The principal problem: Don’t measure what you sell
“A bad product tries to control how it’s measured. A good product tries to perform brilliantly against outcomes.”
In this analysis, Mutinex co-founder Henry Innis explains that problems arising in principal media and measurement are different sides of the same structural issue.
"The architecture creates incentives that are very hard to resist" (Midjourney)
The WPP whistleblower case has put principal media back in the headlines. But the real issue isn’t that agencies make margin on media — it’s that the same players now own the marketplace, the media, and increasingly the measurement. That’s a structural conflict. And it matters more now than it ever has, because the numbers it produces are the ones marketing is taking to the boardroom.
Most people in our industry have heard that WPP is in trouble. Fewer have paid close attention to the specific mechanism at the centre of it — and I think the mechanism is the more important story.
A whistleblower lawsuit filed by former GroupM executive Richard Foster alleges that WPP’s media buying arm was generating close to one billion dollars a year in undisclosed income from principal media trading. Not disclosed to clients. Not passed back as savings. Recorded internally as “non-product related income” — with a 15% year-on-year growth target attached to it.
When WPP filed court documents in response, they inadvertently surfaced data that gives the case its sharpest edge: 97.4% of their proprietary inventory was not being used by their largest clients. The product existed primarily for the agency, not for the advertiser. I’m not writing this to pile on. I’m writing it because it perfectly illustrates the structural tension that exists right across our industry — and because that tension is only going to become more consequential.
