“Rebates are reality,” insists Sarah Armstrong, a partner at McKinsey & Company.
Indeed, she told some 725 delegates at the Association of National Advertisers’ (ANA) 2018 Advertising Financial Management Conference, “they are a fundamental part of this industry.”
In support of her charges, she cited her own experience – in 15 of her 20 years at the Coca-Cola Co., Armstrong led worldwide agency operations (including media agency management) across 200 countries – and a stack of data and verbatims from a new McKinsey study.
The evidence, McKinsey found, is damning: Much of...