HOW THE WORLD HAS CHANGED IN THE LAST 60 DAYS - by Bill Harvey

My good friend Bob DeSena keeps saying it. “The world has changed in the last __ days,” he says. First time he said it I heard 41 days. The next day he was up to 42. I believe he is actually counting the days since It All Changed.

With a guy like Bob around it is impossible not to think. His statement got my mind going.

What Bob is talking about are the series of deals in the box below all of which occurred since April.

(Ed: Bob’s slide shows the name “iO” because he heads North America
for that British Telecom spinoff which is an intelligent convergence
platform for all screen media.)

To Bob the most stunning aspects of these deals is that players crossed the line to the other side of the tracks. A buyer (WPP owns many top agencies) buys a seller. A technology company (Microsoft) buys a (technology-rich) agency.

Bob sees the worlds of Media, Telecom, Technology, and Agencies in collision like galaxies passing through one another, and says that underneath all this collision is actually the real convergence. It's just hard to recognize because we were expecting convergence to be somehow different. Maybe we always picture convergence from a device point of view, and Bob is seeing it from a human organizations point of view.

The thing that one spots immediately is that this whole phenomenon (“The Four Apocalyptic Deals”, “4AD”) has something to do with agencies. They are morphing intuitively like the blind sages that they are. One can guarantee that each of these centers of adaptive thinking will land on its feet, wearing a completely new mask, but pretty much doing the same old thing albeit in a better way.

Even the blurring of the line as regards Third Party Measurement is not new, although it runs through 4AD. 24/7 will be selling to WPP agencies. The advertiser has to trust that WPP and 24/7 are “above all that”. Why is this not new?

Because in the 70s J. Walter Thompson bought Simmons, then the leading magazine measurement currency, upon which $5+ billion dollars would be transacted at Third Party Data reflective prices every year. Life went on. There were no brouhahas, everyone earned their trust. WPP which now owns JWT also owns Kantar, one of the top 4 marketing research companies in the world, and Kantar owns Millward Brown, one of the world's most trusted sources of campaign effectiveness measurement.

The trust (enforced by the MRC in some cases) goes on and widens. An enlargement of trust seems like a nice idea. We will come out of the metamorphic period in a few years, notice that we are now butterflies, look around and be surprised yet proud that we are in fact all trustworthy. Or more likely a few will turn out not to be, and their cases will be object lessons what not to do.

The most profoundly different aspect of The Change may yet to be seen, waiting round the next corner. It could be this:

For the last few years I've heard myself saying, “Let's drop the confrontational opposite-sides-of-the-table roles of buyer and seller. Both ‘sides' benefit the greater is the advertising effectiveness that is created in the marketplace. If the two ‘sides' work together with that as their single mutual goal, can't everything else work itself out from that?”

With the fusion of agencies and sellers and technology, isn't this table rearrangement in the cards?