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Tom Denford and David Indo from ID Comms: Trump vs WPP’s Gotlieb

On this week’s #MediaSnack Tom and David consider the impact of Donald Trump’s election as President on the advertising business.

Armed with some very punctual research from Brian Wieser, analyst from Pivotal Research Group, they highlight the impact of potential immigration restrictions especially for multi-national media companies such as media agency networks and ad platforms such as Google and Facebook.

There are also marketing learnings that will come from Donald Trump’s unexpected triumph, notably with far less of a campaign war chest compared to the well-funded Hilary Clinton. While Bloomberg Politics estimates Hilary’s funding at more than $1bn, Trump managed on a mere $512m and yet he dominated media coverage by a vast margin.

Trump managed to leverage not just social media power (as Obama had done to huge success in 2012) but also mainstream media with his provocative narrative. Estimates are that Donald Trump generated more than $2bn value of earned media.

Continuing the Trump theme, Tom and David look at a piece written by Dominic Mills for Mediatel which made parallels between Donald Trump’s “blusterous” style and comments made by GroupM Global Chairman Irwin Gotlieb at a recent conference in New York.

Gotlieb was asked about the media transparency reporting published this year by the Association of National Advertisers. Rather than try to bring advertisers and agencies together, which is what Irwin had called for back in 2015, he instead took the opportunity to undermine the credibility of the ANA’s initiative.

“I’m going to be really harsh,” Gotlieb said candidly. “The entire effort was a biz-dev [business-development] effort. … The ANA allowed themselves to be part of a third-party’s business development.”

Irwin is typically very careful with his words and this was an intentional act designed to further undermine the credibility of a report designed for, and funded by America’s largest advertisers, to benefit them. Dominic Mill’s comparison to Trump is not just timely, it’s accurate.

Finally, Tom and David discuss news that Toyata has shifted its entire $300m media and creative business away from Publicis Groups agencies and into WPP without a pitch. The comments from Toyota suggest a client with a clarity of vision to create a blueprint for agency resources.

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