What you need to know:

• Former GroupM stalwart and one-time Maxus Australia boss Dave Gaines started Media by Mother, an offshoot of London-founded creative agency Mother, with its own P&L, after growing frustrated with the holdco model.
• He thinks, particularly in the US, holdcos are stymied by siloed thinking and specialists too deep in the weeds to see the bigger picture – even bringing a psychologist into the agency couldn't alter that mindset.
• The legacy model makes money Gaines acknowledges – and his criticisms are aimed at the industry rather than GroupM – but he thinks there’s a better way.
• Gaines reckons media buying is a redundant term: He says tech means it’s now “just data entry”.
• As is the size of an agency’s media billings: “If you think scale is important, you don't know how an auction works.”
• The smarts to make media work strategically require critical thinking and headspace. Hence deep specialisms are necessary, he says, but not at the expense of broader context. Media by Mother staff are KPI’d to learn outside of their disciplines – and earn an extra $1,000 per course. If they don’t learn, they can leave.
• Gaines and Media by Mother – which doesn’t make any mark-ups or revenue from media spend – are now mulling an Apac office.
• Its precise location will be determined by finding the right talent.
• Gaines has found Australians broader and more contextually capable than most – and would hire more in a heartbeat.
• But he says the will to break outside of siloed thinking is currently the preserve of the curious, maybe one in ten.
• “It’s hard yards. You’ve almost got to be pissed off enough with the industry to do this. It’s a lot easier to just cruise for the next ten years. Someone is still going to pay you a shit tonne of cash for doing what you do.”
• Plenty of upstarts – like Naked – have proclaimed the new model only to disappear. Gaines reckons his shop won’t crash and burn. Naked, he said, suffered because it did the thinking, but didn’t land the media buying plane. “We’re taking the whole fucking thing and saying how do we reshape all of it?”
• There's more in the podcast – listen to it here.

The mother lode

Dave Gaines spent the best part of two decades at GroupM in senior roles locally and globally. To be clear, Gaines says his US experience is very different from that with GroupM in Australia – and his criticisms are directed more broadly than squarely at his former employer. But having been lured stateside by mentor and then Maxus global CEO and later GroupM global CEO Kelly Clark to “do Maxus in the US in the way we had it in Australia”, one of his biggest frustrations was the inability for vast swathes of its people to think laterally, critically, and stay curious.

So Gaines started a new business, Media by Mother, where all staff are KPI’d to read, listen and learn outside of their current remits. If they do, they get up to 15 per cent more salary. If they don’t, “there’s plenty of other places they can work.” He believes a media agency’s value is wrapped up in having smarter, broader people that understand the bigger picture – not siloed specialists.

Gaines is nothing if not curious – in the good sense of the word – and walks the talk. Five years ago he went to Harvard Business School, “they let anyone in as long as you’ve got the money”. Then he met the founders of London creative hot shop Mother, mulling expansion beyond creative and design, and so began the genesis of its media arm. Just don’t call it media buying, per Gaines, because people don’t do the buys any more, they just feed code to machines. “It’s just data entry”.

The media agency is also expanding – Gaines is plotting Apac and UK offices next, though says finding smart, T-shaped people will determine which comes first. And that’s not for everyone, he accepts, because “it’s a lot easier to just cruise”, stay narrow, and take the pay cheque.

Media by Mother is not yet three years old. But it’s already winning awards in the US and if things go to plan, Gaines openly admits it may yet reverse-takeover the mothership. He's half joking, but the partners can’t say they didn’t see it coming.

But that means marketers have to buy what its selling – and the media holdco model is still going strong despite oft-expressed client frustration that their agency partners seem reluctant to do anything different. They have to pay properly for its services – and the staff learning – because Media by Mother makes nothing on the $300m it handles on their behalf, trading on full transparency. Per Gaines, no cuts, no mark-ups; clean skins.

How it started

After running Maxus in Australia, Gaines went state-side in 2014, becoming chief planner for its Americas operation, then chief strategist for Wavemaker after GroupM merged Maxus and MEC, before a stint as WPP’s global media strategy chief. He left the holdco three years ago to get Media by Mother off the ground. 

Two years earlier he’d done a design thinking as strategy course at Harvard Business School: “I had to write a thesis on what I thought was wrong with the media industry and how you might fix it.” So he had some answers sketched out when bumping into the founders of Mother by chance some time later.

“I was talking to them about going through this process of having a couple of weeks to really think clearly about how would you break this; what would you do if a media agency had never existed; how would you start one now?” says Gaines. “They’d been thinking about a media shop for a couple of years, but didn’t get started. Because I had a loosely written business plan, they just said, ‘if you’re up for it, let’s do it.’”

