The Fear of Godbeer

My biggest international client in Poland was Polgate Calmolive. It's quite a simple account as it's all household products and you just buy a lot of TV.

Everything was fine the first couple of years. But then a new German GM arrived. In our first meeting he said that as most of our creative work was adaptations we would have to be clever with our media strategy. He suggested that we get the Global Media Director to come to Warschau. As Charles Courtier once told me when the world isn't big enough they go global.

Hearing that Roger E Godbeer is coming is like an escaped convict hearing the baying of the bloodhounds. It's like the Inquistion coming to your media monastery. The Canadian client service director gave me an evil leer as we left the meeting, I started to tremble.

The thing was we had been buying TV using diary ratings, not peoplemeter. We were also spot buying. Any half-wit marketing director would realise that the numbers were wrong given that in every market where we had switched from diary to electronic measurement there was a 40% drop in ad viewing. Also people always over-estimated their viewing to larger channels. Clever clients would buy 100% Polsat in Poland. But Mito Chanalo was less than a half-wit. We bought natural delivery which is the stupidest way to purchase airtime.

As we were spot-buying with diary ratings there was no point doing post-buying analysis. We would send Polgate a list of spots, they would approve them, and we would buy the spots they wanted. Any post-buy would simply be a case of, "remember those spots you approved...we bought them."

Godbeer arrived a few weeks later. I believe the polite phrase is that he "ripped me a new arsehole." For 2 days I had to go through every plan, campaign by campaign, week by week, day by day. "Why weren't we buying ratings?" he demanded. "Why were we using so much Polsat when it was only 15% of viewing?" he thundered. "Why weren't we achieving our KPIs and and CPTs and CPPs and PBAs and other TLAs" (three word acronyms)

I got a 15 page summary of my incompetence. I believe I achieved the record as the Worst Media Director in Polgate history. I landed in Moscow to work for Initiative a few months later.