Ad agencies love to talk about pitching like it\u2019s sport: winners, losers, league tables. Last week\u2019s PepsiCo\/Coca-Cola global media account scramble proves it isn\u2019t.<\/em><\/h3>\nMarkets are crazy.<\/p>\n
Don\u2019t take my word for it. Ninety years ago, in John Maynard Keynes\u2019 highly influential\u00a0General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money<\/em>, the great man made the unsettling (but nevertheless accurate) judgment that markets are irrational, flawed, and strange.<\/p>\nKeynes thought markets used to be more honest. In the early 20th century, when a handful of people owned most of a company\u2019s shares, they knew roughly what it was worth. But as ownership spread out, that knowledge thinned with it. By 1936, Keynes concluded the whole system had gone mad: short-term, meaningless fluctuations were having, in his words, \u201can altogether excessive, and even an absurd, influence on the market.\u201d<\/p>\n
His explanation was the beauty contest: professional investors, he said, weren\u2019t picking the stocks they thought were \u201cgood\u201d. They were picking the stocks they thought everyone else would pick by guessing what average opinion expected average opinion to be.<\/p>\n
Remember this every time you read a business news story in which\u00a0\u201cCompany X\u2019s share price rose\/fell Y% after Z thing happened\u201d<\/em>. Journalists, including myself, point to instant share-price fluctuations as some sort of evidence that \u201cthe market\u201d is making a collective judgment about a company\u2019s fortunes.<\/p>\nThat\u2019s exactly what happened last week, when news broke that PepsiCo was moving its global media-buying account out of Omnicom after 30 years and into Publicis Groupe. Publicis was pitching for Pepsi\u2019s great rival, Coca-Cola \u2013 a bigger client with a bigger budget \u2013 but appeared willing to walk away from Coke to cash in Pepsi.<\/p>\n
This makes Pepsi an intriguing story: not because \u2018it\u2019s a big account\u2019, but because nobody can immediately explain the logic behind Publicis\u2019 decision.<\/p>\n
First: what actually happened?<\/h3>\n
There\u2019s been\u00a0a lot<\/em>\u00a0of trade-press coverage on this story \u2013 here are the essential details of what happened:<\/p>\n\n- June:<\/strong>\u00a0Coca-Cola puts global media, data science and technology into review, run by pitch consultancy MediaSense. It excludes North America (Publicis won that in 2025) and Japan\/Korea (with Dentsu). Invited to pitch are WPP (incumbent, via Open X) and Publicis. The review coincides with the five-year renewal cycle on the WPP Open X partnership that began in 2021, and Coca-Cola framed it as a shift away from traditional media planning toward technology including agentic tools. Global creative and PR stay with Open X and are not part of the review.<\/li>\n
- Late August:<\/strong>\u00a0pitch meetings happen; decision expected late 2026.<\/li>\n
- Wednesday 2 September:<\/strong>\u00a0PepsiCo names Publicis lead global media partner<\/a>across 200-plus markets under a \u201cOne PepsiCo\u201d model. No pitch. Publicis was appointed after a media capabilities review. Omnicom keeps creative, sports and PR.<\/li>\n
- Same day:<\/strong>\u00a0Publicis\u00a0exits the Coca-Cola process.<\/a>\u00a0Publicis, WPP and Coca-Cola declined to comment; MediaSense did not respond.<\/li>\n
- Market reaction:<\/strong>\u00a0Omnicom down 5%, closing at $81.76, recovering nearly 2% on Thursday. Publicis up 4.4%. WPP up 5.6%. Barclays put the Omnicom fee-income hit at around $100m annually; Wells Fargo said higher.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
Numberwang<\/h3>\n
The reporting on this story isn\u2019t even consistent on how big the prize was.<\/p>\n
Campaign<\/em>,\u00a0Adweek<\/em>\u00a0and\u00a0Adotat<\/em>\u00a0each cited a different figure for the Coke business under review, ranging from $1.44bn to $7.5bn \u2013 sourced, mostly, to nobody in particular. Add PepsiCo\u2019s $1.7bn account moving the other way, and you\u2019ve got several outlets confidently reporting numbers that don\u2019t describe the same thing, cited by everyone, sourced by no one.<\/p>\nIt\u2019s not because these publications are failing. It\u2019s their job to report facts as news. But what separates real life from sport is this uncomfortable truth: the \u201cfacts\u201d of sport lead to clear, objective results \u2013 scores, winners, losers. The \u201cfacts\u201d of business, like most of the real world, require interpretation. In other words: explaining\u00a0why<\/em>\u00a0this story happened.<\/a><\/p>\nIn fairness to\u00a0Adotat<\/em>, it has tried to present\u00a0something of an expos\u00e9 on \u201cwhat really happened.\u201d<\/a>\u00a0But its reporting leans on unverified background briefing (in addition to some specific claims that WPP refuted). The use of \u201cpeople familiar with the matter\u201d isn\u2019t wrong in an industry where too few people are prepared to tell the truth for fear of reprisal, but the repeated use of blind quotes and anonymous briefing does mean you have to be extremely careful when handling verbal grenades.<\/p>\nSuch as these bombshells relayed by\u00a0Adotat<\/em>:<\/p>\n\n- WPP\u2019s pitch went badly<\/strong>\u00a0and this was obvious to both sides.<\/li>\n
