Read Frenemies: The Epic Disruption of the Ad Business (and Everything Else) for Free Online

to “use the power of advertising to our favor” by promoting exercise and eating healthy foods like fruits and vegetables. “We all know that advertising works, so we figured why shouldn’t fruits and vegetables get in on the action?” she said. Advertising also works in negative ways, witness the Camel ads that once successfully touted cigarettes as a health product, proclaiming, “More doctors smoke Camels than any other cigarette.” Or mentholated cigarettes were pitched as assuring improved health.
    But neither advertising nor the industry that produces it works the way it once did. The industry is being disrupted by frenemies advancing from the north, south, east, and west. Martin Sorrell impersonates an alarmed Paul Revere, seeking to rally the traditional ad industry, summoning his WPP troops to meet the “continuous disruptionthreat” from various competitors. While pacing his all-white, bare-walled London townhouse office, he says, “You’ve got layers. You’ve got our direct competitors, like Omnicom. You’ve got the frenemies, let’s call them Facebook and Google principally. You’ve got the consulting companies, like Deloitte, McKinsey, et cetera. And then you’ve got the software companies, like Salesforce.com and Oracle and Infosys, and Indian software companies.” He combats new threats by aggressively investing in digital upstarts and jettisoning companies whose economic performance lags. “We’ve invested in Vice. We’ve invested in Fullscreen. We’ve invested in Refinery29,” each a digital company. And, he adds, “I’m prepared to eat our children, because if I don’t somebody else will!”
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    ï¿¼It does not please Sorrell that one clear beneficiary of this tumult and fear—and the client backlash triggered by Jon Mandel’s speech—is Michael Kassan’s MediaLink. Publically, Sorrell may mute his criticism of Kassan, but he dislikes third parties getting between his agencies and his clients. It annoys him that Kassan’s varied clients flock to MediaLink—not WPP—because they seek a reassuring neutral voice and are distressed by the speed and enormity of change. Sorrell has a broader range of knowledge and business acumen than Kassan—and most contemporaries, for that matter. But Kassan is comforting, providing for his clients what he describes as a cushion, a “membrane between” the cartilage and the bone. Martin Sorrell would never describe himself as a cushion.
    Like a doctor with a good bedside manner, Kassan knows his clients have reason to be insecure, and he seeks to address their fears. His clients discuss the accelerated spread of mobile phones, whose approximately six billion global users have replaced the desktop and the television as the dominant platform. They marvel at its awesome power:today’s iPhone 8 has more computing power, says Rishad Tobaccowala of Publicis, than was used for the first space shuttle. They enthuse that a smartphone platform and its embedded GPS open opportunities to track and engage personally with users. They are awed by China’s Tencent, a corporate giant focused on mobile services that connect people, providing access to WeChat. In mid-2016, Tencent had almost 800 million users, 80 percent of whom spend more than an hour a day on one of its sites, especially WeChat, to communicate with family and friends and strangers. They use simple bar codes to partake in 500 million daily transactions, employing 300 million credit cards that link to 300,000 stores, all without switching to another app. If the client does not know, Kassan can explain that WeChat is a one-stop service that combines the varied functions of PayPal, Facebook, Uber, Amazon, Netflix, banks, Expedia, and countless apps. It is clear to Kassan: the mobile future is being shaped in China, not Silicon