News UK angry about ITV drama "The Hack."

Plus shifts on Madison Avenue create a new lane for Havas and Horizon.

This week, I’m in the UK, where I’ve been glued to “The Hack,” a new drama from broadcaster ITV about News Corp’s phone hacking crisis. David Tennant plays the freelance journalist Nick Davies who brought the story together for The Guardian back in July 2011. The revelations brought about a government inquiry into press intrusion and a prison sentence for the editor of the News of the World and others involved.

I’m told that News UK which owns The Times and The Sun, is seriously pissed off with ITV for dredging up some old wounds now more than a decade and a half on. Don’t hold your breath for any positive coverage of ITV’s stock performance on their business pages.

“The Hack,” isn’t the first attempt to dramatize the phone hacking saga. Back in 2014, George Clooney was scheduled to direct a movie based on Davies’ book “Hack Attack.” Even though it had Sony’s backing, it disappeared into the ether with the excuse that no-one wanted to invest in it for fear of angering Rupert Murdoch.

“The Hack,” portrays The Guardian in a very positive light, positioning the newspaper as the Washington Post of its time. But rather than revel in the glory The Guardian’s TV critic pans the drama giving it two stars and ending the review suggesting that the portrayal almost seems quaint, given all the other invasions of privacy we suffer today. “The Hack” almost transforms into a period piece about – God help us – simpler, happier times,” the review concludes.

Meanwhile on my travels through London, I heard that a major UK newspaper is preparing to unleash a big fresh scoop about phone hacking this weekend. Buying the News of the World in 1968 was one of Rupert Murdoch’s biggest coups. While NoW was killed off soon after the phone hacking crisis broke in 2011, the ghost of Sir William Carr, the prior owner, continues to haunt the boss.

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Back in the United States, as the Paramount-Skydance-TikTok-Warner-Discovery foments in the great cauldron of mega-media dealmaking, the ad business is going through its own tumultuous recalculation. The $13.5 billion merger between two of Madison Avenue’s biggest players, Omnicom and Interpublic Group, is about to come to fruition after the FTC signed off, forcing a consent decree preventing “politically motivated” ad boycotts. Japan’s Dentsu is selling off its international ad agencies, leading to more unhappy clients. That’s great news for the business development chiefs at rival ad agencies who are expecting a busy fourth and first quarter as marketers spend their Halloween wondering who will best bewitch them with their pitches.

Yannick Bolloré and Bill Koenigsberg are seizing the moment, creating a fresh alternative called Horizon Global, which will house $20 billion in ad billings and stitch Bolloré’s Paris-based Havas together with the New York-headquartered Horizon to create a new global force.

Interim CEO Bob Lord is ready to capture the fall-out from all the shifts. “The first job is to land business. We are anticipating a wave of opportunities to come through in the next couple of months as all this disruption happens,” Lord told me this week. “We’re already starting to see opportunities present themselves that wouldn’t have been there.”

Peter Mears, the chief executive of Havas Media, and a board director of the new venture says the conversations about the partnership got serious around six months ago. Havas clients include the BBC, French pay-TV company Canal+, investment giant Fidelity, Sanofi and Yum Brands to name a few.

So why not just merge the two businesses? They say they are simply putting clients’ needs first and a merger between ad agencies would take time. Given the changes that AI is wreaking on the ad business, speed is of utmost importance.

Their new AI-focused venture will allow clients to see their own results first hand, versus on a power point, helping clients get answers to the most obvious of questions: “Where did I spend my money; how did I spend my money and what benefit did I get out of that?” “The cycle of innovation has compressed almost to weeks versus months before,” added Lord.

Agencies are now focused much less on big media outlays and more on micro-targeting audiences that once spent all their leisure time watching TV and now hop between websites, streaming video and a variety of social media sites.

I asked these two top ad executives where are all the ad dollars flowing these days. The answer is that consumers are increasingly looking to ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity for advice on buying goods and services. Bad news for the Google search box. Figuring out how to get those generative search engines to feature their clients’ brands in their responses is the great conundrum of today. Horizon Global is hoping it has the right answers.

I am writing a new biography of Rupert Murdoch for Grand Central Publishing. If you’ve got story tips or ideas for coverage, drop me a line at Claireatki@me.com.

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