- PepsiCo made the appointment conditional on Publicis surrendering Coca-Cola North America.<\/strong>\u00a0This is the piece\u2019s biggest scoop. Both companies declined to answer.\u00a0The Drum<\/a><\/em>, working the same story, treats the fate of the $700m-plus North America business as one of various \u201cunanswered questions\u201d.\u00a0<\/li>\n
- Coca-Cola\u2019s contracts are vague, its agencies can\u2019t buy media on their own account, and any solution they propose gets declined, then built in-house anyway.<\/strong>\u00a0All of that reporting is taken from unnamed people with \u201cdirect experience.\u201d WPP is on the record disputing that the account loses money.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n
But more broadly,\u00a0Adotat<\/em>\u2018s entire thesis rests on \u201cPublicis chose the smaller prize.\u201d Use the low end of its own range \u2013 the $1.44bn \u2013 and Publicis actually chose the\u00a0bigger<\/em>\u00a0prize. Hmm.<\/p>\nThe one (unverified) explanation<\/h3>\n
So look at what\u2019s genuinely strange about this event, whatever the interpretation:\u00a0a company walked away from a $1.44-7.5bn opportunity within hours of winning a $1.7bn one.<\/strong>\u00a0Whatever the reason, that\u2019s strange by any normal commercial rationale, and it happened in public, fast, with total silence from everyone involved.<\/p>\nWhich invites the question:\u00a0why would a holding company treat a smaller, harder-won account as worth more than a bigger, currently uncontested one?<\/strong><\/p>\nThere are only a few possible answers:<\/p>\n
\n- Publicis never believed it would win Coke.<\/strong>\u00a0WPP had momentum, an incumbent\u2019s advantage, a CEO publicly confident days before the pitch. If Publicis rated its odds low, this isn\u2019t a sacrifice at all \u2013 it\u2019s just picking the sure thing over the long shot. This is the boring, unprovocative answer.<\/li>\n
- Some accounts are worth less than their billings suggest.<\/strong>\u00a0The industry\u2019s whole self-image runs on billings numbers because they\u2019re the only figures anyone releases publicly. Nobody outside a handful of CFOs actually knows which giant accounts make money, and the trade press has no route to that information except via leaks \u2013 which arrive with an agenda attached. That means the number the entire industry uses to keep score is the one number that tells you least about whether the business underneath it works.<\/li>\n
- PepsiCo bought something categorically different<\/strong>\u00a0\u2013 an operating model built from nothing, rather than inheriting someone else\u2019s five-year-old architecture. Whether or not the North America condition is real, this distinction \u2013 installing your own system versus running someone else\u2019s \u2013 is a real, structural difference.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n
Any of the three could be true. All three might be, in different proportions. But that kind of nuance doesn\u2019t fit the narrative of \u201cX wins, Y loses\u201d.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The narrative that pitching is a simple contest.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Why this isn\u2019t sport<\/h3>\n
Sport works as an analogy for agency pitching because it\u2019s easy to understand.\u00a0<\/p>\n
One company wins something, another loses something, and some proxy measure gets reported as \u201cthe score\u201d: the size of the account won or lost, or the movement of a share price.<\/p>\n
And because agencies have talked themselves into believing it \u2013 they really do see themselves as sports teams, not services businesses. I\u2019ve talked to so many CEOs, MDs, heads of new business, and PRs who really do believe it. For years I used to put together\u00a0Campaign<\/em>\u2018s \u201cnew business league table\u201d, which was as fierce a point of pride and embarrassment as any agency\u2019s comparator of performance.<\/p>\nBut the PepsiCo story last week only serves to underline how fictitious this idea is \u2013 and, more than that, it shows what\u2019s actually happening underneath it instead.<\/p>\n