Not possible at a holdco

It had to be a fresh break, because holdcos, particularly in the US, are too compartmentalised – structurally and mentally – to make a different model work, reckons Gaines. His experience is at GroupM, but he claims the same applies across the US holdco piste.

“I've never worked in a market where you've got so many well-structured silos of specialists in certain go-to-market disciplines. When I got here, it felt like the last specialist we needed was a generalist who could actually help clients to stitch everything together.” In the US media world, “you could literally start as a newbie and you could retire in exactly that same vertical and never have to touch anything else”.

That created a marketer in a sweet shop dynamic. “'I need a search thing, I need a social thing, I need a planning thing, … run away and try and gather those things together [for me]’,” says Gaines.

“It was devaluing the agency, because we'd gone from being professional services to just... services. It increasingly felt like it was the job of the client to make sense of all of these component parts that you brought to them. Rather than you building them a custom product that was going to help grow their business – and being able to explain rationally why you needed each of those elements,” he adds. “But in order to do that you need T-shaped skills.”

Very few had them.

“I'd never met so many people with deep specialist skills, who knew deep areas of ad tech, search etc. I hadn’t met folk in Australia with that level of knowledge – but nobody was stitching it together.”

Hiring a shrink – and arts graduates

Gaines eventually brought a psychologist into the agency to work out why people were so averse to breaking out of their silos and specialisms. After a couple of months, she determined that ‘fear of competency’ was the problem.

“She said it’s found in a lot of tech companies and fuelled by US culture: people come in, learn a brand new skill in a particular vertical, then get to this magic number of six years. At that point they are getting reasonably well paid for what they do and know enough to talk competently about their vertical. But they will not look outside it because they don’t want to look stupid,” per Gaines.

Layer in US litigation culture and an education system still largely built on SATS and the ‘pattern learning’ developed for a 20^th century manufacturing mindset, says Gaines, and it's understandable why most people stay within very narrow swim lanes.

Hence while many holdcos have been trying to hire scientists and data specialists, Media by Mother is hiring arts graduates.

“People turn their noses up a little, but if they’ve got a good IQ and been through a liberal arts college, they do teach people to think critically and horizontally. So they're more open to learning and trying new things. And it's a real hard one to break, because you've got to be inquisitive enough to learn new things. It's a lot easier to say no when someone's still going to pay you a shit ton of cash for doing what you do.”

Could creative agencies lead media thinking?

Gaines tried to tap some of WPP’s creative shops to spearhead change.

“I threw a large level pitch. I had this idea that if critical thinking is more prevalent in the creative agencies [maybe] we could prove the hypothesis – so their remit is now going to extend from the development of a creative idea right through to the media plan. We'll take comms strategists, media planners and we'll drop those into the creative agency. And we'll basically say now GroupM’s job is literally just activation, that’s where GroupM’s best in class.”

Clearly that plan didn’t work out.

“Media isn’t hard, but it’s complicated. You're asking people to do the hard yards of learning about a new area, learning how to integrate a certain skill. And it's a tough thing to do. It's a lot easier to say no and keep earning money the way you're earning it.”

Plus, from a holdco perspective, there was ultimately no need. “GroupM and the US model we had there… does work, you can’t deny it, it makes money,” says Gaines.

“But over the long term, I still believe the value exchange of an agency needs to be knowledge – what people know and how they can apply that to a client's business problem.”

The media buying misnomer

Gaines started Media by Mother with a tech specialist, “the activation brains”. But that partnership was short-lived. “He decided he wasn’t up for the start-up challenge.” Rather rather than abort the mission, Gaines convinced the Mother founders to give him more time.

“I said give me give me a couple of months to just cram as much as I can and let's see if we can stand up the activation thing, I can't believe it's that difficult.”

The experience proved epiphanic: Gaines realised that media buying is a massive misnomer and that scale – those Recma rankings that agencies fight over – means nothing.

“I crammed my advanced analytics exams and learned how to do search – which is fucking horrifying. I don't think I'd ever want to do that job,” says Gaines.

“But burying yourself in the bullshit of ad tech, I suddenly realised what we did isn't media buying at all. You are putting instructions into a piece of adtech in order that an algorithm will then make a decision as to where and when your ad turns up – and the scale of media buying is redundant,” he adds.

“If you think scale is important, you don't know how an auction works. It's literally a supply and demand series of dynamics. And so you're setting pricing ceilings and bases and a piece of kit is looking after that for you. But the sheer labour that goes into copying and pasting all of those lines was absolutely hell on earth,” says Gaines.

Which is probably a reason why people in media agencies – particularly those working in activation roles – struggle to think more laterally. “Because you're just buried in the horse shit of copy and pasting data to make sure that Google, Meta, Tiktok etc., are going to follow the instructions that you're applying,” per Gaines.

