The smash-hit American television show Mad Men was popular not only for its accurate display of the 1960s, but also for its portrayal of the golden age of advertising. For better or worse, that era is drawing to a close, as the book Frenemies: The Epic Disruption of the Ad Business (And Everything Else) by Ken Auletta argues. Having authored 12 books and being a regular columnist for the New Yorker, Auletta is one of America’s premier media critics.

Auletta believes the world of advertising is facing massive upheaval. The Mad Men are being replaced by the Math Men. No longer do advertising agencies hold sway over their clients, as internet giants — Google, Facebook, Amazon and Apple to name a few — are slowly but surely encroaching on territory previously held by the traditional ad industry. The shift is being acutely felt as profit margins in advertising agencies are being squeezed, leading to a downward spiral in revenue streams and depressed wages while Google and Facebook, as stated in the book, are making a killing: Google earns 87% of its $79.4 billion from advertising while Facebook makes $26.9 billion in total revenues from advertising. That’s not all; in analysing data from 2016, Auletta writes that “digital advertising by 2017 [was] expected to surpass the $70 billion spent on the number one United States ad platform — television.” Traditional media is no longer paramount.

The age of the internet has heavily disrupted ad mediums across the board, be it television, radio or print, and digital media is gaining territory at their expense. Auletta’s book chronicles the epic battle between old and new media in this new and uncertain landscape.

Mandatory reading for practitioners of advertising and laypersons alike about an industry in turmoil

But, as the book’s very title Frenemies suggests, the battle lines between old and new media are not clearly drawn. The biggest ad agencies have a love-hate relationship with the incumbents as they earmark increasing portions of their media mix for Google, Facebook and the like. Case in point, WPP’s (the largest advertising firm in the world according to market value) ad spending on Google in 2017 rose five times compared to 2016 to $5 billion. Spending for 2016 on Facebook was $1.7 billion, while on Snapchat in 2017 was $200 million. Both old and new media giants, in order to shore up their defences, are poaching talent from each other and also acquiring whole agencies; this holds especially true for traditional ad agencies that have seen their revenue streams hurt by the internet giants in recent years.

But the author contends all is not well in the digital paradise of Facebook and Google either. The two of them, combined, command 89% of internet ad spending. Both also haven’t really opened up the massive troves of data they have collected on their users, leaving it anyone’s guess on how that data is used. Facebook recently came under fire as it humiliatingly admitted that a company called Cambridge Analytica had combed through 87 million of its users, inducing them to vote for Donald Trump in the last US presidential elections. Doubly infuriating to the American media, the government and the public at large was that a Russian troll farm had “secretly purchased $100 million worth of ads to spread ‘fake news’ to further polarise Americans during the 2016 presidential contest.”

The internet age has heavily disrupted ad mediums across the board, be it TV, radio or print, and digital media is gaining territory. Auletta chronicles the epic battle between old and new media in this new and uncertain landscape.

The CEO of Facebook was summoned for a congressional hearing in April 2018. Google was accused by the European Union for using its own search engine to steer users to its own products and was fined a whopping $5.1 billion in June 2017. Also on the horizon is Amazon, which may potentially wield more power than its tech rivals on its users, possessing as it does their purchase histories and media consumption habits. That, too, would surely raise privacy concerns with regulatory authorities in countries across the world with legal battles to follow.

The glaring oversight of the book could be that it devotes a disproportionate amount of attention to the US and the European Union with just a passing mention to how this battle between Mad Men and Math Men is being fought in the developing world. It’s no secret that China and India are the biggest emerging markets for the advertising industry. Pakistan is a comparatively small player in the worldwide ad game, but regional statistics or figures would have certainly piqued Pakistani readers’ interest and one could draw an inference that a similar erosion of the traditional client-ad agency model is underway here as well.

All things considered, Auletta’s Frenemies is mandatory reading for practitioners of the trade and laypersons alike who are not just the audience, but also participants in the massive changes outlined in the book. No longer — in the West, at least — are ad deals cut on lush green golf courses or over three-martini lunches on Madison Avenue by suave ad men. Instead, business is now done on the basis of data crunching algorithms on the internet. A new age has dawned in the world of advertising; the question is, who’s woken up to see it.g

The reviewer has worked as a producer in news media, an analyst in the NGO sector and is currently a lecturer at SZABIST University

Frenemies: The Epic Disruption of the Ad Business
(And Everything Else)
By Ken Auletta
Penguin, US
ISBN: 978-0735220867
368pp.

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, December 23rd, 2018