Sport requires a level playing field, a legible scoring system, and known constraints. None of those exist here: nobody knows what the account is worth, nobody knows what makes it profitable, and nobody can explain why \u201closing\u201d Pepsi is supposed to be a blow to Omnicom if Coke was meant to be the bigger prize all along \u2013 or why \u201cwinning\u201d Pepsi is supposed to be such a coup for Publicis if Coke really was worth more.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.moreaboutadvertising.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/e61f74a4-c62c-4d3b-979d-2702e04334a9_1536x1024-1-1024x683.jpg\")
<\/figure>\nCoca-Cola\u2019s own position undermines the sport framing further. If it can\u2019t generate a genuine competitive process \u2013 if it\u2019s now left with WPP in a pitch it started specifically to find alternatives \u2013 that\u2019s a serious issue. That\u2019s a client that may simply be stuck; and it\u2019s stuck for the same reason the rest of us can\u2019t call this story: none of us, Coca-Cola included, has enough information to know what a fair contest for this business would even look like.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s no scoreboard here. There\u2019s only a story that\u00a0reads<\/em>\u00a0like a scoreboard.<\/p>\nWho benefits<\/h3>\n
So why has nobody ever bothered to build a real one?<\/p>\n
It isn\u2019t hard to imagine what one would look like: account margin; revenue retained per client, not billings won; headcount required to service a piece of business against fee income. These are numbers holding companies calculate internally every quarter, but none of them are published.<\/p>\n
What is published, in press releases and league tables and quarterly new-business roundups, is the one figure that tends to mislead most of all: the size of the account.<\/p>\n
And plenty of people benefit from this arrangement:<\/p>\n
\n- It suits holding companies, whose share prices respond to wins and losses rather than to the profitability of what they\u2019ve won.<\/li>\n
- It suits agency leaders, whose standing rests on league-table positions built from billings, not margin.<\/li>\n
- And it suits the trade press, because \u201c$1.7bn account moves\u201d is a story we can file by deadline, and \u201cnobody can establish whether this is good news\u201d is not.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
Every party with the power to make account economics visible has a reason to leave them foggy. That is not a conspiracy; it\u2019s something much more dull: an established way of working that nobody has any incentive to break.<\/p>\n
The ugly contest<\/h3>\n
Which brings us back to Keynes, and to something much uglier than even he described nearly a century ago.<\/p>\n
Keynes\u2019s professional investors were meant to be guessing what average opinion expected average opinion to be \u2014 already a strange, self-referential game, but one built on real information about real companies. What happened to Omnicom\u2019s share price last week is that same game, played on top of a story nobody can actually verify. Investors weren\u2019t reacting to what losing PepsiCo meant; they were reacting to what they expected other investors to do about a story they couldn\u2019t check.<\/p>\n
You couldn\u2019t look at the 5% drop as any kind of meaningful judgment on Omnicom\u2019s business. The Barclays and Wells Fargo estimates behind it are informed guesses, not facts, and the price partly reversed within a day. What actually happened was nothing more complicated than\u00a0\u201cI don\u2019t know why this happened, but I\u2019m afraid other people will sell, so I\u2019d better sell first.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\nIt\u2019s a beauty contest judging a beauty contest \u2013 Keynes\u2019s guessing game, running one level deeper than the great man imagined.<\/p>\n
But where Keynes was describing a flaw, pitch theatre is closer to a design. He described investors guessing at each other because the information genuinely wasn\u2019t available. Ours are guessing because the information is deliberately not published.<\/p>\n
So no: pitch theatre isn\u2019t sport. There\u2019s no scoreboard, no final whistle, no honest league table underneath it.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s just an industry that lives with this fog because it suits almost everyone in it better than a true verdict would.<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.moreaboutadvertising.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/OmarOakes-2024-750x502-1-200x200-1.jpg\")
