Gideon Spanier: The ad industry’s thriving — and London is setting the pace

Thriving: WPP chief executive Sir Martin Sorrell thinks Advertising Week has outgrown its name as the industry expands (Picture: Eric Piermont, AFP/Getty Images)

Eric Piermont/AFP/Getty Images

Gideon Spanier

26 March 2015

The good times are back for London’s Mad Men and Mad Women.

The capital’s advertising industry has been in buoyant mood as it has gathered for Advertising Week Europe, an annual festival imported from New York and now in its third year in London.

It would be easy to think this four-day series of panel discussions, celebrity interviews and music gigs — held at glitzy venues from Bafta and Fortnum & Mason to Abbey Road Studios and Kensington Palace — was all fluff.

Some of the star panellists such as Hollywood actress Salma Hayek, posing for her first selfie for Facebook, and glamour model Katie Price, talking about her personal brand, were hardly business heavyweights.

Other guest speakers were caustic — such as ex-Telegraph political commentator Peter Oborne, who condemned advertising as “consumerist sewage”, and TV inquisitor Jeremy Paxman, who mocked pollsters for getting their election predictions wrong.

Yet the sheer scale of AWEurope, attended by over 30,000 delegates and funded by a raft of sponsors, demonstrates that the British ad industry is in healthy, growing for the sixth year in a row and generating close to £20 billion a year in revenues.

As an Advertising Association report showed earlier this year, Britons get the equivalent of £10 billion worth a year of media consumption for free thanks to advertising — from ITV and YouTube to your favourite evening newspaper.

What’s more, the UK ad market is growing faster than the US or the rest of Europe, thanks to our early adoption of new technology from 4G smartphones to the automated, real-time trading of ads — known as programmatic buying.

Carat, a leading media agency, this week upgraded its forecast for UK ad growth in 2015 to 6.4% — far ahead of GDP.

Britain’s top ad man, Sir Martin Sorrell of WPP, thinks Advertising Week is now the wrong name for the event because the debate is so much wider — from sponsorship and content to privacy and tech.

The digital revolution is certainly as much of a threat as an opportunity as agencies risk being bypassed in the new world order where brands can communicate directly with customers and media owners.

No wonder much of the talk at AWEurope has been serious and thoughtful.

Annette King, chief executive of agencies group Ogilvy UK, says the quality of discussion has been on a par with Cannes Lions, the showpiece event in the global advertising calendar in June.

“It’s like a cold Cannes,” she says, joking about the March weather.

Tim Lefroy, boss of the Advertising Association, talks about how Advertising Week could be “as big as London Fashion Week” one day.

Matt Scheckner, the New Yorker who brought AWEurope to London, says he couldn’t imagine staging the event anywhere else in Europe.

The fact that global media giants such as Bloomberg, Google Havas, Omnicom and Ogilvy are investing in major new offices in London in the next few years is further proof that this city is the European capital of creative industries as well as financial services.

But Yannick Bolloré, boss of Havas, France’s second biggest ad group, who plans to move his headquarters to London in 2017, is among several international leaders to warn about a British referendum on leaving the European Union.

“If the UK turns its back on the eurozone, I don’t think the UK will stay a long time as the headquarters for Europe,” he warns.

Gideon Spanier: The ad industry’s thriving — and London is setting the pace

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