Frenemies

By: Ken Auletta

Narrated by: Jonathan Todd Ross

Length: 12 hrs and 3 mins

Publisher's Summary

An intimate and profound reckoning with the changes buffeting the $2 trillion global advertising and marketing business from the perspective of its most powerful players, by the best-selling author of Googled.

Advertising and marketing touches on every corner of our lives and is the invisible fuel powering almost all media. Complain about it though we might, without it the world would be a darker place. And of all the industries wracked by change in the digital age, few have been turned on its head as dramatically as this one has. We are a long way from the days of Don Draper; as Mad Men is turned into Math Men (and women - though too few), as an instinctual art is transformed into a science, the old lions and their kingdoms are feeling real fear, however bravely they might roar.

Frenemies is Ken Auletta's reckoning with an industry under existential assault. He enters the rooms of the ad world's most important players, some of them business partners, some adversaries, many 'frenemies', a term whose ubiquitous use in this industry reveals the level of anxiety, as former allies become competitors and accusations of kickbacks and corruption swirl. 

We meet the old guard, including Sir Martin Sorrell, the legendary head of WPP, the world's largest ad agency holding company; while others play nice with Facebook and Google, he rants, some say Lear-like, out on the heath. There is Irwin Gotlieb, maestro of the media agency GroupM, the most powerful media agency, but like all media agencies it is staring into the headlights as ad buying is more and more done by machine in the age of Oracle and IBM. 

We see the world from the vantage of its new powers, like Carolyn Everson, Facebook's head of Sales, and other brash and scrappy creatives who are driving change, as millennials and others who disdain ads as an interruption employ technology to zap them. We also peer into the future, looking at what is replacing traditional advertising. And throughout we follow the industry's peerless matchmaker, Michael Kassan, whose company, MediaLink, connects all these players together, serving as the industry's foremost power broker, a position which feasts on times of fear and change.

Frenemies is essential listening, not simply because of what it says about this world but because of the potential consequences: the survival of media as we know it depends on the money generated by advertising and marketing - revenue that is in peril in the face of technological changes and the fraying trust between the industry's key players.

©2018 Ken Auletta (P)2018 HarperCollins Publishers Limited

Critic Reviews

"Now more than ever, advertising is the lifeblood that sustains most journalism, television, and entertainment. But with the advent of Google, Facebook, and other digital players, the advertising industry is being fundamentally disrupted. Ken Auletta brilliantly chronicles this drama with his usual combination of behind-the-scenes reporting filled with colorful characters, surprising revelations, and judicious insights. This riveting book shows again why Auletta is the premier reporter of our era on the fascinating and ever-changing worlds of communications and media." (Walter Isaacson)

Praise for Googled: "At last, a book about Google that does not require readers to get in touch with their inner geek. The most important company of the internet era, and the most controversial new media company for a generation has deserved a more accessible account for the general reader. In the hands of Ken Auletta, media writer for The New Yorker magazine, it gets one." (Financial Times)

"Ken Auletta, one of America's best business journalists, has turned his attention on the firm, with particular reference to the challenges it faces...superbly reported." (John Lanchester, Observer)