“Once you've determined what's the audience, what are the parameters of the way this campaign needs to turn up – after that the data entry and orchestration of the media buy is lots of very rote, repeatable tasks.”

Dealmakers' demise

That realisation led Gaines to set up a team “basically focused on data entry” in India. “That is all they do. It's an incredibly important job. But it's very, very repetitive.”

It means the agency’s core team can focus on delivering outcomes.

“How do I make calls on optimisation? How do I dial up a lever? What do I think about dialling down? How do I focus on what creative is working or creative is not working? All of that requires an enormous amount of headspace and it requires a foundational layer of data entry that is accurate and that you can trust,” says Gaines. “Without that, it's just a shit show of money being dragged around the internet by a piece of code. So that's why I don’t think the word ‘buying’ is right anymore. It is about data entry.”

Media by Mother also outsources linear TV buys to a Simulmedia for related reasons – Gaines suggests it’s not where the smarts lie.

“There's no point in me setting up a linear television buying infrastructure because it just keeps declining and the digital and data entry adtech approach to media activation is only growing. There's just no point in establishing it or getting involved in things like upfronts, for example. While there are definitely people picking up phones, making deals, etc., the day to day activation is increasingly being influenced by first second third party datasets that you can apply to viewing datasets, and it's allowing algorithms to make calls on when an ad should appear. So you are now just buying aggregate audiences.”

As such, Gaines thinks the days of media buyers actually influencing deals are largely gone.

“My media buyers – I use that term loosely – are engineers. If I ask them to ring up and bite their head off some salesperson, negotiate and scare the crap out of them, they wouldn't know what to do. But they are geniuses in their areas.”

Funny how?

Gaines is trying to improve communication skills across all the agency’s functions, introverts included. How? By making them tell jokes, on stage, to strangers.

"I've just sent everybody on a communication and presentation course – not to present decks but to say ‘as a human being, we're going to teach you how to use the skills that you have naturally to communicate’,” says Gaines. “And then I took everybody out to a comedy club and made them do an open mic session so they could stand up and present.”

How did that go?

“Really well. It was Joe Public in the crowd – and people really leaned into it,” says Gaines. “I don’t think anyone’s going to say ‘this is my calling’, throw away media and become a comedian. But it helped them get to grips with communicating a little better.”

Either way, he’s repeating the exercise. “We couldn’t get the whole agency up in one night.”

T-shaped skills

Communication and T-shaped skillsets are critical to Media by Mother’s model – partly because “we don’t make any money from trading income,” says Gaines.

“Our model is closer to a creative agency model, where you're paying for – it depends on the client – some of it is product, some is outcome, some is FTEs. But it's all people-based and outcomes-based fee structures where we will never get to clip the ticket on income,” says Gaines. “So we purposefully put pressure on ourselves to raise our game … and I think over time we will start to see … our fees increase, because we are able to put a better calibre of individual in front of a client.”

Which means developing staff that see the bigger picture – the whole point of breaking out of the holding company structure. Agencies need specialists, he said, but not at the expense of context.

“We’re not creating an agency of Jacks of all trades, but every three months everybody moves seat. So if you're in a social role, you sit next to somebody who's in a search role, or you sit next to somebody who's an analyst or somebody's a programmatic strategist. So you're constantly on the job learning because you're being exposed to a different perspective on the work and what needs to be done than if you just sat in your own little vacuum.”

Gaines says the approach is paying off.

“I do see that ability to be able to finish other people's sentences when the guys are in a room together and they're talking to a client. The conversation baton doesn’t get handed to the search person and then to the planning person and then to the activation person – everybody's beginning to be able to finish each other's sentences,” he says. “They have some context for what they do and consequently, we're a bit more considerate for the way everything works. It's actually sped up the way everybody works too.”

Hit learning KPIs – or do one

Media by Mother’s staff are KPI’d on becoming T-shaped.

“Those who are zero to seven to ten years [into their careers] depending on the individual, all of those folks within their job description, KPIs, their scope of work, have a curriculum,” say Gaines.

Some of that curriculum is books, including, Television is the New Television, How Music Got Free and how-to-make-great-ads guide, Hey Whipple. Other materials are “some of the courses that I took: advanced analytics; learning how to activate search,” says Gaines.

“And for every single one of those courses you do, your base salary goes up by $1,000. So if you're young and new, you can increase your salary by 10-15 per cent just by doing these courses.

“The flip side, if you don't do them, well... it is literally part of your KPIs. There is a reason we have to set standards. If you're not going to do them, there's a load of other agencies out there for you to work for. We should not sacrifice this culture of discipline, otherwise we’re never going to get to this place,” says Gaines. “I want people to feel like they qualified to get to Media by Mother, like this isn’t ‘just a job’."

