If the buck doesn't stop with the CEO's, why do they make the big bucks?

http://adage.com/article/agency-news/pressure-cooker-marketers-lay-blame-advertising/229621/

From Ad Age

The Headline itself is bad enough:

In Pressure Cooker, Marketers Lay Blame on Advertising

Ad Age continues to report:

• Last month, Gap Inc. CEO Glenn Murphy bluntly told analysts on an earnings call that he was "disappointed" with marketing efforts for the company's largest brand, Old Navy. 
• General Motors' Global CMO Joel Ewanick doling out [barely passing] grades for his highly-regarded agencies, Goodby, Silverstein & Partners and Fallon, to the press. 
• And when Groupon's Tibetan plight-themed Super Bowl spots were deemed tasteless, CEO Andrew Mason vented to Bloomberg BusinessWeek about its work with CP&B, saying he placed too much trust in the agency. "We learned that you can't rely on anyone else to control and maintain your own brand," he said.

Are these guys kidding?

These guys are CEO's, entrusted by th shareholders to run the entire company. Not the company minus the advertising. Or minus the marketing. The entire company. 

Nevertheless, it is true that the ad industry has reached a very low point (is it the "lowest"... who knows, it could be worse): we get hired and fired as commodities, second-guessed at every turn, drawn & quartered by procurement, dismembered by our own CEO's and drowned in pontification.

And, of course, the problem is that ad agencies have no clue if their advertising works, doesn't work, maybe works or even what works.

So... here's what I would do if I were Michael Roth (IPG), Sir Martin Sorrell (WPP), John Wren (Omnicom), Maurice Levy (Publicis) or David Jones (Havas) since they control 85% of the world's advertising:

1. Drop $2-$5mm in a formal, serious research as to what works in what is broadly defined as advertising. And by that I mean the mix of advertising, PR, social, digital, experiential and all other little silos. Bottom line: How do I make consumers choose?

"When Ads Work" the seminal work by J.P. Jones in 1991 took two years or so. I assume such a major piece of work will easily take that or more. So, this is medium term.

2. Accept the results and redesign my entire company around these results. 

3. Rebundle disciplines under real brands. Actually, I would probably get rid of a bunch of brands and create completely new ones to make sure everyone in the company gets the message

4. Invest money in doing parallel tracking. It is naive to think that major advertisers are going to accept all the findings just like that. They won't; though for sure some of them might accept them and become "test cases". So, I would just get all the data and run two sets of metrics: the client mandated ones (like awareness, intent to purchase, engagement, whatever) and the metrics resulting from the research. This will validate the research in real-life.

5. At some point, say 3-5 years from "Point Zero", that company will have an armor-plated business case: it invested its money in validating its work, redesigned its structure, hopefully hired and/or redeployed the right people to the right places, got rid of silos, rebundled the work coherently and can prove to clients that it knows what works.

Then, let's see whom advertisers choose to blame.