‘Be an engineer to understand the engine’: Why consultant Nick Manning thinks principal media is anti-marketer

A trove of documents published during an ongoing court case between WPP and a former employee, Richard Foster, has exposed the inner agency calculations around principal media — and the tensions between their business interests and those of their clients.

For media consultant Nick Manning, a former CEO of OMD U.K. and chief strategy officer of consultancy Ebiquity, the so-called “Foster Papers” are proof that principal media-buying is incompatible with effective advertising or with a transparency agency-client relationship.

Agencies engaging in principal media wield the combined investments of their clients to obtain discounted media inventory (for example, TV ad spots), then sell that inventory to clients at a markup. It’s become normalized over the last decade; 37% of U.S. advertisers said they had increased their use of principal media in the last year, according to the ANA.

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