Mike Yershon

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Mike Yershon
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SUBMISSION TO OFFICE OF FAIR TRADING AND THE COMPETITION COMMISSION REGARDING ITV CONTRACT RIGHTS RENEWAL OBLIGATIONS

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Mike Yershon

Mike currently advises a number of companies in both traditional and emergent media and leading edge technologies.

Prior to setting up his company Media Assessment Ltd, Mike worked for McCann Erickson (twice as media director with a 20-year span in between and on the first occasion with a pan-European responsibility), Collett Dickenson Pearce and Leo Burnett (as Vice chairman in charge of the Media, Research and Sales Promotion departments). 

He then built his own businesses, Yershon Media Management, and Yershon Media Buying which were sold to TMDH, the largest independent media buyer in the UK in 1988 and a PLC. Mike joined the PLC board and three years later TMDH was sold to Aegis in order to form the UK end of Europe’s largest buyers of media. Yershon Media still traded as an separate brand with Mike as Chairman and the TMDH brand was renamed Carat UK with Mike as a founder director.   

In parallel Guinness World Wide Media Controller with particular reference to Europe.

Mike has always believed the key way to make a difference to an industry is fresh thinking. In the last 25 years these are the major innovations he introduced to the media advertising business.  

Persuading the television companies to change the spot lengths used in UK commercial television from 15/30/45/60 seconds to 20/30/40/50/60 seconds.  

CDP, where Mike was Media Director, gained the Centralised Media Buying for  Reckitt and Colman It was one of the first centralisations and Mike asked the client to request their creative  agencies to alter their commercials to these lengths. He then invited all the TV channel sales directors into CDP to compare the two approaches. The  demonstration clearly showed the new system was much better for the industry.  

Buying all available 48 sheet poster sites in the UK for the launch of the Ford Capri. This was an unprecedented step. 

Then he revitalised the outdoor medium by forming Portland Outdoor (jointly owned by CDP and J Walter Thompson) where he was chairman and the JWT media director sat on the board.  

Buying all the advertising time available round the film, Jaws, after he persuaded CDP’s creative people to turn their TV commercials into cinema versions.  

Launching the UK ’s first specialist strategic media consultancy, Yershon Media Management, was for several years the only agency of its kind. When sold to TMDH, it had a fee income of £1 million per year and a long list of the world’s largest advertisers as clients.  

 CLIENTS HAVE INCLUDED THE FOLLOWING: -

Inventing the idea of live League football as a way of increasing revenue to clubs.  

Mike was appointed an advisor to the commercial sub committee of the Football League. This was well before the Premiership was invented. He came up with the suggestion that games should be taken out of the Saturday afternoon fixture list and  run on Friday nights and Sunday afternoons and split between BBC and ITV. The rest is history. Subsequently Mike advised the League on the exploitation of the rights worldwide.

Adlab was invented by Mike to help Central Television increase their share of ITV revenue. 

At the time Central was taking 11% of net ITV revenue. Within two years this share had grown to 16%. Adlab was the UK’s first large scale consumer research panel offering added value to advertisers and agencies by measuring four weekly purchase of brands and linked to panel members’ frequency of exposure to commercials. The idea still carries on to this day and the research company selected by Mike offers the service to the market under a new brand name.

Contact Mike at mikeyershon@commercialtelevision.biz