Frenemies: the epic disruption of the ad business (and everything else)

"An intimate and profound reckoning with the epic changes assaulting the global advertising and marketing business--the lifeblood of media as we know it--from the author of five national bestsellers. Advertising and marketing touches on every corner of our lives, and is the invisible fuel powering almost all media. Complain about it though we might, and should, without it much of media and business would shrivel. The disruption has been late in coming, but just as it struck the music, newspaper, magazine, and book businesses, today advertising and marketing are under assault. Good-bye, Don Draper. A Mad Men world has turned into a Math Men (and women--though too few) world, as engineers seek to transform an instinctual art into a science. The old lions and their kingdoms reel from fear, however bravely they might roar. [This book] is Ken Auletta's reckoning with an industry under existential assault. He enters the rooms of the ad world's most important players, some of them business partners, some adversaries, many 'frenemies,' a term whose ubiquitous use in this industry reveals the level of anxiety, as former allies become competitors, and accusations of kickbacks and corruption swirl. We meet the old guard, including Sir Martin Sorrell, the legendary head of WPP, the world's largest ad agency holding company; while others play nice with Facebook and Google, he rants, critics say Lear-like, out on the heath. There is Irwin Gotlieb, maestro of GroupM, the most powerful media agency, but like all media agencies, it is staring into the headlights as ad buying is more and more done by machines and algorithms. We see the world from the vantage of its new stars, like Carolyn Everson, Facebook's head of sales. We visit other brash and scrappy creatives who are driving change, as millennials and others who disdain ads as an interruption employ technology to zap them, becoming advertising and marketing's most potent frenemies. We also peer into the future, looking at what is replacing traditional advertising. And throughout WC follow the industry's Dolly Levi, its peerless matchmaker, Michael Kassan, whose MediaLink company connects all these players together as he serves as the industry's foremost power broker. Frenemies is essential reading, not simply because of what it says about this world, but because of the potential consequences: to the survival of media that depends on the money generated by advertising and marketing; to free television that would not be free without ads; to companies that would perish without a way to tell consumers of their products or sales; and to consumers who would be blind to new products."