Stuart Fogarty, chief executive of Admatic, has a lighthearted take on competitiveness among his peers

I live in Dalkey and I was talking to my neighbour Matt Damon over the tomatoes in SuperValu recently. He said that Hollywood was changing. It’s become more ‘collaborative’ and the super cutthroat business of movies was friendlier than ever.

I made that up. I haven’t been talking to Matt Damon, I’ve never met him, but I have been talking to media owners. The chief executives of the Daily Mail, the Sun, the Sunday Times, Virgin Media TV, FM104, the Business Post, and many, many others.

These are people are normally very competitive. They move to the other side of the street when they see each other and they book separate hotels. Getting them to collaborate was like asking Dominic Cummings to go to the opticians around the corner from his house.  Impossible. 

But now? They are, and they’re all the better for it. Al Green singing ‘Let’s Stick Together’, over endless commercials of people doing funny things in their homes, nauseatingly makes the point: We are all in this together. All facing the same cashflow problems, sales drops, staff cuts, landlord assassinations. But if we collaborate, it helps. 

Reach out to each other and talk about how a competitor has got around a problem like yours or by sharing back office tasks. In the media business they are putting their competitive streaks aside for the minute and getting things done, together. They are good people, business people who don’t dither when their backs are against a wall. 

In Association with

Advertising Ego

Advertising and media agencies prefer to stay in their silos, and yet they are that most threatened of species — middlemen. They’re going to just plough their own furrow whatever it takes, as they bleed all over the floor. And that’s a mistake, because they could leave a mountain of debt in their wake for others. 

The reason is as old as the hills and a particular feature of advertising leaders. Ego. They don’t want to talk about their problems for fear of a drop in rumour profile, or share their solutions because, well, they’re theirs. They leave it too late to talk mergers until there’s nothing left to merge.

Their press releases tell a story of ‘business as normal’, ‘new business pitches and gains’, ‘nothing to see here’, while we all know that advertising is in the doldrums. And it’s not getting better any day soon.

Collaboration and talking, merging, sharing between former competitors, is the media crew's way out. That new sense of community you now see, on the formerly ‘nose-in-the-air’ middle class streets of Dalkey. Now it’s like a country village of hellos, fine day thank God, and how are you? We’re in this together. Put differences away and seize opportunities. 

Advertising agencies and Hollywood, as my old pal Matt Damon was telling me.

• Stuart Fogarty is the former owner of McConnell’s Advertising and a former President/Fellow of The Institute of Advertising Practitioners (IAPI), and a Fellow of The Marketing Institute. He’s writing a book called ‘Advertising Is A Waste Of Time’