Interview with Matt Van Hoven AKA: Agency Spy
May 20, 2009
Matt Van Hoven is one of the most polarizing figures in the advertising agency blogging world. He freely admits that he never worked at an ad agency, yet he sometimes breaks some of the most polarizing agency dirt and wins the industry has ever seen.
It seems that every layoff, every lost account, every “lost pension” plan that develops in the industry you can find it first at Agency Spy with the author generally being Matt.
So here’s the interview :)
Question: How the hell do you get all these leads?
agencyspy: From a healthy mix of anonymous tips, which I chase down to having drinks with people that know to generally being a really skeptical person. The community helps me out a lot, it’s just my job to dig into what they give me.
Question: You run the popular twitter feed @adagencylayoffs Do you find twitter to be a reliable source of information, or more of just an initial contact that requires extensive followups?
agencyspy: Well first off, the layoff feed is half the equation. Lately I’ve focused a lot more time on @agencyspy because I was getting replies saying things like, “@adagencylayoffs is the most depressing feed I follow” etc. And that’s no fun. But nowadays Twitter is both an info provider and a relationship builder for AgencySpy. People DM me tips just as much as they e-mail or use the anonymous tips box, which is cool - it allows me to get more info right off the bat. I could write a book about the value of Twitter in general, so this is just the surface.
Question: What are your thoughts on Adage and Adweek?
agencyspy: oh boy, where do I begin. I think that they both do really well at what they do, which is just so different than AgencySpy. So as far as being traditional publications go, they have some challenges ahead of them. Both have had staff cuts, both still have print editions and just a ton of work to do and few people to do it. That said, moving forward they’ll have to adapt - and quickly. But they beat us to the punch sometimes and that always ticks me off…and makes me work harder.
Question : We get our weekly giggle at the “the week in advertising” videos… is that your favorite part of the job?
agencyspy: In some ways, yes. It gets me away from the desk and lets me use the left brain for a bit the secret to the show is that we kinda make things up as we go (as if you couldn’t tell) I just pick some ads I liked that week and kinda make up the script as I go. I heard somewhere the first rule of TV is to stay on script, so being that we’re all about doing things our own way, Pip, Weston and I just make up little quips as we go. Our 12 viewers seem to like it.
Question: Do you think the holding company model is flawed, or it’s successful during a recession?
agencyspy: Completely screwed up. I was talking to a very savvy source of mine about this very subject and we both agree that unless your business is tied directly to the client’s, you can’t hope to win these days. Holding companies have a whole other set of concerns, ie stock holders, that independent agencies just don’t have. The focus must always be the client’s business, the work. To me that just seems like the logical answer, but I know very little about how the HC model really works and I’m sure people much smarter than me will take issue with that remark. But when all else fails, I say get back to fundamentals - inside a holding company agency it’s just harder to do that.
Question: After reporting on the industry did it change your thoughts on Advertising? Do you find advertising enjoyable or far more shady?
agencyspy: Well I tend to look at advertising from a consumer’s perspective, so I tend to have a different perspective than a lot of my readers - which is good, it fosters discussion whether I say something stupid or salient. That said, I am an advertising addict - my roommates get pissed that they pay for DVR because I don’t let them fast forward through ads. So no matter how screwed up things get I will always love it - the challenge of advertising is much greater than that of TV and movies IMO, because you have 15 or 30 or 60 seconds to entertain, convince, please etc and that’s it. Well, depending on how much ad space your buyer purchased. Anyway, the agencies that don’t have as much internal drama tend to do better work and to me that’s a good thing - it allays my skepticism about the industry - at least until the next scandal pops up.
And of course the obligatory photo :)
Adweek has a “no MediaBistro / AgencySpy link policy”
April 21, 2009
We were told that Adweek has a “no link out policy” that stems from a previous row with Media Bistro. Meaning that Adweek’s policy is not to link out to other news sources, and to just “rewrite” other people’s stories.
From our understanding of the story, some time ago there was a big issue with linking out to Media Bistro / Agency Spy .. and then Adweek put in place a draconian policy that disallows linking out to sources… even if that source is what initiated the story.
Now we like some of the people there, Brian Morrissey for example is one of the best reporters / authors that I know in the industry.. and he works for Adweek… and generally speaking I do like reading Adweek… as they tend to get the official story from the agency … rather than the leak and slams from the blogs when only 80% of the story is out…. with half of it coming from posts on twitter and direct e-mails from people that are still exiting the building after being fired… in other words seriously slanted.
