I have to admit that the Fleishman-Hillard LA overbilling thing mostly escaped me. For the most part I’m completely and blissfully unaware what goes on in the big fat agencies of the world and they are probably (hopefully) blissfully unaware of social media – so much the better to keep me fat and happy and well paid.
Do the big agencies overbill and pad their invoices? Oh you betcha.
This tidbit from the LA Times gave me a ‘duh’ moment:
A critical part of the government’s case was a cache of e-mails about billings that Stodder and Dowie sent to underlings.
“A number of e-mails we read indicated there were guilty parties higher up the ladder than Dowie or Stodder,” Mann said. “We were definitely wondering why there weren’t other indictments.”
Mann added that he understood “damage control is one of [Fleishman's] specialties.”
In other words, yes Virginia, the pressure to pad invoices is what makes the world go round in the agency world and it comes from the top down.
