Smart Brand Managers are forever scrutinizing the value they are gaining from their agencies.

The ad industry is forever trying to accurately respond to the old quip, attributed to John Wannamaker, “Half of the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.”

Recently, Marc Pritchard of Unilever announced their “People First” initiative. As stated in CampaignLive; “a structure in which talent from roster agencies across holding groups are brought together under one roof to service the FMCG giant’s North American fabric care business.”

This is a client doing everything he can to unlock value from these relationships for his brands. Multiple agencies, multiple brands, massive media spend, redundancy and not enough of a payoff; or at least that’s what we can infer from the directive.

I don’t know Marc Pritchard, but really appreciate his efforts not to throw the baby out with the bath water. In the article he talks about bringing all the various agency creative together as a new model effort to find value by uniting the agencies in one collaborative effort.

I’ve run huge global brand development sessions with agency partners and client brand teams from all over the world. The largest initiative included participants from 16 countries. The approach can work miracles in ideation and equally important in getting everyone on the same page. Getting everyone on the same page with a big brand idea requires great talent in the room, a hugely collaborative effort, and egos left behind.

Believe it or not, it is rarely the creatives who do not play well with others.

The minute the big idea is agreed, it’s the agency business leads who start tearing at the budget like lions on a kill. Unless a client is willing to address the budget and compensation in an equally unilateral manner, it is very tough to make the collaboration stick.

I’ve worked on both Unilever and P&G brands and these are smart people with massive resources and still they are struggling to realize the promised value in the age of “new media.”

A big culprit is the industries’ addiction to its own hype.

The ad industry did not invent Google, or Facebook or any of the other super creative things that are reshaping the world; all we do is figure out how to monetize these things to our advantage and now clients are finally asking; How do all these exciting pieces of content you create make me money and build my brand?  Clearly there is benefit; but how much return is in that investment?  Spending less on creative and eliminating this redundancy is helpful to a brand if all the collaboration works out; but this is a client-driven attempt to solve an industry problem. We need to get better; showing and proving our value in context of the media and not just the execution itself.

Possibly one of the worst things to have happened in the advertising industry is when media was cleaved off from the agencies and became independent. It is not a matter of church and state; it is a matter of execution of ideas, and ideas cannot be separated from the media that gives voice to their expression.

Does Facebook invade your privacy?

Facebook and the Web, in more general terms, and other technologies have redefined what is possible in terms of worm-holing into our lives. This is old news at this point. What’s a little shocking is that the social media wunderkinds come across as unaware and apologetic, as if they have no clue of the havoc they have wrought.

Can they be that ignorant of their own business model? Of course not. They just assume the rest of us will keep buying the aw-shucks act.

I’m a fan of the European opt-in model, and I think more Americans should be as well.  Here’s why: All this invasive technology is not going to stop; in fact, it’s going to get worse, much, much worse. As the internet of things comes on-line, more and more aspects of our lives will be under the microscope, more data, ever more personal.

As Americans, we are a bit naive on the topic of privacy and the abuses of privacy that have gone on and continue to go on all over the world.

We live in a country that ostensibly does not make a habit of spying on its citizens. And even if we’ve crossed that line on occasion, for the most part, we’ve been spared the abuses of family members disappearing forever in the middle of the night at the hands of our government. God Bless our democracy.

But this happens every day in many other countries. Can it happen here? Do these newer technologies threaten our personal security and freedoms? What is happening is that big business is spying on us, and we’re gleefully letting them make scads of money while many Americans struggle to survive. But who owns the right to your data? Who owns the right to profit from it more than you? The big question is, who owns the internet? Social media exploited a free communications channel, one made free by our government funding the internet. Does our government maintain rights over the internet? Will they exercise these rights to protect us? Will the government step-in and leverage available data from these businesses to help protect our privacy?  These are vexing questions. That’s why I favor the opt-in model. Opt-in will not solve the privacy problem completely but it is a step in the right direction. By default our privacy should be protected.

Social media have built business models that exploit our privacy and have become extremely profitable as a result.

Not only does the model make money selling our user data, it’s also sells a lot of ads. The majority of these ads are useless and annoying clutter, the junk mail of the internet. What value are they providing? To my mind, there is very little exchange of value beyond the revenue generated to the social media platforms and those clients that have the types of transactional business models that profit from the mercurial, whim-based purchases of a bored and distracted populace.

When we subscribe to a print publication, we opt-in. We’re agreeing the publication provides value to us in some equal measure of our money. Why should online media channels get to play by different rules? Especially since we are the ones producing the content. Opt-in increases the value exchange and gives us a voice in the matter. Ideally, it also forces a quality dynamic down on the media channel and the advertisers.

Opt-in has the potential to open the door to more competition; which of course, will drive improvements in the marketplace.

The businesses thriving from our interactions and data are never going to change until we, the content generators, demand it.