GroupM North America CEO Sharb Farjami On Streaming, Ad Disruption And His Unplanned Path From Rugby Pitch To Corner Office – Deadline Q&A

Courtesy of GroupM

EXCLUSIVE: At an age when most teenagers are trying to master basic hygiene, Sharb Farjami was working full time in the advertising business. Today, roughly three decades after that early start, he has risen to one of the top posts in the industry as CEO of GroupM North America. As the media buying arm of giant holding company WPP, GroupM controls billions of dollars in annual ad spending.

“I’d love to say this was all intentional, but it’s actually rather accidental,” Farjami told Deadline in an interview. “I didn’t go to college. I left school pretty early. At 17, I went straight into media.”

After initially pursuing a career as a professional rugby player while growing up in London, Farjami recalled with a shrug, “I just wasn’t good enough.” Through sports, he added, “I met lots of people who happened to be in media in one way or another – media owners, agency people, client-side marketers. And I just got into it. I put a resume together, sent it to a mate. He sent it somewhere. On a Tuesday, I had an interview and on Wednesday I got offered a job.” His first post was at Flextech, a former UK oil company that pivoted to pay-TV in the go-go 1990s.

Farjami was got the CEO job in January after previously heading up North America operations at Wavemaker, a different GroupM division. He also spent time as an exec for Rupert Murdoch-controlled properties Storyful, Foxtel and News Corp Australia and also had more than a decade-long run at Viacom well before its reunion with CBS. In a recent conversation with Deadline, Farjami touched on his unplanned path but also weighed in on the streaming boom and the continual state of disruption in the media business. (Upfront negotiations, given they are still ongoing, was one topic he declined to address.) His take on the anxiety rippling through the media world could be succinctly paraphrased as: “‘Twas ever thus.”

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.

DEADLINE: How is your tenure going so far? Do you feel like you have your bearings?

SHARB FARJAMI: I have my bearings, I think. As much as you ever have your bearings. Look, there’s a lot to do, going through a transformation. That’s no secret, that’s been published and discussed, so leading that transformation is a thing. I kind of like that in some ways. I enjoy change, I enjoy transformation, not for the sake of it but where we think we can be better, a little less silo-ed. Can we be simpler and easier to deal with? Can we be more agile? Can we be more effective for our clients? The answer to all of those should be ‘yes.’ That’s really what the transformation is about.

DEADLINE: Are you looking to make any changes to the internal culture at GroupM or are you more focused on strategic objectives?

FARJAMI: I think every leader should be addressing internal culture all the time, forever. Taking that a step further, I think the culture of an organization is a byproduct of a lot of other things: how we organize ourselves, how we support and grow our talent and how we organize ourselves around our clients. Those are the things that, to me, influence culture. And then obviously, just organically, how we operate. How we behave. What we prioritize. How we talk to our people. How we talk to each other. If I have a business ethos, it’s all about team. I’m a big proponent of team cultures. I don’t believe that any individual is better or more important than the team, in any situation. Ever. My belief is, you obviously always want the best talent. I’m not for a second suggesting that you don’t. I think we have fantastic talent. But I think fantastic talent that can work well as part of a team is the critical component that can separate us.

DEADLINE: You got such an early start in media. Did it just come naturally to you? And how does that experience inform what you do now?

FARJAMI: To be honest with you, I didn’t really know what media was for the first six months. They would give you a fax, a facsimile, and it would have a booking order on it and I was on the sales side, so I was basically a booking clerk. The manager would give me this piece of paper. It was a series of numbers and codes and you’d put it into an MS-DOS platform. I didn’t know what I was doing. I just knew that the information on this piece of paper had to go in the system. So, six months in, my boss’s boss said to me, ‘Do you know what this is?’ And I was like, ‘No, I just know I have to put it in there.’ She said. ‘These are campaign orders (from Coca-Cola or British Gas or whatever) and you’re putting them into the system and that’s going to put them in a traffic system and then these things are going to appear as ads in the middle of TV shows.’ And I was like, ‘Ahhhhh! I get it.’

DEADLINE: Did that Eureka moment change what you were doing day to day?

