Ahhh, the missteps I took…

By Xavier Mantilla – Media Strategy, Creative and tactical execution across multiple markets including US Multicultural. Agency Partnerships and coordination.

Work is like any relationship and sometimes we pursue what we feel is right, and find out later that it was a mistake. Like marriage, there are ups and downs, but when we look at current jobs and how the holding companies are so vertical, we can see how joining an organization that is too vertical, too segmented, that is a mistake.

PJ Pereira the other day wrote about the large holding companies having a place in the adworld DNA, as small boutiques, and full service agencies fill some needs. This is true in particularly large, global companies that need not just the structural backbone of a multi-country entity, but also the investment muscle as the reality is that clients now pay 60 to 90 days after a campaign has run. Some even longer times.

When I had a media representation firm, I was muscled out of the way from another player that could “finance” clients spend 60-120 days. As an independent I just could not do that. I had staff to pay, office space, and all the realities of a small business.

When the agencies started the holding company model (think back to when IPG was started) all saw the promise of shared backoffice, shared invoicing and so many more benefits to these structured. But then as holding companies grew, the value that the actual holding would deliver to my client was only in cost savings for the most part.

Is the Holding Company time up – yes I believe it is, in this time that we have made everything more efficient, advertising is not. We still have companies running media arbitrage, we still have programmatic without strategic planning causing chaos, and we now have multiple “necks to choke” so not one point of contact/responsible person is left.

In my last mistake at a holding company I was powerless to work across teams and so the misgivings about working for a holding company made me realize, this was a huge misstep on my part, having accepted a position and joining a company where I worked for one division, a client in another region and the management was in a different region. All made possible by the holding company model.

In the end I was the only neck to choke from the client side, but powerless to actually deliver to the client the needed results and of course the politics internally were interesting. When the company restructured the organization, I realized my time had come to move on, and so parting is never easy, like that breakup as you had so much expectation, so many dreams, but yet, in the end, “it just was not working”.

I am not against holding companies, as a matter of fact I was very successful at WPP, at Publicis and at IPG, but that was when holding companies were starting to consolidate, so I wonder if my last experience was not just a reality of the changes that are structurally happening across the ad industry, and shaping the new model of full service agency, to once again be the dominant way of business, and not so many “specialized verticals” that basically mean that a holding company will charge more for what was thought of the agency model.

There are no clear answers, but I do see the work from smaller full service shops being more agile, faster to market and more importantly – great creative. But then again I have been wrong many times before, and hence my missteps in life.