MediaLinked: Big News: Holding Companies Are More Relevant Than Ever - Michael Kassan

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Jay Chiat was wrong when he said that he wanted to see how big his agency could get before it got bad. It's a suspect link, a faulty connection, yet everyone who quotes that line—almost all of us at one time or another—repeats it like they heard it from a burning bush on a mountain top.

He was joking, folks. Chiat/Day wasn't exactly tiny when it created "1984," "Think Different" or all of that amazing Nike work. Big isn't automatically bad.

Bad is bad.

Of all the ridiculous memes that afflict our business, the idea that an entity is slow, cumbersome and unimaginative just because it's large is one of the silliest. Why, for example, are we always looking for the "big idea?" If you follow the logic of the big-is-bad meme, wouldn't it be better to have a "small idea?"

I worked with many small to midsized shops when I ran Initiative Media Worldwide, and trust me, friends, there is no shortage of change-averse little agencies as well. Small isn't inevitably good.

Good is good.

I don't think size is a guarantee of anything, especially in our industry. In fact, you don't succeed in the media game unless you are inventive and nimble, regardless of where you work or for whom you work.

Misdirected memes have been on my mind since I read an Ad Age article about the formation of a new "marketing holding company" called Project Worldwide. The piece went on to note the emergence of several smaller competitors to the Big Four holding companies, and a significant percentage of the story was given over to complaints about how the quartet may be the wrong resource to foster innovation. The suggestion was floated, inevitably, that maybe WPP, Omnicom, Interpublic and Publicis have outlived their usefulness.

Because they're big, you see.

I don't buy it, certainly not where media services are concerned.

WPP and Publicis are segment leaders because they had and have inventive, visionary parents who back them without hesitation. Interpublic struggled for a time not because it was too large to display talent or innovation—it has plenty of both—but because it took awhile to find the right structure and the right leadership to compete. And at Omnicom, John Wren doesn't care if your shop employs a cast of thousands or it's just you doing business out of the attic of your mother's house, as long as you make money.

It's hard to do that if you're only offering big to clients demanding smart. And by the way, Dentsu and even MDC aren't exactly small, either.

No, I believe that the holding company model is more relevant than ever. But like everything and everyone else, it needs to be reformatted for a digital age. With so many clients demanding (rightly) fully integrated solutions, being able to deliver all those solutions seamlessly from the same source seems to me to be a competitive advantage, not a hindrance.

They're not even holding companies in the traditional sense anymore. They are facilitators and resources for the entities under their umbrellas, and fully cognizant of the need to endlessly experiment and constantly question their own assumptions and structures. Wren noted as much in the close to the Ad Age piece, which quoted the holding company leader telling the 4A's conclave in Austin that "our ability to survive and prosper depends on our ability to adapt."

The notion that the holding companies are dinosaurs simply because they're behemoths does not hold up. You could say the same of clients—until the latest audacious success from a Nike or a Unilever proves otherwise.

I'm going to let you all in on a critical competitive secret no one else will admit. It is possible to have brains and brawn.

And for marketers, that's very, very good.

Michael E. Kassan is Chairman and CEO of MediaLink, LLC, a leading Los Angeles and New York City-based advisory and business development firm that provides critical counsel and direction on issues of marketing, advertising, media, entertainment and digital technology. Michael can be reached at michael@medialinkllc.com

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