This article first appeared in Ad-verse Reactions<\/a>, a newsletter written by independent journalist and consultant Omar Oakes, covering the economics, power structures and unintended consequences shaping advertising and media. You can subscribe to Ad-verse Reactions for regular analysis at omaroakes.substack.com<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Ad agencies love to talk about pitching like it\u2019s sport: winners, losers, league tables. Last week\u2019s PepsiCo\/Coca-Cola global media account scramble proves it isn\u2019t. Markets are crazy. Don\u2019t take my word for it. Ninety years ago, in John Maynard Keynes\u2019 highly influential\u00a0General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, the great man made the unsettling (but […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":7069155,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12023],"tags":[5353,1923,20527,227507,21654,15057,649,5367],"dealstore":[],"offerexpiration":[],"class_list":["post-7069154","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-advertising","tag-agency","tag-beauty","tag-contest","tag-oakes","tag-omar","tag-pitch","tag-sport","tag-theatre"],"yoast_head":"\n
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Last week\u2019s PepsiCo\/Coca-Cola global media account scramble proves it isn\u2019t. Markets are crazy. Don\u2019t take my word for it. Ninety years ago, in John Maynard Keynes\u2019 highly influential\u00a0General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, the great man made the unsettling (but […]","og_url":"https:\/\/fivemor.com\/?p=7069154","og_site_name":"Som2ny Network","article_published_time":"2026-09-28T14:06:40+00:00","og_image":[{"width":1456,"height":971,"url":"https:\/\/fivemor.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/e61f74a4-c62c-4d3b-979d-2702e04334a9_1536x1024-1.jpg","type":"image\/jpeg"}],"author":"admin","twitter_card":"summary_large_image","twitter_misc":{"Written by":"admin","Est. reading time":"10 minutes"},"schema":{"@context":"https:\/\/schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Article","@id":"https:\/\/fivemor.com\/?p=7069154#article","isPartOf":{"@id":"https:\/\/fivemor.com\/?p=7069154"},"author":{"name":"admin","@id":"https:\/\/fivemor.com\/#\/schema\/person\/b85e3c3dc0e1daea076524dc8810c371"},"headline":"Omar Oakes: Ad agency pitch theatre is not a sport, but a beauty contest","datePublished":"2026-09-28T14:06:40+00:00","mainEntityOfPage":{"@id":"https:\/\/fivemor.com\/?p=7069154"},"wordCount":2031,"commentCount":0,"publisher":{"@id":"https:\/\/fivemor.com\/#organization"},"image":{"@id":"https:\/\/fivemor.com\/?p=7069154#primaryimage"},"thumbnailUrl":"https:\/\/fivemor.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/e61f74a4-c62c-4d3b-979d-2702e04334a9_1536x1024-1.jpg","keywords":["Agency","Beauty","Contest","Oakes","Omar","Pitch","Sport","Theatre"],"articleSection":["Advertising"],"inLanguage":"en-US","potentialAction":[{"@type":"CommentAction","name":"Comment","target":["https:\/\/fivemor.com\/?p=7069154#respond"]}]},{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https:\/\/fivemor.com\/?p=7069154","url":"https:\/\/fivemor.com\/?p=7069154","name":"Omar Oakes: Ad agency pitch theatre is not a sport, but a beauty contest - 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Keynes thought markets used to be more honest. In the early 20th century, when a handful of people owned most of a company\u2019s shares, they knew roughly what it was worth. But as ownership spread out, that knowledge thinned with it. By 1936, Keynes concluded the whole system had gone mad: short-term, meaningless fluctuations were having, in his words, \u201can altogether excessive, and even an absurd, influence on the market.\u201d<\/p>\n
His explanation was the beauty contest: professional investors, he said, weren\u2019t picking the stocks they thought were \u201cgood\u201d. They were picking the stocks they thought everyone else would pick by guessing what average opinion expected average opinion to be.<\/p>\n
