On first acquaintance Chris Ingram is an unlikely revolutionary. But look beyond the pink-striped button-down shirt and instant affability and there lurks the fervour for finding new ways to do things better - the hallmark of anybody who has dreamed of overturning the old order.
Ingram’s in his 60s now and admits that he is no longer a 24/7 operator. But the desire to create change and drive new opportunities burns as fiercely as it did when, as a 16-year-old messenger for a small London advertising agency, he began to change the way an entire industry operates.
As the inventor of the modern media agency, Ingram has been honoured as one of the individuals that has done the most to shape the advertising industry. Now he aims to lead a new revolution, this time in sport.
Ingram is currently applying the vision and the leadership talents developed over 50 years in media to Sports Revolution, a company headquartered in London’s adland which is busy developing and implementing new media opportunities and solutions around many areas of the sports sector, but most interestingly in stadia.
He bought the controlling interest in the company two-and-half-years ago when its private equity investors - faced with the need to trim their portfolio on the back of nine straight years of losses - decided to pull out.
Up until then Sports Revolution had bought and sold media rights in football stadia. This probably sounds slightly more glamorous than it really is: if you’ve ever used the toilet at a top English club, you’ve probably been looking directly at its work which was, by and large, confined to the stadia’s euphemistically entitled ‘rest rooms.’
For Ingram, the fact that Sports Revolution has contracts with 16 of the 20 English Premier League clubs was enough. The door to a broader opportunity was open far enough to allow him to introduce a different approach to realising the potential of digital media in stadia.
Sports Revolution represents the confluence of two of his great loves - the media business and sport which is, he says, one of the main reasons he has no trouble finding the enthusiasm to get out of bed in the morning.
In many ways it is a natural development of a career which began back in the 1960s when London was swinging and advertising may well have been on another planet. It was, he says, a business generally conducted over large gin and tonics where the media owners effectively paid for everything through the 15 per cent commission ‘earned’ by agencies on their media spend. In many parts of the world - including the UK - planning and buying media space was underdeveloped because there was simply so little choice.
“In the early years I bounced around between agencies but I ended up developing the concept of separating the media function from the creative function,” he says. “That got me fairly well loathed in the industry because it challenged the 15 per cent commission which paid for everything.
“I came to the conclusion that media was all about planning, analysis and trading so the skills of numeracy and negotiation were key. On the other hand the creative function is to do with coming up with great ideas and producing ads.
“They are two separate skill sets and I liken them to computers. Nobody today thinks that the people who build computers are automatically the best people to develop software.”
Back then media departments were neglected as a matter of course. In an otherwise glamorous business, the people who bought space were the monster with two heads, kept out of sight for fear of scaring off visitors.
“You’d inevitably find the media people in the basement,” Ingram explains. “They were out of sight and hardly ever got the chance to meet clients, despite the fact that they were responsible for 85 per cent of the agency’s revenue.”
All of which sparked the revolutionary fervour which led him to launch his own business, The Media Department, in 1972 before starting Chris Ingram Associations (CIA) four years later.
CIA grew and grew, ultimately employing 2,600 or so people in 67 offices in 29 countries. The company floated on the London Stock Exchange (as part of Tempus Group) and was ultimately sold to WPP in 2001 for £430 million, an acquisition that Ingram fiercely opposed.
“Media has changed so much in a short time,” Ingram reflects. “In the early days in the UK there was no media choice: no commercial radio, only one commercial TV channel, and the trade unions dominated the newspaper industry, their practices determining how big a paper should be and how many sections should be printed.
“That meant there just wasn’t the same choice or skill in getting the right message to the right people at the right time to influence their buying decisions. Opportunities for planning and negotiating were limited to say the least.
“Now digital has changed everything. Mobile phones and computers have had a massive impact and even newspapers have changed. You can now print newspapers anywhere in the world and make money without massive sales. The change has been breathtaking and while media agencies didn’t exist in the early 1970s it is now a $500 billion a year global business.”
For the full article see the latest edition of SportBusiness International published February 1.