He suggests people should have ample time to cover those bases. “We've structured the place so everybody's out here at six o'clock,” claims Gaines. “It shouldn't be a sweatshop. You're not going to get the best out of people from a sweatshop.”

AI ‘will only kill bullshit jobs and lazy businesses’

More broadly-skilled workers will also be protected from a widely predicted wave of AI-disruption, per Gaines.

“If you think AI is a shock to the system, you maybe haven't been paying attention, because media has been fundamentally grounded in machine learning and AI for over a decade,” he says. “It has completely upended the media industry – programmatic search, social, all of those things.”

“What we're trying to do is create value in what we know and better knowledge amongst the one asset that you have, which is people. You've got to give people time to learn, time to absorb things, time to get confident with communicating those things. AI creates that time and takes away the bullshit jobs. I think it's a very exciting area,” says Gaines.

We’ve been here before, reckons Gaines, and technology ended up creating more jobs than it took.

“If you look at old TV buying floors, the number of people that were picking up phones and buying TV… I remember having conversations in GroupM about how programmatic was going to be a game changer. We were going to have 25 per cent of that workforce putting to bed the same number of ads as our old TV and print buying teams. And that was complete and utter bullshit. We were flooded with programmatic folks – because of the margins you could make from it … The margins that are made are insane because of the mark-ups you can put on data,” says Gaines.

“AI is not going to kill the industry. Models will kill the industry. If you use AI the right way to get critical thinking faster, it can accelerate curiosity. But on the flip side if you get lazy and you rely on models, it's an algorithm, it's only going to consider the variables and the rules that have been programmed into it,” says Gaines.

“That's why I say media buying is about data entry. It’s not about nuances and the complexities of the problem. …. So if we get lazy, and we use AI because models are just going to tell us what to do – and cookies are a good example of that – then yes, things will get fucked up very quickly,” he reckons.

“But if we use AI as a tool to accelerate and create space for us to use our minds and develop the assets that we have – people – then I don't think there's anything to be frightened of at all.”

Naked 2.0 and subsuming the mothership

If media buying is now just data entry and the US holding company model is old hat, albeit profitable, why aren’t Mother and the other upstart indies touting fresh approaches and smarter thinking bigger than Ben-Hur? Others – like Naked – have previously threatened the status quo, but ultimately fizzled out. Can Media by Mother mount a sustained challenge?

Gaines answers that Media by Mother is well ahead of schedule ­– and that growing too fast can be terminal, as others can attest locally and globally.

“We're probably where I thought we might be in five years time – we've got there in 24 months. So it’s moving at a pace that is also manageable. I don’t want this thing to go bang, because we will never be able to hire enough people to be able to maintain the standards and the integrity of what we're trying to do. We'll end up looking like a small version of everybody else – and then we've failed. But gradually we will get there,” he says.

Gaines thinks Naked ultimately withered because it was reliant on others with traditional media models for execution.

“Those [disruptors] disappear because they take a piece of the problem and fix it. I think Naked did a brilliant job of revolutionising the way we think about planning and communication strategies – but they didn't land the plane. You were still giving the final outcome to an old school media agency to then go and buy, so that thinking was potentially lost,” Gaines suggests. “I would like to think that … we're taking the whole fucking thing … And that has really been the success of where we're going at the moment.”

Gaines says Media by Mother works increasingly closely with Mother’s creative teams on integrated pitches and ongoing work. Ultimately he thinks the two may become a single unit – especially given creative work is “probably the fastest growing chunk of the media agency right now”.

So is he plotting a reverse takeover?

“Somebody in the UK asked me [a similar question]. I don’t see why we don't just grow it until it's five times the size of Mother. And then we just swallow up Mother and take off the ‘Media by’ badge and then just say 'This is Mother; It’s just a contemporary creative agency and we know how to land the plane as well'.’”

In the meantime, he’s mulling expansion into the UK and Asia Pacific. Talent, says Gaines, will likely determine which comes first.

“Because we're focused on people as the assets, the way that we'll roll this out across the world is where can we find those right people?” per Gaines. “It doesn't make sense to just say geographically ‘we need to be here’. Because if you can't find the right people… you’ve almost got to be pissed off enough with the industry do this. Because it's hard yards, it's a lot easier to just cruise for the next 10 years. So finding the people who are motivated to be able to do this is going to determine where we open the next Media by Mother.”

But he thinks Australians tend to be more lateral than most – certainly than their US counterparts. He’d hire more of them in a heartbeat. “Maybe as a consequence of the [smaller] market they grew up in, Australians are far more comfortable with stretching into areas which are not necessarily their specific task, trying to learn new things.”

Mi3 will check back with Gaines in the new year when maybe he’ll have recruited one or two to get that Apac office off the ground.

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