Hasta La Creative!

Could the fractious client-agency relationship have been salvaged if agencies had been willing to take less than 15% commission?

“Losing the 15% media commission was the biggest game changer in the ad business since it started,” contends Gary Burandt, who worked across the world for Young & Rubicam before becoming executive director of ICOM, an independent agency network. He retired from that post in 2015 and now serves as an adjunct professor of marketing at the University of Denver and gives guest lectures at the universities of Missouri and Colorado. He’s been married for 50 years to the “extraordinary” Harriet “Freddye” Krumrey, a teacher and author of children’s books.

Gary said the commission system worked well for decades, but by the 1980s because of inflated media costs it was getting too favorable to the agencies. The fat profits were an incentive for agency chieftains to sell out to the newly emerging holding companies at big multiples — spurring the consolidation of the agency business in a few hands.

Continue reading at AdAge.com