Irwin Gotlieb knows China, and much of the rest of the world. He was born in Shanghai in 1949 to Jacob Gotlieb and Genya Diatlovitzky, who were second cousins and Belarusian émigrés; when he was a year old, the family left for the newly forming Israel. His father, Irwin said, bribed an official to allow them to exit with valuables, including small antiques and precious metals. Because Jews could not pass through the Suez Canal, the refugee boat took six months to arrive. A year later his father flew alone to Japan -Irwin does not know why-and several weeks later the family flew to join him. In Japan, his father suddenly had a new career as an exporter of pearls and an importer of diamonds. Irwin knew his father wasn’t a trained jeweler, and he knew Asian currencies “were not worth the paper they were printed on,” but he did not know how his father came to that business, or who funded it.
Irwin lived in Japan until he was fifteen and was a precocious student. His parents encouraged him to attend college in the United States and he was accepted by New York University, arriving alone at fifteen with a stipend of cash from his parents. He rented an apartment, learned to speak English, and served as his father’s U.S. representative, working with Japanese and Chinese diamond dealers. In keeping with the many secrets held by the Gotlieb family, he never told his parents that he dropped out of college ten days after entering. “They were teaching me stuff I already knew,” he said.
He met Elizabeth Billick, a paralegal, in 1968, when he was nineteen. They eloped the following year, fearful that his father, who at the time was not speaking to Irwin, might try to block their marriage. Irwin displayed the stealth of his father. “My mom and dad went to their graves,” he said, “not knowing that I didn’t go to school and that I eloped.”
He had a friend in advertising and it sounded like “a fun business,” so Irwin, at age twenty, sent a resume to various agencies. Over the next five years he worked for two of them, amassing a quiverful of skills: cash and barter syndication, spot buying, research, planning, network TV negotiations. He was recruited by Benton amp; Bowles in 1977 to run their national broadcast group; over the next twenty-two years he helped build their overseas business and also supervised the production of prime-time shows and made-for-TV movies. Throughout, he dabbled in computer software, creating the first application to measure the audience that ads attracted, and building software to manage ad inventory. “I wrote my first full-blown software system in 1973,” he said. In 1979, he built “the first Monster system-eventually two million lines of code,” he said, which became the standard yield management software that determined prices, modeled the national marketplace, and allocated ads. His last job at Benton amp; Bowles was CEO of MediaVest, their media buying and planning agency. In 1999, Sir Martin Sorrell, the CEO of the WPP Group, who was knighted in 2000, recruited him to become global chairman and CEO of Mindshare, a MediaVest competitor. Sorrell acquired other media-buying and planning agencies, and in 2003 Gotlieb was elevated to run them all under the rubric of GroupM. Today, 73 percent of his company’s revenues come from outside North America.
Gotlieb’s background well served GroupM’s global expansion. “The fact that I didn’t grow up in the United States was incredibly helpful as the business began to morph globally,” he said. His techie background better prepared him to understand and compete against the Googles and Double-Clicks. His friend Michael Kassan, who had a successful advertising career and founded and is the CEO of Media Link LLC, which serves as a consultant to Microsoft and AT amp;T, among others, remembers the time he and his wife visited the Gotliebs’ Westchester home and watched a movie in his screening room. “In Hollywood, a screening room is a show-off room,” he said. “At Irwin‘s, he takes you behind the wall and shows you the wiring and how he does it himself.”
Gotlieb tries to stay a step ahead. When digital recorders allowed viewers to dodge TV ads, he pushed to place his clients’ products in programs, establishing a production arm of the agency to do it. He grew his digital staff, which now numbers more than two thousand employees. He invested in various companies with technologies that gather consumer data. Invidi, one of those investments, is a software system that resides in a cable box and monitors viewer behavior. It collects data on what we watch, what we like, and how much time we spend watching ads, and can correlate reams of television-watching data with other data collected from motor vehicle records, credit cards, purchase cards, and other credit-rating services and databases. The technology allows the advertiser to show different ads to different potential customers watching the same program.
Gotlieb doesn’t think Google, outside of its search advertising, can rival GroupM because most advertising was “not in the sweet spot of their capabilities.” Like Mel Karmazin, he believes that engineers cannot replicate what his sales force can do. They can’t do product placement, an increasingly popular form of advertising requiring subtle judgment to avoid offending viewers. They miss the “art” part of selling ads, the judgment required to build a brand, the relationships that seller and client forge and that spark ideas. “As complex as the Google processes are, as robust as they are,” Gotlieb said, “there is an inherent oversimplification because it is purely quantitative.”
ASSUMING THAT GOTLIEB is truly undaunted by Google as a competitor, his would have been a lonely voice in the advertising community. Sorrell, the CEO of the WPP Group, worried that DoubleClick would allow Google to “take our client data.” He began to refer to Google as a “frenemy,” not quite a friend or enemy but a rival power to guard against. With mounting anxiety, executives noted that Google TV Ads was selling advertising for EchoStar’s fourteen million set-top boxes and for Astound Cable, a small cable company. Google’s sales pitch was that it could find new local advertisers and help advertisers better locate their targeted audiences. The way it works, according to Keval Desai, the product manager and director for the project, is that Google finds the advertisers through ad agencies or by dealing directly with companies that advertise and brings them to one of one hundred satellite channels. Once the ad airs, Google has software in the set-top box that collects data and analyzes the results. Among the things they learned, he said, turning to a series of slides to make his point, is that when grouped together the shows that have “less than a half of one percent audience share can have a share equal to ESPN.” Unlike the Nielsen ratings, which make an estimate of the audience’s size by extrapolating from a relatively small sample, Google takes a digital measurement of actual homes. Desai said they learned that advertisers were spending half their dollars on the twelve largest cable networks when they could be reaching audiences of comparable size by grouping smaller networks together. Because the ESPN and other large cable network spots are much more expensive, Google is saving advertisers money, removing the “inefficiencies,” as Google had told Mel Karmazin they would. Or as Desai now said, “This slide fucks with the magic!” Through a digital box “we can measure second by second” what ads and programs viewers are watching or turning off, and share this information with advertisers within a day.
As Google’s director of media platforms, Eileen Naughton, said, “It is absolutely our intention to be in every cable box.” To accomplish this, she knew, would require the cooperation of the cable companies that own the box. And that cooperation depended on trust. Naughton said, “Google aims to improve the advertising quality in traditional media.” If traditional media trusts her word, then Google is servicing them, not supplanting them. If they mistrust Google, they will never allow its software to invade the cable box. A decade ago, when Bill Gates tried to persuade the cable companies to trust Microsoft to be the operating system for digital cable boxes, he didn’t get past first base.