FARJAMI: It did teach me a valuable lesson, which was once I knew what it was, I used much more discretion because I knew the difference between doing it well and doing it badly.

DEADLINE: You spent significant time at two of the major media players of the past few decades. What did you take away from that, especially working for the Murdochs?

FARJAMI: Being in and around that ecosystem at the time, that business environment was a real sharp learning curve. You get good quickly or you leave. It’s very fun. It’s very competitive and I learned a huge amount. Also, being around journalists, working with journalists on a day to day basis is so hard to describe. They’re such a unique and special breed. Being around that environment as a business person is very rounding for you.

DEADLINE: There is a lot of angst these days in traditional media, in large part due to technology and the scramble to keep pace with Big Tech. What do you think needs to happen to help these companies get through the existential crossroads that many of them seem to have reached?

FARJAMI: When you use the phrase ‘existential crossroads,’ had there been someone sitting in this seat in 1972, that person would have probably said, ‘We’re at a crossroads, it’s never been like this.’ Do you know what I mean? It’s certainly more complex. There are always specificities and unique circumstances to every moment and every point in an industry’s evolution. But I think of the constants. And going through change and transformation, that’s the thing that’s the hardest, right? The thing that’s the most difficult part of that is people. For a large media organization or in whatever industry may know that it needs to go through change. There’s an existential threat fundamentally changing their business model, their interactions with their consumer, whatever it is. They know what they need to do. Most companies are full of incredibly smart, brilliant people who got to the top not by accident. When you have lots of people like that and flashes of politics, I think that’s where things sometimes fall down.

DEADLINE: Streaming, of course, has been the biggest battleground of late. How would you say it is affecting the landscape?

FARJAMI: I think there’s a huge amount of change coming. Obviously, the streaming discussion is not a secret. I think there are some fantastic players in there. There’s often talk of how many streaming players the market can handle. The reality is, probably more than people think. If you look at most of the streaming platforms, we talk about it like it’s kind of not dissimilar to the cable days. But it is dissimilar because most cable operators’ back end or business model was mostly the same. Streaming platforms, most of them are not. They’re owned by different companies, different shapes and sizes. The business models and what they’re prioritizing are really different.

DEADLINE: Also, how do advertisers measure their results? Streaming is booming, but data is still mostly in a black box. Measurement is murky and streamers can cherry pick what to say about how content is performing. Is that causing any restlessness from buyers?

FARJAMI: Ratings have always been an inexact science. But given technology and the systems in place, one could argue that it shouldn’t be. There is more than one way to assess the ROI and the impact of an ad beyond ratings. That’s something we work very hard on. Marketplaces eventually dictate and marketplaces will tolerate to a point and then they don’t tolerate. I think you kind of get, without being overly Darwinian (although he’s not actually the one who said that!), the survival of the fittest. People buy what they want to buy. At the moment, it seems that we have a lot of players in streaming and a lot of supply so people can work with the ones that give them the best metrics and ROI. The more interesting thing is balancing ad loading and ad experience. Media companies have to work out how much is the right amount. People are opting in and opting out. There are so many different models and but all of them will have to find the right balance. Ad formats are another key. Some of these companies are going to have access to some amazing technology from a shoppable consumer perspective. That’s where we’re at now.

DEADLINE: It’s been interesting to watch advertising evolve in streaming. The ad load is dramatically lighter than linear TV, maybe one-third as many spots. Is the bet that advertisers will pay more given the scarcity and therefore make it a sustainable model for media companies?

FARJAMI: I don’t think about it solely through a lens of loading and how many ads you’re going to be around. There’s always been a conversation. I was the ad guy and I would have regular meetings with the programming and the content guys and guess what? We didn’t really like each other! [Laughs.] I think that’s a good thing. I think every media company, you want that healthy tension. Because what that means is that the viewing experience is pleasant for the consumer. The difference now is the technology. We used to have those conversations based on feels or broad ratings trends. Now, you can have them in a far more detailed, scientific manner. There’s that old expression, ‘I know half of my advertising is working; I just don’t know which half.’ In my opinion, that phrase is out of date now. You have to know how your advertising is working and we have the data to enable you to do that.