When Lesa Ukman met GroupM...
What is it with sponsorship and media agencies, why can't they ever play nice? (Spoiler: £$€)
There’s a bit, about 27 minutes in to my conversation with the brilliant Lesa Ukman, where she talks about what happened when she sold IEG to WPP’s GroupM.
I’m flagging it because it’s a good story and second, it’s indicative of something much wider.
Backstory: Lesa Ukman created IEG in 1982, building it from a marketing publisher to be the leading sponsorship measurement and evaluation service in the US.
Fast forward to 2006:
We couldn’t keep growing as we were. And here’s the irony, we ended up selling to GroupM, the world’s largest media buying company. That’s not who I wanted to sell to, I’ll just say it right there. My brother and sister had equal shares and that’s what we decided to do. It was horrible. Horrible.
The next bit of the story is familiar to anyone who has worked in sports marketing or sponsorship within a bigger marketing services group.
We were working on an ROI project for a major client, who was paying us $200,000 to look at several of their sponsorships and analyse the return on investment. We were showing them they were paying huge premiums on the media side and the sponsorship side and they were getting no credit from their customers or the fans of these sports events for what they were doing. The only thing that was working for them was a theme park project, which had no media. We had all the primary research, and it was a big client to us.
I get a call from somebody at GroupM, and it turns out that this same client is a $40million client of theirs and it was they who recommended the media pieces, and ‘this was not acceptable, you know, so just shut up’.
This scenario is being played out at a marketing network near you every day of the week. The big idea is a sound one - sport is a sparkly looking thing and way more interesting than the tedious grunt work of flogging ad space. But the media sales makes more money, so…well, you know the rest.
Culture clash, and incentives out of whack
It was not a great fit. Their model was turnkey. Hire these young media buyers, train them, mark it up, get more money, the end. Our model is so labour intensive, we charge a fee that’s nothing to do with hours, and everything to do with value, we get our money upfront. Nothing we did made it a good fit.
They are just such different animals. At the time, all the below the line service agencies and all the media agencies were looking for new sources of revenue to make up for the fact that the media and marketing world was changing so dramatically. I think that’s why they bought us.
Beware sexist British wankers
It was such a strange, odd fit from the beginning. The other odd thing was that I was always enamoured with British marketing, and I loved British plays and books, so I was just so excited to be part of a British entity. But then I quickly found out that things that I had taken for granted all these years, that you could be a woman and do whatever you wanted, but there was so much sexism. We all spoke English but we spoke different languages. I couldn’t believe it. I finally got to use the word ‘wanker’ - I’d read that word in British novels and never got to use it, and then I was like, oh my god, what a wanker!
Our interview with Lesa Ukman is the second in our series Who’s There?
The first episode featured Matt Locke of Storythings, and was one of our most popular podcasts of the lockdown period.
To find out more about the Unofficial Partner podcast and to delve in to our back catalogue, go to unofficialpartner.com and sign up to receive our weekly briefing email.