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I was having lunch with a friend from the ad business last week. After a glass of wine (or six) she laid into me: "You're always going on and on about data and tracking, but you never seem to have the answer. All you talk about is what the problems are. If you're so f***ing smart how would you fix things and how would you explain it to people in terms they can understand?” While I freely admit that whining is a lot more fun than actually doing something, I decided to take a crack at the problem. I'm going to lay out what I hope is a simple, practical but far-reaching solution for data, tracking, and privacy issues. First, a few principles that this solution is based on: Online publishers, media owners, and service providers have a right to make money from their efforts by selling advertising. If a user will not accept advertising or pay a reasonable fee, he/she should not expect to be able to access the content or service. However, this does not give publishers, media ...

That's the question of the day in adland. But speaking with a very smart person recently who has deep roots inside WPP, he feels that isn't the key question. He says the key question is this: what does an agency holding company do? He believes there is a continuum along which holding companies can operate. On one end, the holding company is basically a financial instrument that invests in businesses and manages the corporation's relationships with investors and regulators. The operations of the constituent companies are left to the talents of the individual company managers. The exemplar of this is Berkshire Hathaway. At the other end, a holding company can be more of an operating company that is a brand in its own right and works directly with customers. This is, to a significant degree, how WPP seems to have operated. To find a proper CEO, the board of WPP first has to decide where it plans to sit on this continuum. The proper person for option one may be a completely dif...

As a resident of Oakland, CA and a baseball fan, I have more than a passing interest in the health and welfare of the Oakland A's baseball team. Like all sports franchises, the A's have had their ups and downs. But in recent years they have become one of the most hapless franchises in all of American sports. For years the ownership of the A's have turned off fans by trading excellent players for "prospects," hinting that they were going to leave town, constantly whining about their predicament, and making one false start after another trying to build a new stadium. They have also had lousy teams. But the end of last season was hopeful. Although they finished in last place in their division, the final month of the season they played .586 ball with a 17-12 record. This would have placed them in 2nd place in their division and earned them a playoff spot (a .586 winning percentage would have won the division in the American League East.) They had some good young playe...

Grab some popcorn and a nice comfy chair and get ready for a three-ring clown show. The government that has done absolutely nothing to protect the privacy of its citizens is going to waggle its farcical finger of hypocrisy at a company that has done absolutely nothing to protect the privacy of its customers. It's gonna be the comedy hit of the season. While the EU is ready to implement substantive restrictions on the unauthorized collection, sharing, and selling of personal, private information, all our government is prepared to do is give us a master class in insincere self-righteousness. Congressional blowhards will be preening for the cameras and using Mark Zuckerberg as a piñata as they pretend to give a shit about consumer privacy. These sanctimonious frauds have had a decade to do something about the unauthorized collection of personal private information, but they did nothing until they found out it affected them . When the 2016 Russian meddling and the Cambridge Analytica s...

Walk into any ad agency in the world and in 10 seconds something will become obvious. Everyone is young. While people over 50 comprise 42% of adults in the US, they comprise only 6% of agency employees. This is even more pronounced in creative departments where people over 50 make up about 0% of the population. The reason for this is that young people are just more creative. Or are they? Let's have a quick look around... There is only one Nobel Prize in a creative field. It is the prize for Literature. Last year it went to Kazuo Ishiguro who is 64. The recent Pulitzer Prize awards were interesting. The Pulitzer for Drama went to Lynn Nottage who is 54. The Pulitzer for History went to Heather Ann Thompson, age 55. The Pulitzer for Poetry went to Tyehimba Jess, age 53. Meanwhile at this year's Academy Awards, three of the four winners for acting were over 50: Francis McDormand, 60; Gary Oldman, 59, and Allison Janney, 58. The fourth, Sam Rockwell, will be 50 in November. The Osc...