Hypothetical example:
Aug 1, 3:05pm: Adscam / Parker = X fires 30 people under disguise of a company lunch
Aug 1, 3:15pm: Media Bistro / agency spy = X cans 30 during lunch time (links to adscam)
Aug 1, 3:25pm Tribble Agency = 30 X staffers find pink slips in lunch-box (links to adscam)
Aug 2, 8:01am Adweek = X loses account Y , fires 30, plans more layoffs (links to no one)
Clearly they are all reporting the same story, but Adweek tends to take the time to research the full article and goes more in depth than the blogging community does, but at the expense of being a day late for the article.
However this is our beef with it, Adweek most likely read Adscam, AgencySpy and Tribble, but yet didn’t mention it as the initial source… or in this case George Parker would have been the first to report whereas the others citied adscam …
The question is that did Adweek learn of the layoffs and was working on the story before the bloggers discovered it… or did they read it like everyone else did on adscam.. then started making calls / e-mails..
Regardless, the policy at Adweek (if true, and we suspect it is) is draconian and should not be a rule for journalists there.
Adweek fires a bunch of people
October 21, 2008
Adweek is going on the pink slip rampage. Matt at Media Bistro has some of the details … we put a call there to see what’s the official story…. but no reply yet… story is developing….
Note to everyone : It’s ugly out there.. and it will continue to get worse until this recession is over with…
Adweek : DDB Unveils Push for Efflies
October 15, 2008
DDB Unveils Push for Efflies !!
We want to win Efflies too!
AdWeek : Spamming Video Games with Ads is cool
September 15, 2008
According to Ad Week, Advertising Agencies have a free reign to spam our games with ads. You know, the games that we pay money for to play.. We need an Ad Block Plus for video Games… reward for the first person to code that.
NEW YORK Just how effective is that Burger King ad in the game NFL Street? Marketers have often wondered. Considering that more than a third (36 percent) of gamers actually bought, talked about or sought information about a product after seeing an ad in a videogame, per Nielsen Games, a case can be made that they are very effective. Full Story
This is just an outrage.. we don’t want ads littered in our games… we pay money for the games so ads don’t get plastered in our face. We have been lobbying for years asking for this to stop…
Andy Fletcher / AdWeek : The Trouble With Agencies
April 29, 2008
Andy Fletcher got one thing right in his article…. “a half-dozen companies that control our entire industry” . That is the sad state of affairs. We have a 1/2 dozen firms that control the industry..
It pains us when you see some marketing VP at a firm get conned from switching from one Omnicom Group company to another… and says they ‘changed agencies’. Like what Pepsi did… these guys switched phone numbers… not agencies… the VP’s of ‘both divisions’ report to the same idiot..
That’s the problem out there.. it’s that you have 6 guys controlling what they feel is advertising.. 6 people that don’t understand the internet.. not by a long shot. Their lives center around the next pitch for the estimated lifespan of 36 months per client.. use the canned TV spots, billboards, newspaper and magazine ads for the 87% of their massive spending / carbon footprint budget… the rest will go to their new ‘InterActive shop’ which is nothing more than a computer monitor showing Google Adwords and 2 interns that can make flash sites ‘look cool’.
Then these guys have the guts to say they know how internet marketing works. In a former life these guys that make the pitches used to be in used car sales.
Seriously enjoy the mess out there.. It’s only going to get uglier. Perhaps a longer recession will force them to actually understand that the internet is used for more than just sending virtual pink slips to their employees.
Nothing changed. Not with my holding company or anyone else’s that I am aware of. A hindsight reality check reveals the near impossibility of that goal. Was a guy who runs a midsize shop in Atlanta really going to convince a half-dozen companies that control our entire industry to voluntarily sacrifice a quarter of their short-term profits to invest in the agencies that actually earned it? Please.
Full Story
George Parker : Adweek in trouble
April 10, 2008
Adweek is in trouble according to George Parker, Evidently there is going to be mass layoffs at the magazine (as well as Nielsen’s other properties) …. recession people….. recession.
In a further sign that Nielsen Business Media, the parent company of AdWeek, Brandweek, Mediaweek and the Hollywood Reporter, is falling deeper and deeper into the shit, news today that it is laying off a number of staffers across the company.
AKQA get’s advertorial from AdWeek
February 18, 2008
AKQA should be on their knees kissing some serious rear-end at AdWeek, with an article like this that gives them all props using terms in the article such as “whiz-bang experience” and “hyper-colorful” leads us to believe that it was an advertorial. Though we cannot verify it, read the article yourself and tell us what you think.
Adweek runs advertorial for Kimberly-Clark (K-C)
February 6, 2008
We don’t know if it’s a true advertorial, but boy does it read like one.
Palmer is making fundamental changes to K-C’s marketing structure, the company’s main agencies, JWT, OMD and MindShare, are not in any danger. Palmer says: “�We’re not changing our roster but we are changing the way we work with our agencies. We have an opportunity to change how our marketing works and we see this as an enormous advantage in the way we’re going forward.”�
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