Remember this every time you read a business news story in which\u00a0\u201cCompany X\u2019s share price rose\/fell Y% after Z thing happened\u201d<\/em>. Journalists, including myself, point to instant share-price fluctuations as some sort of evidence that \u201cthe market\u201d is making a collective judgment about a company\u2019s fortunes.<\/p>\n That\u2019s exactly what happened last week, when news broke that PepsiCo was moving its global media-buying account out of Omnicom after 30 years and into Publicis Groupe. Publicis was pitching for Pepsi\u2019s great rival, Coca-Cola \u2013 a bigger client with a bigger budget \u2013 but appeared willing to walk away from Coke to cash in Pepsi.<\/p>\n This makes Pepsi an intriguing story: not because \u2018it\u2019s a big account\u2019, but because nobody can immediately explain the logic behind Publicis\u2019 decision.<\/p>\n There\u2019s been\u00a0a lot<\/em>\u00a0of trade-press coverage on this story \u2013 here are the essential details of what happened:<\/p>\n The reporting on this story isn\u2019t even consistent on how big the prize was.<\/p>\n Campaign<\/em>,\u00a0Adweek<\/em>\u00a0and\u00a0Adotat<\/em>\u00a0each cited a different figure for the Coke business under review, ranging from $1.44bn to $7.5bn \u2013 sourced, mostly, to nobody in particular. Add PepsiCo\u2019s $1.7bn account moving the other way, and you\u2019ve got several outlets confidently reporting numbers that don\u2019t describe the same thing, cited by everyone, sourced by no one.<\/p>\n It\u2019s not because these publications are failing. It\u2019s their job to report facts as news. But what separates real life from sport is this uncomfortable truth: the \u201cfacts\u201d of sport lead to clear, objective results \u2013 scores, winners, losers. The \u201cfacts\u201d of business, like most of the real world, require interpretation. In other words: explaining\u00a0why<\/em>\u00a0this story happened.<\/a><\/p>\n In fairness to\u00a0Adotat<\/em>, it has tried to present\u00a0something of an expos\u00e9 on \u201cwhat really happened.\u201d<\/a>\u00a0But its reporting leans on unverified background briefing (in addition to some specific claims that WPP refuted). The use of \u201cpeople familiar with the matter\u201d isn\u2019t wrong in an industry where too few people are prepared to tell the truth for fear of reprisal, but the repeated use of blind quotes and anonymous briefing does mean you have to be extremely careful when handling verbal grenades.<\/p>\n Such as these bombshells relayed by\u00a0Adotat<\/em>:<\/p>\n But more broadly,\u00a0Adotat<\/em>\u2018s entire thesis rests on \u201cPublicis chose the smaller prize.\u201d Use the low end of its own range \u2013 the $1.44bn \u2013 and Publicis actually chose the\u00a0bigger<\/em>\u00a0prize. Hmm.<\/p>\n So look at what\u2019s genuinely strange about this event, whatever the interpretation:\u00a0a company walked away from a $1.44-7.5bn opportunity within hours of winning a $1.7bn one.<\/strong>\u00a0Whatever the reason, that\u2019s strange by any normal commercial rationale, and it happened in public, fast, with total silence from everyone involved.<\/p>\n Which invites the question:\u00a0why would a holding company treat a smaller, harder-won account as worth more than a bigger, currently uncontested one?<\/strong><\/p>\n There are only a few possible answers:<\/p>\n Any of the three could be true. All three might be, in different proportions. But that kind of nuance doesn\u2019t fit the narrative of \u201cX wins, Y loses\u201d.\u00a0<\/p>\n The narrative that pitching is a simple contest.\u00a0<\/p>\n Sport works as an analogy for agency pitching because it\u2019s easy to understand.\u00a0<\/p>\n One company wins something, another loses something, and some proxy measure gets reported as \u201cthe score\u201d: the size of the account won or lost, or the movement of a share price.<\/p>\n And because agencies have talked themselves into believing it \u2013 they really do see themselves as sports teams, not services businesses. I\u2019ve talked to so many CEOs, MDs, heads of new business, and PRs who really do believe it. For years I used to put together\u00a0Campaign<\/em>\u2018s \u201cnew business league table\u201d, which was as fierce a point of pride and embarrassment as any agency\u2019s comparator of performance.<\/p>\n But the PepsiCo story last week only serves to underline how fictitious this idea is \u2013 and, more than that, it shows what\u2019s actually happening underneath it instead.<\/p>\n Sport requires a level playing field, a legible scoring system, and known constraints. None of those exist here: nobody knows what the account is worth, nobody knows what makes it profitable, and nobody can explain why \u201closing\u201d Pepsi is supposed to be a blow to Omnicom if Coke was meant to be the bigger prize all along \u2013 or why \u201cwinning\u201d Pepsi is supposed to be such a coup for Publicis if Coke really was worth more.