President of Sinapro-SP and VP of Cenp says that the volume bonuses paid to agencies by communication vehicles have been trivialized over time
Journalist and publicist by training, Dudu Godoy is out of the day-to-day role of executive in agencies, but today he accumulates positions in several entities in the advertising market, such as the presidency of Sinapro-SP and the vice presidency of Cenp, where he shares management with President Luiz Lara, who took over last December. In this interview, among several sensitive topics for the communication industry, he talks about the importance of discussing the digital environment and the conversations with the IAB and ABA to return to the negotiating table of advertising self-regulation. One of the issues that he says will be on the agenda in the new management of Cenp is the review of BVs, the so-called volume bonuses, paid by the media to advertising agencies, which he currently considers a “black box”.
Are you 100% dedicated to entities in the advertising market today?
Yes, I worked at Grupo Dentsu until August 2020 and until December 2022 I am in the non compete phase. I have no executive position in the entities. I’m just giving back what the industry has given me. Today, I am president of Sinapro-SP (Union of Advertising Agencies of the State of São Paulo), for the second term, which runs until 2023, vice president of Cenp (Executive Council of Standard Norms) and VP of Fenapro (Federation of Advertising Agencies). I am also VP of the Associative Club of Political Marketing Professionals, of which I am one of the founders. We founded this association precisely to improve the image of the marketing professional
politician.
And improved the image?
There is an improvement, because there is an association, there are rules to establish more serious relationships. There is a big difference between what the marketer was a while ago and what we are proposing. The proposal is to establish professional ethics. Have everything stated in financial terms. Another bias is that public funding (electoral fund) has brought us a much greater responsibility, because it is public money for people to campaign privately.
How to change the view on who does political marketing?
If you don’t, someone else will do political marketing. There is important space. It’s a cause, a battle. The image of the advertising market is good and some time ago several international communication groups stopped serving public accounts, but then they started to come back. When you think about enforcement rules, there are four times more steppes in the public account than in the private one. In the public account, in addition to the compliance of private accounts, it is necessary to render accounts, for example, to the TCU (Union Court of Auditors) and the CGU (Comptroller General of the Union). Sinapro has a direct role in all public notices issued by city halls. Our lawyer, Paulo Gomes, works and looks at all the notices to see if there are any deviations on public accounts, which is a very large market in Brazil. The public account generates a gigantic volume for the communication market.
Do you have any idea how much public communication moves in the country?
Not yet, because Cenp-Meios does not divide public and private funds. But we have a project, which is already at Secom (Special Secretariat for Social Communication), to revive the IAP (Institute for Monitoring Advertising), which accounts for all the investments made by the federal government’s supplying agencies. The IAP was deactivated during the Michel Temer government.
What is the purpose of the bidding guide that Sinapro-SP will launch?
The objective is to guide municipalities and autarchies, both for those who hire and for those who supply. Public bidding for advertising has its subjectivity. The idea is to help municipalities not to create problems for the Public Ministry, so that they know what they can buy and execute.
What themes are most sensitive in Brazilian advertising today?
Understanding the digital environment is the most urgent topic in advertising, for clients, platforms and agencies. The problem is not concentrated in the advertising agency, nor is it in the advertiser, and it’s not just a platform problem either. If there is no conversation between these links, the market will find it very difficult to establish the relationship, because the demands and professionals are different. Financially, you also need to have some kind of reference and platforms can no longer escape the idea that they get paid for advertising. This is still very obscure around the world.
And what are the agencies’ claims?
It is necessary to understand that agencies are service providers. Why does a vehicle pay fees to an agency? Because we envelop the work for them, we seek the best profitability for our clients, the best research. We work with programmatic media, with all platforms, we design strategies. There is a lack of understanding of what each one does, what and how we can build a relationship in this new environment. We are currently building a bridge, which is well advanced, with the IAB (Interactive Advertising Bureau). The self-regulation of the advertising market benefits everyone in the sense that the government stays in its corner and we solve our issues, because otherwise the tendency is for the government, the deputies, to create laws, which begin to put us in a ‘comic ‘ and our market is very dynamic. That’s why we’re talking to the IAB for them to come back to Cenp, we’re building this with a lot of dialogue, establishing digital principles with communication principles.
Is there any claim for agencies to be remunerated by the platforms?
Do not. The idea is to establish a clear, open relationship to measure the data, because today the platform systems are closed. When I report to my client, I report the actions and return the cost-benefit to him. Advertising reports from these platforms are not open and agencies need this transparency. This is the most critical, difficult point of convergence. In the area of remuneration, we are already convinced that there will not be a table, because prices are very dynamic, it is programmatic. Another issue is the identification of the CNPJ of whoever made the publicity.
And how is the labor relationship in the market?
I start from the point that I don’t believe in the entrepreneur 100% and I also don’t believe in the worker 100%. I think this regulation needs to be written, established by a rule, agreed between the parties. The construction of business life is very new. Corporate responsibility is very different from professional performance. In a company, you can’t have most people working as a legal entity. There is still a lot of informality between agencies in the countryside, which do not provide food stamps for employees, for example. There are many professionals, most of them recent graduates, who think that to open an agency it is enough to join two or three people and hire people to act only as PJs. This is not right. Of course the charges are high, that can be discussed, there are things that can be changed. In 2019, long before the pandemic, for example, Sinapro already started to put rules in the collective agreement on hybrid work with remote point. That was a problem for us. The first thing a company needs to do to avoid labor problems is to establish the remote point.
Like the IAB, the ABA (Brazilian Association of Advertisers) also broke with Cenp. How is this conversation going for the entity to come back to the table?
The bridge is more difficult because it has more complex issues
and involves economic power. A point on the remuneration of the agencies, which are the fees, called the standard discount, is paid by the communication vehicles. And this standard discount of 20% is set by the Standard Norms for Advertising Activity, and is provided for in Law No. 4,680/65. And the value is standard exactly so as not to trivialize relationships. Now there is a point that the agencies agree with the ABA – and I say this as VP of Cenp and president of Sinapro – which are the Volume Bonuses (the so-called BVs). For a long time, because the vehicles had their commercial packages, such as sports, for example, they began to pay incentives to agencies that sell more to their customers. Over time, in my opinion, this incentive was trivialized by advertising agencies, communication vehicles and by the advertisers themselves, because it also started to be negotiated within the package. At the beginning,
the incentive was the idea that I pay more because you are going to sell and for that you need to adapt to the customer. In this sense, ABA is right, because this
Incentive cannot be a black box and is bad for advertising agencies. Cenp has already signaled to ABA, Abap (Brazilian Association of Advertising Agencies) and Fenapro that we are going to put the topic of BVs on the agenda, together with the media, on how this transparency can be. This topic will be on the agenda of Cenp meetings.
