-second ads. It is focused on the end-to-end, digital customer experience from search and discovery to purchase, delivery and continued customer loyalty. All these “touchpoints” need to be joined up with technology and data but most traditional ad agencies don’t have the capabilities.

Suddenly, famed agencies such as J Walter Thompson and Young & Rubicam, both part of WPP, look like analogue dinosaurs and are suffering financially.

When Shell put its account up for review and WPP’s Read successfully repitched, he used its digital agency Wunderman, rather than JWT, the incumbent, as the “lead” agency.