President and CEO of GroupM, Dominic Proctor, has backed traditional media ahead of online; suggesting that despite the popularity of social media and mobile advertising, marketers should ignore the fashionable measurables and analytics and concentrate the majority of their efforts on the more financially profitable medium of broadcast.

"I don’t think anybody has found the optimal way of using social media in the same way that people have found wonderful ways of using broadcast media," he told AdNews on a recent visit to Australia.

"If you are commuting on a train, people, generally speaking, are not lingering around banners. They are just getting past them so it goes to my point about the tacit understanding of a pay-off where people receive something for free in return for receiving advertising messages."



Prior to becoming CEO of WPP's media holding company in January 2012, Proctor founded Mindshare in 1997, which he ran for 15 years. Mindshare became WPP's very first media agency, and now has 97 offices worldwide.
It is not a total surprise, then, that Proctor is somewhat a traditionalist when it comes to effective advertising, ROI is still the ultimate measurable. The popularity of personable multimedia devices is very alluring to  marketers - but online media is still in relative infancy for remuneration.


"It is to some extent coming to an agreement with the user that part of the price of getting a device cheaply is they will receive commercial messages, for example," he continued.

"There is a very clear tacit understanding that if someone watches commercial TV there is a trade-off that they will receive commercial messages. They know it because there is a commercial interruption but they are getting the program for free. That is accepted but it’s not yet the case for most mobile media and tablets. It needs to get there for the dollars to properly follow."