Media brokers are back on top in global adland

Much chatter about the growing dominance of media in the big ad holding companies as they finish their 2024 reporting season. In reality it’s been that way for a good few years now, as the digital tide overtakes adland. Managing all that money has well and truly taken over from old-fashioned things like ideas and creative ads.

Actually, as all the big groups go on about so-called principal media trading, it’s a move back to a rather distant past (the late 1980s) when what is now an ingredient of Next 15’s House337 creative agency bought French media broker Carat. Principal media trading is buying media on your own account and flogging it on to clients – media broking. For years after Carat was bought, broking was officially banned in many markets and then frowned upon by the likes of the US Association of National Advertisers (ANA.)

Wight Collins Rutherford Scott, which had floated on the London Stock Exchange alongside some other high-flying creative agencies bought Carat as part of a deal with Havas and didn’t really seem to know what to do with it. Creative agencies in those days were still mostly about lunch and awards – anyone caught in the office between one and three was regarded as unsporting, not playing the game at all.

WCRS became part of Peter Scott’s Engine Group (Scott, above, was a WCRS founder alongside Robin Wight, Ron Collins and Andrew Rutherford) and then, years later, House337. Carat, after a number of deals, became quoted Aegis Group and then Dentsu Aegis Network. It still constitutes the main part of Dentsu’s business outside Japan. Now, it seems, it can broker media to its heart’s content alongside the likes of WPP (which says it needs to more), Omnicom/IPG (ditto) and Publicis Groupe, which says it doesn’t do that much yet although its rivals might disagree.

Most businesses end up ultimately about price. Broking media (principal media trading if you must) appears to offer many clients cheaper prices even if they only have a hazy idea about the merits of the media they’re being sold. In fact you might as well buy from a specialist bank – which is what media agencies (and their ad holding company owners), unwittingly perhaps, are in danger of becoming.

And it’s all (to a degree) the fault of dear, departed WCRS….