Media Buying Briefing: Crossmedia founder Asghar on how the holding companies subverted media planning – and how he’s fighting back | International Association of Digital Marketing Professionals (IADMP)

By jim cooper

Kamran Asghar, co-founder and CEO of 20-year-old independent media shop Crossmedia, makes no secret of his disdain for holding-company agency structure, and how the unbundling of media from creative agencies led to all manner of bad behavior that’s only gotten cleaned up to a degree in recent years.

In this edited interview, Asghar shares his opinions on unbundling, transparency (or the lack thereof), and the need for brand and performance media to align with each other more effectively.

Unbundling’s origins

It was a terrible idea at the time because it set media agencies off on a path of figuring out how to monetize leverage and media billings — how to make money off the money. Then in [2015] the transparency shit hit the fan, and [then Mediacom CEO] Jon Mandel stood up at the ANA. I would put Mandel’s face on a T-Shirt — he’s our Che Guevara. He validated the proposition we had from the beginning, which is, we should be paid for giving advice as objectively and neutrally as possible. If you follow the trail of money, media agencies did the exact opposite. We operated transparently this whole time, largely because we were never big enough to be invited to the kickbacks party anyway. That really became a dividing line between independents and holding company agencies.

Because transparency has come to the forefront, holding companies aren’t allowed to get away with what they used to, so now they’re looking for different ways to make money. It’s now turned into ‘Yes, of course we’re consultants and we plan — but now we also have big data operations we can sell you alongside [agency] trade desks.’ But they’re still trying to figure that out because they can’t make money just on consulting.

Margins and disclosed vs. non-disclosed

The old story is the holding company shops would accept a lower fee, then they’d make money behind your back — whether it was hidden margins, rebates, kickbacks, whatever. Some of them were transparently non-transparent. The problem we had with it from the get-go was they never walked clients through how they were going to make the money. They found ways to bury the language in the contract around disclosed versus non-disclosed buying. And they pushed as much through the non-disclosed way of buying that they legally could. Why? Their contracts were written well. That left clients with a lot of egg on their face — because who’s going to admit that they let their agency get away with this? Especially when they were being asked to beat their agency up on pricing.

Holding companies are very good at packaging solutions that sound good, whether it’s true or not or can be executed. There was a recent large review where the winner (a holding company agency) told me outright, “We sold them a data story that we’ll never be able to execute.”

Brand and performance, not brand vs. performance

We’re at an interesting inflection point: On one side, performance media, performance marketers, DTC and digital, and [on the …read more

Source:: Digiday