Diminutive twinkle-toed Arsenal wizard Santi Cazorla just turned 30 and, on Sunday, so will Media Week. Feliz cumpleanos to both.
I took a lot of flak, ten years ago, when asked for my prediction for Media Week's 25th anniversary - which was that it would be online only by that point. I was, it seemed, at best heartless, at worst enslaved by the dark forces of digital. (It’s astonishing how tenacious these hankerings for the past are: witness Waterstones’ supremo James Daunt last month fondly imagining that ebooks’ share of the market has peaked. Talk about boats beating against the current). It turned out that I was right in 2004 - well, even a stopped clock is right twice a day; and I am as confident in this next prediction: that I will not be asked to write a piece marking its 40th anniversary (when I'll be 67).
The magazine's creation was driven by a simple perception about two related changes to the market. Firstly, that media channels would proliferate. My first assignment as a media journalist (at 北京赛车pk10, in 1982), had been to cover the launch of Channel 4, which increased UK commercial airtime by a whopping 50% or so. In MW's first year, Murdoch broke the print unions at Wapping, triggering a boom in print media (not just newspapers) that only petered out in the Noughties. So supply was changing radically. At the same time, demand was being managed differently. The first media buying specialists were unbundling the fat fee base of the big full-service ad agencies; offering clients more and supposedly better-planned media for less money, and playing up the increased choice as a reason for clients to favour the specialist. There was no trade publication covering this emergent market.
How droll, in hindsight, that the technological revolution everyone was obsessed by in 1985 was the advent of desktop publishing. As a new, independent start-up, we gained the print unions' permission to use computers to create our stories. But after a row with regional newspaper owners over the same issue, the unions reneged. Which meant we would 'typeset' our material in the office; then print it out, and sit next to an NGA operative at our typesetters watching him (they were, of course, all blokes) type it out again, and paste it to the page by hand.
Surveying this 30-year landscape, 3 individuals loom much larger than the rest; all present and correct in 1985, and all more so today. In rising order of significance, the first is Sir Martin Sorrell. Love him or loathe him (and WPP certainly has employees in both categories), he has transformed the advertising industry globally. It is now a professional services sector; it used to be a rough but pleasing collection of jazzed start-ups, propped up by a handful of dour mid-life-crisis American branch offices (Grey, JWT, etc). The 80s version was almost certainly more fun to work in; if you are a Unilever shareholder, you may perhaps prefer the corporatist present.
The second key figure is Rupert Murdoch. Again, he enjoys his fair share of detractors, and attracts a great deal more venom than Sir Martin; but on the media owner side, there is nobody comes close to him. Not content with transforming the newspaper industry of the English-speaking world, he has gone on to engineer at least as big a change to the broadcasting industry. People said he couldn't do it in the UK; once he'd trounced the incumbents here, those same people were strangely just as certain that he had bitten off more than he could chew by daring to launch against the big 3 US networks. Doubt him – or challenge him – at your peril.
There are many who cannot forgive the venality into which his dominant and bullying UK newspaper empire slipped; but as an industrialist shaping an entire sector of western economies, he is up there with Gates and Jobs. Early in my own working life, I interviewed, at the end of his, Sir Frank Rogers - the man who had in 1969 sold Murdoch the Sun (then an embarrassing, loss-making little sister to the Daily Mirror). He confessed it was the biggest regret of his professional life: 'We unleashed on Fleet Street a level of competitiveness previously beyond our imagining.'
The third is, of course, the brilliantly self-effacing Sir Tim Berners-Lee. It isn't really due to his turning the internet into a universal publishing platform; it's his decision to gift his genius to the world. This is why, however you rate those who have subsequently monetised his platform - Page, Brin, and Zuckerberg and their successors - they are merely standing on the shoulders of this humble giant.
Thanks to Berners-Lee, everything changed. I feel blessed to have enjoyed a career in this industry during such an extraordinary time of change. Sometimes scary, but never less than fascinating.
Yet, as those nice French people say, everything also stays the same. Advertisers are still bamboozled by plausible young people (tats optional) spouting jargon, and still don't know which half of their ad budget is wasted. The public still loves a good story told well, whether fact or fiction, and will pay for it with money or time. Big companies are still often soul-destroying workplaces. And a picture - these days, a moving picture - is still worth a thousand words.
In 1985 we were too naïve to think we could fail with our new magazine. I've launched a fair bit of stuff in my time, but nothing as improvised and seat-of-the-pants as Media Week. Nothing (yet) as durable, either; even if, like popular music, it's changed a lot since then.
Tim Brooks
2014 Advisory council member, The British Library
2012 - present Chief executive, BMJ
2008-2010 Chair of the Newspaper Publishers Association
2006 Managing director, Guardian News & Media
2003 Managing director, IPC Ignite
2000 Managing director, IPC Southbank
1999 Network managing director, Emap UK
1994 Director, Emap Business Comms
1992 Publishing director, Emap Business Communications
1991 Head of corporate planning, Emap
1989 Managing director of start-up publishing business in Australia
1985 Co-founder & launch editor, Media Week
Family Married with three children
Lives Harpenden, Hertfordshire
Football team Arsenal