VALENCIA (AdAge.com) — The tenuous relationship between media agencies and media owners reared its head during the day’s last session at the 2009 Festival of Media as the heads of some of the largest media agencies gathered here discussed how everything from the recession to social media has affected their operations.
During the “Global CEO Spotlight” panel, the moderator, Advertising Age Editor Jonah Bloom, playing the role of a media owner, took the agencies to task for complicating buys due to their complex internal structure. “We came with a multiplatform [ad buy] and it was an integrated-marketing solution. And then the [agency's] TV guy didn’t want to know about parts of it, or he wasn’t talking to the digital guy and the digital guy doesn’t even know who lives in the TV department.” His monologue drew applause from the media owners in the audience.