This week on The MCA Prodcast Pat Murphy is joined by Nick Manning, one of the most respected and influential voices in media transparency. Co-founder of Manning Gottlieb (now OMD), former CEO of OMD UK, and founder of independent consultancy Encyclomedia International, Nick has spent decades championing advertiser interests with a directness that has made him one of the industry’s most necessary voices.

Nick considers how the advertising industry has potentially lost its way. The conflation of ‘non-working spend’. with production is, he argues, one of the most damaging ideas in modern marketing: if the advertising you make is brilliant, every pound spent making it is working. What the industry has instead chased is performance through direct response and dashboard metrics at the expense of the kind of beautifully crafted material that actually builds brands.

Nick is also very outspoken about the lack of transparency in the industy and the Publicis acquisition of LiveRamp (which was announced the week of recording) gives Nick a live example. While industry commentary focused on what the deal meant for agencies and ad tech, Nick filed an article asking a different question: what does it mean for advertisers? The programmatic market has been inherently inefficient for advertisers for nearly twenty years, and moving money from one set of hands to another does not fix that. What it does do is concentrate more control of the advertising supply chain within a single holding group. He argues that the need for genuinely independent advisors, free of holding company structures, is now more crucial than ever.

Nick is a co-founder of ‘Advertising Who Cares’ which is a grassroots movement set up to protect the advertising industry. It is not a campaign to return to the past, but a call to remember what great advertising actually does: build brands over time, and deliver returns that a performance dashboard cannot measure.

Outside the industry, Nick writes local history books for charity, is midway through a postgraduate diploma in Spanish and Latin American studies, and is never far away from a very bad pun.

See Nick’s favourite ad: Marston’s Pedigree – Team Portrait (1995)

Hosted by Pat Murphy

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