Earlier this month Dentsu issued a statement that it had cancelled its annual New Year party, typically celebrated in each of its five offices in Japan, citing a need for “deep reflection.”
When one considers the issues being faced by the agency, albeit of their own doing, it is easy to understand their desire for a more contemplative holiday.
Two short months ago the agency rocked the ad world with the acknowledgement that it had overbilled one of its oldest and largest advertisers, Toyota Motor Corp. for digital media placements. Ultimately, the agency confirmed that the overbilling and falsification of invoices impacted 111 clients, totaling JPY ¥230 million ($2.28 million USD).
This is on the heels of a Japanese Labor Agency ruling that the suicide of a young employee in December, 2015 was due to karoshi, or death by overwork. Prior to her death, the employee had logged 130 hours of overtime in November and 90 hours in October. In the wake of this ruling, the third such case of karoshi at Dentsu, the Minister of Health, Labor and Welfare Yasuhisa Shiozaki threatened harsh action against the company. Regrettably, according to Mediapost, reports have surfaced in Japan suggesting that the agency “may have encouraged workers to underreport overtime hours” to deceive authorities that it had been complying with regulatory limits (70 hours per month).
Thus, many in the industry were intrigued when it was reported earlier this month by MediaTel that Dentsu-Aegis was looking to launch a programmatic trading desk in the U.S. called “agyle.” The irony, for an agency dealing publicly with fraud and transparency issues, is that the model apparently being pursued for agyle is that of a principal-buy (media arbitrage) operation, where advertisers will have zero line of sight into the price paid for media inventory purchased by the trading desk.
Really? This move certainly seems to be counter intuitive for an organization trying to mend its brand image within the advertising community, while it deals with the fall-out from the overbilling and labor investigations. Particularly in light of Aegis’ own track record related to media transparency over the last ten plus years (prior to Dentsu’s 2012 acquisition of Aegis).
Some will remember that Aegis and its Posterscope division had their own problems of accounting fraud, involving the use of volume rebates it earned on its clients’ out-of-home media investments that were improperly retained by the agency to record higher revenues, rather than returning them to their respective clients. In the end, its President and Finance Director pled guilty to accounting fraud. This fraud occurred on the heels of a highly publicized scandal in which Aegis’ client, Danone successfully sued the agency, requiring it to disclose the disposition of all volume based discounts it had received for a two year period, estimated to be $22.0 million. Notably, during the lawsuit it was alleged that Aegis’ president and five other executives had been “siphoning credits for free media airtime to a private company” and then selling that same airtime for their own profit.
With all due respect to Dentsu’s CEO, Tadashi Ishii, for his efforts to aggressively and forthrightly address the agency’s recent issues, one has to wonder how deeply seeded these issues are in the organization’s culture.
For advertisers who have followed the lawsuits, regulatory investigations, allegations and company acknowledged issues into overbilling, fraudulent reporting, timekeeping system manipulation, volume rebate programs and the like… this is why the industry must inwardly reflect and take the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) study on media transparency seriously.
Clearly opacity issues related to misleading practices employed by some within the agency community related to the pursuit of non-transparent revenue sources using client funds, for their self-gain negatively impact advertiser trust in their agency partners and ultimately erode the client/ agency relationship.
For Mr. Ishii and his team at Dentsu, we wish them luck in righting the proverbial ship and hope that their decision to use the holiday season as a time for deep reflection bears fruit.