THE AGE of MISTRUST

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Today, marketers mistrust agencies, agencies mistrust marketers, pundits mistrust television, audiences mistrust advertising and everyone mistrusts each other's theories. Say goodbye to the Age of Partnership. Say hello to the Age of Mistrust.

Advertising may be a cyclical business, but you can rarely tell which cycle is coming next.

In 1959, few people anticipated the Creative Revolution, and some of the events of 1987 must have startled even such prime movers as the Saatchis and Martin Sorrell.

Recently, Adweek's Marketing Week asked me to investigate the next era of advertising- an age we are now entering. In this new era, there are fundamental changes in the rules of marketing. Unfortunately, few people agree on the nature of the new rules. But that, too, is in the spirit of the times.

It's an era when marketers mistrust agencies, agencies mistrust marketers, pundits mistrust television, audiences mistrust advertising and everyone mistrusts each other's theories. Call it the Age of Mistrust.

Mistrust was never a complete stranger to the peculiar relationships between agencies and advertisers. But in the era of network television- from the 1950s through the early 1980s- suspicion simmered below the surface. As Rosser Reeves of Ted Bates and Leo Burnett demonstrated in the 1950s, the most successful advertising campaigns could sustain themselves for decades. Burnett's Marlboro man has been puffing and riding for more than 40 years, and Bates' Wonder Bread built strong bodies 12 ways for just as long.

Only long-lasting, intimate relationships could nurture such longevity. At many large advertisers and their agencies, intertwined bureaucracies wound around each other through the 1960s and 1970s like double-helix chains. Call it the Age of Partnership. After investing time and money to build these chains, marketers could not afford to have them severed by open mistrust.

Agencies, of course, had made a similar investment- particularly as their largest clients pushed outward from the U.S. and prodded their agencies to do the same. Furthermore, advertising people took great pride in their role as symbiotic pilot fish, simultaneously playing trusted insiders with access to intimate corporate secrets and brash outsiders who represented the American consumer to their large, insulated clients. Agencies were the only ones that sought this role. It was their accepted place in the natural order of things.

In the mid-1970s, economic changes gradually began to place unprecedented pressure on this fellowship. Consumer population growth slowed. Television advertising costs escalated. Women began working in greater numbers. The consumer-products companies merged and remerged, and their agency counterparts began to follow suit.

Frustration built gradually, but like World War I, a spark was needed to cause the explosion. This time, the equivalent of the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand came in 1986, when the Saatchis bought Ted Bates.

While marketers may have envied the $567million windfall reaped by Ted Bates stockholders, many accepted it as the hard-won fruits of a tough deal. Less forgivable, once it was made public, was an archetypal act of agency faithlessness. In the rush of the two-week negotiations between Bates and the Saatchi, nobody informed Bates' largest domestic client, Warner-Lambert Co., of the impending deal and the conflicts it would create with clients. When Warner-Lambert President Melvin R. Goodes heard about the sale, he reportedly first asked how much Bates' Chairman Robert Jacoby had made personally (about $112 million), and second, what The Proctor & Gamble Co. would do (they were a major Saatchi client).

Within three months, Warner-Lambert had ended its 25-year relationship with Bates- a major blow to Jacoby. Later, Jacoby accused the Saatchi organization of leaking the news of the merger to the press prematurely, while others at Bates accused Jacoby of arrogantly snubbing his client. Either way, it didn't matter. The lapse seemed to confirm what many clients already believed: that mega-mergers represented a breach of trust between agencies and their clients.

In the subsequent wave of account firings by Colgate-Palmolive Co., Proctor & Gamble, RJR Nabisco and many others throughout the industry, mistrust was always the motivating force. People outside of marketing looked on with astonishment, but then most onlookers don't appreciate how much marketing campaigns, like military campaigns, depend on secrets and loyalty. When the Saatchis tried to force the issue of conflict, assuming they could strong-arm clients into accepting a giant advertising holding company that could serve competing clients, they became an instant symbol of arrogance in the Age of Mistrust.

You can hear that mistrust in marketers' private comments about the Saatchis, even two years later. "If I had been Jacoby or Saatchi, I'd have done the same thing," says a high-level executive at a consumer-products company. "But I was hoping for more from them, because they're in advertising. It's clear, now, that they don't care about loyalty or creativity, just about building their empire."

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