<\/p>\n Coca-Cola\u2019s own position undermines the sport framing further. If it can\u2019t generate a genuine competitive process \u2013 if it\u2019s now left with WPP in a pitch it started specifically to find alternatives \u2013 that\u2019s a serious issue. That\u2019s a client that may simply be stuck; and it\u2019s stuck for the same reason the rest of us can\u2019t call this story: none of us, Coca-Cola included, has enough information to know what a fair contest for this business would even look like.<\/p>\n There\u2019s no scoreboard here. There\u2019s only a story that\u00a0reads<\/em>\u00a0like a scoreboard.<\/p>\n So why has nobody ever bothered to build a real one?<\/p>\n It isn\u2019t hard to imagine what one would look like: account margin; revenue retained per client, not billings won; headcount required to service a piece of business against fee income. These are numbers holding companies calculate internally every quarter, but none of them are published.<\/p>\n What is published, in press releases and league tables and quarterly new-business roundups, is the one figure that tends to mislead most of all: the size of the account.<\/p>\n And plenty of people benefit from this arrangement:<\/p>\n Every party with the power to make account economics visible has a reason to leave them foggy. That is not a conspiracy; it\u2019s something much more dull: an established way of working that nobody has any incentive to break.<\/p>\n Which brings us back to Keynes, and to something much uglier than even he described nearly a century ago.<\/p>\n Keynes\u2019s professional investors were meant to be guessing what average opinion expected average opinion to be \u2014 already a strange, self-referential game, but one built on real information about real companies. What happened to Omnicom\u2019s share price last week is that same game, played on top of a story nobody can actually verify. Investors weren\u2019t reacting to what losing PepsiCo meant; they were reacting to what they expected other investors to do about a story they couldn\u2019t check.<\/p>\n You couldn\u2019t look at the 5% drop as any kind of meaningful judgment on Omnicom\u2019s business. The Barclays and Wells Fargo estimates behind it are informed guesses, not facts, and the price partly reversed within a day. What actually happened was nothing more complicated than\u00a0\u201cI don\u2019t know why this happened, but I\u2019m afraid other people will sell, so I\u2019d better sell first.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n It\u2019s a beauty contest judging a beauty contest \u2013 Keynes\u2019s guessing game, running one level deeper than the great man imagined.<\/p>\n But where Keynes was describing a flaw, pitch theatre is closer to a design. He described investors guessing at each other because the information genuinely wasn\u2019t available. Ours are guessing because the information is deliberately not published.<\/p>\n So no: pitch theatre isn\u2019t sport. There\u2019s no scoreboard, no final whistle, no honest league table underneath it.<\/p>\n There\u2019s just an industry that lives with this fog because it suits almost everyone in it better than a true verdict would.<\/p>\n Ad agencies love to talk about pitching like it\u2019s sport: winners, losers, league tables. Last week\u2019s PepsiCo\/Coca-Cola global media account scramble proves it isn\u2019t. Markets are crazy. Don\u2019t take my word for it. Ninety years ago, in John Maynard Keynes\u2019 highly influential\u00a0General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, the great man made the unsettling (but […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":7069155,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12023],"tags":[5353,1923,20527,227507,21654,15057,649,5367],"dealstore":[],"offerexpiration":[],"class_list":["post-7069154","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-advertising","tag-agency","tag-beauty","tag-contest","tag-oakes","tag-omar","tag-pitch","tag-sport","tag-theatre"],"yoast_head":"\nFirst: what actually happened?<\/h3>\n
\n
Numberwang<\/h3>\n
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The one (unverified) explanation<\/h3>\n
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Why this isn\u2019t sport<\/h3>\n
<\/figure>\nWho benefits<\/h3>\n
\n
The ugly contest<\/h3>\n
This article first appeared in Ad-verse Reactions<\/a>, a newsletter written by independent journalist and consultant Omar Oakes, covering the economics, power structures and unintended consequences shaping advertising and media. You can subscribe to Ad-verse Reactions for regular analysis at omaroakes.substack.com<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"